Free and Alive: Business Education in the Age of AI

“The one who is best prepared for the future is the one who is free and alive in a world of uncertainty.” — Ingemar Hedenius, Swedish philosopher.

When Hedenius wrote those words in the mid-20th century, he could not have imagined the rise of AI. Yet his idea captures the central question facing educators today: how do we remain free and alive in an age of rapidly accelerating intelligent technologies?

Around the world, universities are stepping-up AI adoption. Platforms promise efficiency, better feedback, and personalised pathways. But amid this activity, institutions must not lose sight of the type of education they want to create.

At the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), we have approached this tension by reframing education not as a delivery system but as a living practice. Our educational mission is called FREE, which stands for: Fact-based, Reflective, Empathetic, and Entrepreneurial. It expresses our belief that in times of rapid automation, institutions must actively reaffirm the human dimensions of learning.

From Philosophy to Practice

The FREE framework draws from four philosophical dimensions of education that can guide teaching in any context:

Educational Value and What It Cultivates

Fact-based: Rigorous, evidence-informed learning

Reflective: Self-awareness, perspective-taking, identity formation

Empathetic: Ethical reasoning, intercultural understanding, care

Entrepreneurial: Purposeful action, experimentation, agency

Seen together, these dimensions form a compass for educational design. They invite educators to ask: What kind of knowing are we enabling? What kind of being are we nurturing? What values are we expressing? And what kind of action are we preparing students to take?

At SSE, these questions are not abstract. They shape the design of programs, courses, and even AI pilots. Education, in this framing, is not simply about knowledge transfer but about cultivating the capacity to act responsibly within uncertainty.

Reclaiming the Human in Business Education

Business schools are often early adopters of technology, yet they are also uniquely positioned to explore its ethical and societal implications. The paradox is that while management education celebrates innovation, it can easily drift toward instrumentalism.

The FREE framework counters that drift. It reframes innovation as an ethical commitment. When educators map their teaching practices to the FREE dimensions, they begin to see how even familiar methods carry deep human purposes:

Case-based learning builds critical and ethical reasoning through dialogue.

Peer learning and mentoring foster empathy and connection.

Reflective journaling develops ontological awareness and self-regulation.

Scenario-based design and experimentation cultivate agency and adaptability.

We have mapped thirty pedagogical approaches used in business education to these values. This mapping helps faculty make deliberate choices about how each method supports human connection, reflection, and responsible action, and how technology, including AI, can be used to enhance rather than erode them.

Positioning FREE in the context of AI

AI has become the defining question of our time in education, and understandably so. The temptation is to treat AI as an innovation agenda in its own right. Yet the real innovation lies not in the technologies, but in how we use them.

At SSE, we integrate AI tools where they can strengthen and extend the FREE agenda. For example, students might use AI to explore different perspectives on a finance case or simulate stakeholder dialogues before live discussion. In Entrepreneurship courses, Students are trained to become AI-augmented entrepreneurs, using generative tools to accelerate idea generation, experimentation, teamwork, and problem-solving in the early stages of venture creation. In Strategy courses, students use AI as an analytical partner to explore real-world scenarios. They alternate between AI-assisted analysis and independent reasoning to identify where machine-generated insights plateau and where human judgement must take over.

In all contexts, the approach is the same: AI should extend empathy, curiosity, and critical thinking. We ask faculty to begin with pedagogical intent, not technological novelty. The question is never “What can AI do?” but “What does learning need?”

To support this, we have created resources that help educators examine their teaching practices through the FREE lens. These include questions such as:

• Which dimensions of FREE are most visible in your course design?
• Where does technology amplify or undermine them?
• How might AI become a partner in deepening, rather than diluting, your pedagogical intent?

This reflective process turns the institutional mission into a living design principle. It also provides a governance structure for AI adoption, one grounded in ethics, transparency, and educational purpose.

Values Before Velocity

Higher education today faces a paradox of acceleration. Institutions are under pressure to adopt AI quickly to remain competitive, yet the moral and pedagogical frameworks that should guide these decisions evolve more slowly. The result is a form of organisational vertigo: constant change without clear direction.

Values-based frameworks like FREE act as stabilisers. They help universities align technological transformation with human intention. They provide a shared language that connects strategy, pedagogy, and technology. And they remind us that educational innovation should be measured not by how much technology we adopt, but by how much impact we create.

This approach also travels well beyond business education. All disciplines face the same underlying challenge: to educate individuals who can think critically, act ethically, and create responsibly in a complex world. A framework like FREE offers a structure for doing exactly that. It is adaptable across disciplines yet anchored in universal human concerns.

A Compass for the Age of Intelligent Systems

As artificial intelligence becomes part of how universities teach, research, and make decisions, business schools must ask themselves: What kind of institution are we becoming as these systems take root? At the Stockholm School of Economics, our educational philosophy acts as that compass. It helps us connect technological change to our values so that innovation strengthens identity rather than eroding it.

FREE allows Stockholm School of Economics to integrate new technologies, pedagogies, and partnerships while maintaining a strong sense of identity and direction. It turns philosophical reflection into daily practice.

Closing Reflection

As Hedenius reminded us, moral seriousness begins with intellectual honesty: “We have a duty to believe that the convictions underpinning our values are true, or at least probably true.”

In the age of AI, to learn how to reason about what we value is education’s most human task.

Author Note

Charlotte von Essen is Pedagogical and Digital Development Lead at the Stockholm School of Economics, where she leads initiatives on AI-enhanced learning and pedagogical innovation. Her work explores how institutions can design human-centred, values-driven education in an age of intelligent systems.

Written for OEB 2025 by Charlotte von Essen.

Join Charlotte for her Presentation “Learning That Frees: A Human-Centred Framework for Business Education in an Age of AI” at OEB25.