Will the MBA degree cease to exist in the future?
5 years back, I was fortunate enough to get into IISc to study computer science. I also had a choice to study at a prestigious business school in India. I decided to go to IISc as I wanted to work in tech post my masters degree. Back then I thought, if I still wanted to go to business school, I would take it up around 5-6 years post masters. Now, it seems like AI is taking over all fields especially non-tech strategy type roles where human input can be replaced with effective code+AI in cost effective ways. Functional managerial roles are being filled with experienced engineers who have a great depth of experience building products for their companies. Where will the MBAs fit in? With AI advancing at a break neck speed many more roles will be replaced with AI. Also, the MBA curriculum seems a bit stale given the speed our world is advancing. Need some advice.
IMHO, a lot of tech folks feel that tech is core to most businesses or it will be the core in the future. It won't be. The core will always remain human-to-human interaction and transactions.
- Most of the businesses will be built in the physical world and hence roles like Sales, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Offline Marketing, etc. can never be replaced by AI or Tech. They can be augmented but can never be replaced.
On the other hand, barring exceptional developers, the requirement for average and below average developers will fall thanks to AI.
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Simultaneously, I do believe that MBA's will indeed become less attractive and useful going ahead as specialists will be preferred to generalists. MBA's usually tends to be generalists for a large part of their first 8 years of work experience and hence MBA folks may likely be considered less lucrative.
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MBA will still exist as a parameter to qualify talent. Do I agree to it? No. But Talent Acquisition gets easier with such qualifiers and parameters.
I work in developing self correcting machine learning based supply chain solutions at a very large retail company.
The number of supply chain professionals we've replaced with data science solutions is close to 650. Most of the ops jobs just involve routine work.
I've also worked to reduce a lot of the finance ops jobs. It involved building simple forecasting models and seamless off the shelf tech products. The only people who remained were a few finance leaders and the lead data scientist.
it will go like Bcom ... unless it is done from a T1 institute, its not worth it. Even now, i say MBA in our country is a waste of time. The loss in value has nothing to do with AI. but simply we have too many people with the same educational qualifications. more than half the jobs are clerical in nature, in my opinion you dont need an MBA for that. Some basic common sense is more than sufficient, rest can be taken by training or simple work exp.
Who will run the business, bro? Developers and AI? And it will be cute to see the tech teams handle sales as well.
But yeah, agree the MBA curriculum is stalemax. In today's world the MBA curriculum should maintain pace with that of tech advancements.
Where is AI taking over strategy? I have seen AI takover customer support but don't know if it has impacted strategy and corporate planning