EDHEC Executive MBA Launches New AI Track For Senior Leaders

For senior executives, artificial intelligence can feel like everything, everywhere, all at once. Years of building specialized expertise, and now here’s this thing that promises to reshape productivity, transform the workplace, and unlock new growth if only leaders knew which tools to use and how to implement them.  

Then there are the questions about ethics, different regulations for different regions, data privacy, and how to deploy AI without creating new risks.  

That’s why EDHEC Business School built its new AI-Augmented Leadership & Performance track around how executives think, rather than any single technology or tool. The track will launch in October 2026 for EDHEC Executive MBA students.

“Everyone is talking about AI. There is pressure from the external environment, a kind of panic and anxiety, but also great opportunities,” says Ghassan Paul Yacoub, associate professor of innovation and strategy and Global MBA academic director at EDHEC.  

“It is important to structure the debate, from both an academic and managerial perspective, so participants can understand the pros and cons, reflect, make decisions, apply what they learn to projects and filter out the noise surrounding the topic.” 

AN AI TRACK BUILT ON MANAGERIAL MINDSET 

EDHEC’s Executive MBA, an in-person program meeting four days per month in Paris, is built around four broad pillars: strategy, finance, cross-functional management and leadership. It also includes Transform360 – a personalized development journey that begins with a 360-degree survey and features one-on-one coaching, public speaking, and career development.  

Students can further specialize through electives, the Healthcare Innovation & Technology Track, or the new AI track. Participants complete the degree in about 17 to 20 months, depending on the timing of their final consulting project. 

The program enrolls two intakes per year with cohorts of about 30 to 40 each. Students average about 42 years old and bring around 17 years of work experience, says Véronique Carresse, Executive MBA program director. 

“They’re really expert and very good at doing their thing, but when it comes to digital innovation and everything around that, they don’t usually feel as well at ease,” Carresse says.  

“They really want to be able to connect with the new trends. And obviously, AI is more than a new trend. It’s a complete revolution.” 

The track is aimed at experienced managers who will be expected to lead AI projects, even if they are not building the tech themselves.

“The key is not the technology. It is the mindset, the strategy-first approach and the leadership approach,” says Yacoub, who designed the new track. 

“Tech is a means toward an end. Too often, we forget what that end is.” 

THE AI LEADERSHIP PYRAMID 

So, how do you build an AI track around strategy and leadership? Yacoub, a 2025 40-Under-40 Best MBA Professor, broke it down into a pyramid with three levels.  

The base focuses on individual productivity and performance, with courses on agentic AI, intelligent automation, and data visualization. The goal is to help executives understand how AI can improve their own productivity and decision-making. 

A second level focuses on team leadership in AI-enabled organizations. It examines responsible AI governance, regulation, ethics, and human-AI collaboration. Students move from personal use cases to the realities of managing teams where AI is becoming part of daily work. 

The third level, the tip of the pyramid, moves to AI strategy and execution.  

“How can I conceive and design an AI strategic roadmap for my organization that embeds everything I’ve learned – individual productivity, optimizing the tools, team dynamics, regulation, ethics and governance, as well as the culture of the firm?” Yacoub says. 

This level includes a data strategy course, a must for AI to work at scale, as well as an applied AI project from execs’ own organizations.  

“We start with a business problem, not a technical problem,” Yacoub says.  

PROBLEM FIRST, AI SECOND 

Each of the blocks will feature two courses, for a total of six in the track. While the individual track will naturally change with the rapid-fire evolution of AI tools and applications, the full program is grounded in managerial and decision-making fundamentals.  

Many companies are approaching AI with a tech-first mentality when they should be looking first at their actual pain points, Yacoub says. Does their company or organization have a problem with customers? Products or services? Are there market issues or operational bottlenecks?  

From there, participants will diagnose the situation, study the external environment, map potential use cases, and set priorities. Where (and if) there is an AI solution, they will develop a strategy for implementation. 

In a previous AI elective, Yacoub asked EMBA executives what their organizations should do over the next two years in AI. One student explored how to connect internet-of-things sensors with AI to improve predictive maintenance for his logistics company. Another used AI to create a digital twin that could help predict financial transaction behavior and classify what might or might not be fraud.  

Yacoub expects similar organization-based projects in the AI track.

ETHICS, REGULATION & RISK 

EDHEC’s AI push is also tied to the school’s broader emphasis on responsible business. Its Executive MBA already includes business ethics, critical thinking and repeated attention to sources, methods and assumptions. Those habits become especially important with AI, where the consequences of poor implementation can be significant, Carresse says.  

An AI practice may be legally permissible but ethically questionable. Or it may be ethically desirable but complicated by regulation, geography, or risk. Operating in Europe is different from operating in the U.S., China, the Middle East or Latin America. AI is moving faster than both company policy and government regulation.

“The key is basically to understand the risk first, and then try to have what we call the risk mitigation strategy,” Yacoub says. 

The track also draws upon EDHEC’s wider AI ecosystem including the EDHEC AI Centre andLaw Institute on AI governance issues. In 2025, the school added an AI & Innovation track in its Global MBA while integrating AI throughout the MBA curriculum, similar to the way sustainability was previously woven through the program. 

For EDHEC, the new AI track is another way to connect leadership development with current business challenges. Participants are not being trained simply to use AI tools, but to think about how AI changes decision-making, team performance, organizational strategy and responsibility. 

Knowledge of today’s tools will eventually become outdated, Carresse says. “So what matters in the long term is how you’re going to be able to react and to tackle new things in the long run.” 

Yacoub agrees.  

“The track will help the Executive MBA nurture the leadership and transformation journey we want for our participants,” he says. 

“AI is likely to be one of the biggest disruptive technologies of the next 10 to 20 years. Knowledge comes and goes, but learning is a lifelong journey. What stays with you is your mindset, and that is what we try to embed.” 

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