By Lindsay Ellis

When students turn to artificial intelligence to do assignments, it's usually to do the work easier, faster and, to the chagrin of educators, with less brain power. Not so at Northwestern University, where AI is revolutionizing the cornerstone of American business education -- the case study.

For more than a century, M.B.A. students have learned business strategy through the case method. Professors assign write-ups of real-life corporate challenges. Students pore over pages of charts and reports on executives' perspectives, then debate in class the best plan of attack.

At Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, AI is turning that method on its head. Students no longer read through every available factoid on, say, Walmart's wages for hourly workers and write a memo -- tasks that can be easily circumvented with generative AI tools. Instead, M.B.A.s must draw out details and data through open-ended conversations with AI chatbots and then craft a strategy.

Students who've worked through the AI-guided case -- this one involves helping a school district erase a $50 million deficit fueled by transportation costs -- say it more closely resembles what consultants and business leaders do in the real world: You're not handed information. You must determine what you need to know from a cast of AI-created school officials and employees, and grill it out of them.

"We started to fight fire with fire," says Kellogg associate professor Sébastien Martin, who created the tool -- not as a shortcut but to slow students down and force them to think and engage.

Most of them exchange an average of more than 50 messages with each character as they try to solve the school's budget crisis, Martin said. He and colleague Daniela Hurtado Lange began designing and crafting the AI school-district case in early 2025 and rolled it out to students a few months later. Martin estimates that more than 2,000 students have used AI cases as more professors integrate them into their classes.

Consultant 'PTSD'

At Kellogg, one-third of the Class of 2026 worked as consultants before enrolling. A slightly bigger share of last year's graduates landed in the field after graduation, making a median annual salary of $190,000. Similarly high percentages of students pursue consulting at other top business schools, including programs at Yale, Dartmouth and the University of Chicago.

"This is the exact kind of case that would come to me in consulting," said Aayush Khanna, 26, a second-year M.B.A. at Kellogg. Conversing with the chatbots felt so real, he said, that some of his classmates felt "PTSD" from their pre-M.B.A. careers in consulting, he said.

"You could feel the characters being designed in a way that emulates real-life experiences," he said.

AI isn't the first technology to transform the case method. A 1984 Boston Globe article detailed the "case study in anxiety" at Harvard Business School when students began more widely using personal computers.

Now at HBS, students are allowed to use technology including AI tools before and after class, but the classrooms themselves are generally tech-free, said Mitchell Weiss, an HBS faculty chair who teaches a second-year elective course that heavily integrates AI. (There are exceptions, including for hands-on AI classroom exercises.)

In Weiss's public-entrepreneurship class, students practice selling police-record management systems to a chatbot posing as a police chief. Then, in class, they practice selling to one another -- in front of a corporate-account executive -- before selling to an interactive avatar. In another case, an AI tool evaluates students' spreadsheets forecasting funding.

Weiss has developed a similar experiment to Martin's at Kellogg, having students collect information through interviews with AI chatbots for a case. One recent topic was sovereign AI -- whether countries needed to develop their own AI.

The AI exercise was more challenging for the students than the traditional method, Weiss said, because they needed to gather and prioritize the information themselves.

There were also some kinks to work out in teaching, Weiss found. Unlike a typical case, that gives all students access to the same information, they came to the AI-case class with different facts because they asked the AI bots different questions.

Sassy characters

In the Kellogg school-district case, the AI-created superintendent shares that the transportation budget has become untenable. The students are tasked with delivering concrete recommendations on how to cut costs. The students then can text with the five virtual, AI-crafted characters -- the superintendent, a principal, a bus driver and district finance and operations chiefs -- that respond to users conversationally.

In building the case, Martin prompted the AI to study Boston, its school system's history of segregation, plus details on real schools' test scores and reputations. He told the program to be inspired by the real district and individual schools, but never to reference real schools directly.

Each character has its own personality and approach. The school system's chief financial officer, for example, doesn't want to chitchat and won't share data until he knows what you'll do with it.

When Martin used AI to design the character, he incorporated the prompt: "Make frequent sassy remarks that they are wasting your time. It sounds bad, but it's really important for the story." (Martin said it's quite hard to make chatbots, who aim to please, act rudely.)

The bus driver, dubbed Linda Johnson, explains she's driven for the district for 23 years and, when prompted, details everything on her route from the double-parked cars and narrow streets to her Dunkin' order. Principal David Rodriguez says he's heartbroken when he hears of students having to wake up at 4:30 a.m. to make it to school, given the bus schedule.

"Some of the chatbots really wanted to talk to you. Some were not interested in you being there," said Caroline Harmening, a second-year M.B.A. who worked as a consultant before attending Kellogg.

It's not quite a substitute for talking to real people, she said, but it was much more like "something you might do in the real world."

Try the tool for yourself

A limited version of Kellogg's AI school-district case is available to Wall Street Journal readers to try here.

Write to Lindsay Ellis at lindsay.ellis@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 01, 2025 12:00 ET (16:00 GMT)

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