Interview with Antonella Moretto
As AI reshapes learning and leadership, business schools are placing greater emphasis on judgment, self-awareness, and the human skills technology cannot replace.
Business education is undergoing a significant transformation as artificial intelligence, evolving workplace expectations, and growing demand for purpose-driven careers reshape how future leaders are prepared. In this interview, Antonella Moretto of POLIMI Graduate School of Management discusses why self-awareness, critical thinking, experiential learning, and human development are becoming central to management education, and how business schools can help graduates thrive in an increasingly complex and technology-driven world.
In your journey at POLIMI Graduate School of Management, what moments or experiences have most shaped how you see the role of business education today?
I started my journey as Associate Dean for Open programs in February 2020. 20 days after the start of this experience, we had COVID and a strong lockdown in Milan. This moment was both terrible and a fundamental moment about how I see the role of business education today. This moment made me understand that business education is, first of all, a matter of taking care of people, of nurturing the human side before the business side, and also a fundamental part of experience and community. These elements remain fundamental for me also in the following years.
Across your work in teaching and executive programs, what has influenced your thinking most about how future managers should be prepared for the real world?
Honestly, the clearest signal came from my own research. I have been studying sustainability since 2013, and one pattern kept emerging across industries and organizations: managers were consistently being asked to navigate challenges — strategic, ethical, organizational — for which their training had simply not prepared them. Not because the programs were poor, but because the world had moved faster than the curriculum.
Managers were consistently being asked to navigate challenges — strategic, ethical, organizational — for which their training had simply not prepared them.
That gap between what organizations need and what managers actually carry with them into a role became a kind of north star for how I think about executive education. It shifted my focus from content delivery to capability building — from “what should managers know” to “what should managers be able to do, and become, when the situation has no precedent.”
If I had to distill it: what has shaped my thinking most is the conviction that we are not preparing managers for the world as it is — we need to prepare them for the world as it is becoming. And that requires educators who are genuinely embedded in that becoming, not just observing it from the outside.
The New Generation MBA places the individual and personal awareness at the centre of learning. What motivated this shift, and what gap in traditional education is it trying to address?
We maintain close connections with our alumni—those who have attended an MBA over the years. What many managers have told me is that, even after many years, they still remember the MBA as one of the most transformative experiences of their lives. They described how the program strengthened their hard skills, helped them better manage their time and delegation, and enabled them to define priorities more effectively. They also explained how it fueled their curiosity and desire to continue learning, and how it provided them with concrete tools for networking.
However, one area they consistently felt was not fully addressed concerned how to manage their emotions in critical situations—how to handle emotions and energy more effectively. In essence, while the MBA was extremely effective in strengthening the professional dimension, it was much less equipped to support the human side of leadership and management.
This insight led to the idea of redesigning the program, with the goal of placing individual self-awareness at its core—an aspect that, in an increasingly fragmented and digital world, I believe is more important than ever.
The programme also brings greater focus to life skills alongside traditional business knowledge. How does this change the way students understand success in their careers and personal growth?
I think the real shift has been moving away from focusing solely on outcomes to embracing more personal dimensions of decision-making.
What we increasingly see is that individuals are not just asking themselves what they want in their careers, but why they want it. That shift—from goals to underlying motivations—changes the way they approach professional choices.
At the same time, there is a growing attention to values. People are becoming more conscious of the alignment, or misalignment, between their own beliefs and those of the organizations they consider joining. This reflection on shared values is becoming a central element in career decisions.
In the short term, this has very concrete implications. Many individuals today are more willing to say no to opportunities that do not resonate with their aspirations or needs. At first glance, this might appear to be a risky choice.
However, what we often observe is that this selectivity ultimately leads them to roles that generate deeper satisfaction—positions where they feel more aligned, more engaged, and where they tend to stay longer.
As artificial intelligence becomes part of how schools teach and design learning, how is it changing the way students think, learn, and make decisions?
The honest answer is: it depends entirely on how we choose to integrate it — and that choice is far less obvious than it might seem.
What I observe in my work with both students and executives is that AI is already reshaping the learning experience in ways that are neither uniformly positive nor uniformly negative. On one hand, it accelerates access to information, helps learners structure complex problems, and opens up possibilities for personalization that traditional classroom formats simply cannot match. On the other hand, I see a real risk of cognitive shortcuts becoming defaults — of students reaching for a generated answer before they have genuinely wrestled with the question themselves. And in management education, that wrestling matters enormously. Judgment, after all, is not built by receiving answers. It is built through the discomfort of not yet having them.
The research on decision-making adds another layer of complexity here. We know that how a problem is framed shapes the decision that follows. If AI increasingly mediates the framing — organizing information, surfacing options, suggesting paths — then the critical question becomes not just “what decision did the manager make?” but “who, or what, shaped the way they saw the problem in the first place?” That is a profound shift in the cognitive landscape of leadership, and business schools are only beginning to reckon with it.
My pragmatic position is this: AI will not replace the need for judgment, ethical reasoning, or the ability to lead through uncertainty. But it will ruthlessly expose managers who never developed those capacities to begin with — who relied on structured processes, available data, and received frameworks to navigate their roles. In that sense, AI raises the stakes for education, rather than lowering them. It forces us to be more intentional about what only humans can develop, and to design learning experiences that genuinely build those things — not just assess them.
At POLIMI GSoM, this means asking harder questions about our program design: where does productive struggle belong, and where does AI assistance actually enhance learning? The answer is not the same for every context, every competency, or every learner. That nuance is exactly where our work as educators needs to sit.
Even with new technology, human qualities like judgment, empathy, and creativity remain essential. How are business schools helping students strengthen these qualities in a practical way?
At POLIMI GSoM, this question has moved from philosophical to structural. We have made deliberate, concrete choices about what belongs in a management curriculum — and some of them might surprise people who expect a business school to stay within its traditional boundaries.
The first choice was to take human intelligence seriously as a subject of study, not just as a background assumption. We have introduced dedicated courses in critical thinking, human intelligence, and future thinking — and to teach them well, we have brought in voices from outside management altogether: psychologists, philosophers, theologians, sociologists. This was intentional. Judgment, empathy, and creativity do not develop in disciplinary isolation. They develop when people are exposed to genuinely different ways of framing the world, and when they are asked to hold that plurality without immediately resolving it into a single answer. That discomfort is part of the learning design.
The second choice was to make experiential learning the norm, not the exception. One hundred percent of our courses now include immersive experiential activities — project-based and problem-based learning, action learning with real companies, role plays, and simulations. This matters because human qualities are not transferable through content delivery. Empathy does not grow by reading about it. Judgment sharpens through decisions made under real constraints, with real consequences, in front of real people. The classroom has to create the conditions for that.
The third choice is perhaps the one I am most proud of, because it reflects a genuine commitment to the whole person. Every student at POLIMI GSoM has access to coaching and mentoring throughout their program — and, if they choose to use it, dedicated psychological support. We built this in because we believe that the inner dimension of leadership is not a private matter that students should navigate alone. Self-awareness, resilience, the capacity to remain grounded under pressure — these are professional competencies, and they deserve the same institutional investment as any technical skill.
Taken together, these choices reflect a conviction that runs through everything we do: that the most important thing a business school can develop is not knowledge, but the human being who will carry and apply that knowledge in conditions we cannot fully anticipate.
When you think about graduates entering a world shaped by constant change, what kind of mindset do you believe will help them lead with confidence and clarity?
The image I keep coming back to is that of surfing. Not because it romanticizes uncertainty, but because it captures something precise about what effective leadership in complex environments actually requires. A surfer does not control the wave. They read it, adapt to it, and find the line that carries them forward — and they do this by developing an intimate, embodied understanding of the ecosystem they are operating in. That capacity to read and move within a system, rather than against it, is exactly what I believe our graduates need to cultivate.
But surfing well also requires something less obvious: the discipline to ignore most of what is happening around you. Waves are full of noise — competing movements, distractions, false signals. The surfer who reacts to all of them falls. The one who stays upright has learned to filter relentlessly, to hold their focus on the few elements that actually determine the outcome.
That capacity to read and move within a system, rather than against it, is exactly what I believe our graduates need to cultivate.
This is what I would call a first principles mindset — and it may be the most underrated leadership capability of our time. In a world of information abundance and constant stimulation, the ability to strip a situation back to its essential structure, to ask “what actually matters here?”, is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable. It is the antidote to the kind of managerial anxiety that confuses busyness with effectiveness, and reaction with leadership.
What gives me confidence is that this mindset can be developed. It is not a personality trait reserved for the naturally calm or the exceptionally gifted. It is a practice — built through repeated exposure to complexity, through learning to sit with ambiguity without immediately reaching for a resolution, and through the kind of reflective habits that our programs try to embed from day one.
Graduates who carry this with them will not be immune to uncertainty. But they will be far less frightened by it — and that, I think, is what leading with confidence and clarity actually means.
How do you see business education evolving in the years ahead as learning becomes more connected to purpose, personal development, and new ways of working?
Business education is entering a phase of profound transformation. At POLIMI Graduate School of Management, we believe the future of management education will be defined not only by technical excellence but by the ability to connect knowledge with purpose, human development, and societal impact.
For many years, business schools focused primarily on preparing managers to optimize performance and competitiveness. Those capabilities remain essential, but today they are no longer sufficient on their own. Organizations are operating in environments shaped by digital transformation, sustainability challenges, geopolitical uncertainty, and rapidly evolving expectations from employees and society. In this context, business education must help individuals become not only better professionals but also more conscious leaders and responsible decision-makers.
We see three major evolutions ahead.
First, learning will become increasingly purpose-driven. Future leaders are looking for meaning in their careers and want to understand how business can create value not only economically, but also socially and environmentally. Business schools therefore have a responsibility to integrate sustainability, ethics, inclusion, and long-term thinking into every discipline — not as separate topics, but as part of the managerial mindset itself.
Second, education will become more personalized and centered on human development. The future of work requires adaptability, emotional intelligence, creativity, critical thinking, and the ability to collaborate across cultures and disciplines. This means that business education must move beyond the transfer of knowledge and focus more deeply on personal transformation: helping participants understand themselves, develop leadership awareness, and continuously reskill throughout their professional lives.
Third, learning models themselves are changing. The traditional distinction between studying and working is becoming less relevant. Learning will increasingly be continuous, flexible, experiential, and closely connected with real-world challenges. Hybrid formats, AI-enabled personalization, international ecosystems, and collaboration with companies will all play a central role. At POLIMI GSoM, we see education evolving into a lifelong partnership with learners, where the school supports professionals at different stages of their careers and entrepreneurial journeys.
Technology, especially artificial intelligence, will accelerate this evolution. However, the more technology advances, the more human capabilities will matter. The business schools that will create the greatest impact are those able to combine innovation with humanity: rigorous analytical skills with ethical responsibility, digital competencies with empathy, and global vision with personal purpose.
Ultimately, the future of business education is not simply about preparing people for jobs. It is about preparing people to lead change responsibly in a complex and interconnected world.
