How AI Is Changing the Way Students Learn

For decades, business school students around the world learned decision-making in similar fashion: absorbing information about a business scenario by reading a narrative or watching a video, studying related facts around the scenario, and finally forming an opinion on next steps.

This practice forms the foundation of the case method, an interactive, instructor-led tool that encourages students to debate and exchange ideas. These ideas turn into insights that can then be applied elsewhere in one’s career.

This mode of teaching was changed forever in late 2022, however, thanks to the advent of Generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, among others. Students were suddenly able to use these tools to question aspects of a business scenario they might not have understood otherwise, increasing their classroom engagement. On the flip side, students could use these tools to skip reading course materials altogether while still forming an AI-assisted opinion, i.e. AI-shortcutting.

“My first hunch was that everyone would just use AI to cheat,” says Dan Wang, Lambert Family Professor of Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School and Co-Director of the Tamer Institute for Social Enterprise and Climate Change.

“It turns out that I wasn’t wrong about that, but I also realized that was a naive way of looking at AI, because it's really incumbent upon instructors and the entire educational system to think about new modes of integrating technologies in order to enhance learning, as opposed to just finding ways to make our classrooms invulnerable to cheating.”

While problematic, AI-shortcutting cannot simply be stopped with an outright ban—bans are often unenforceable, and can unintentionally starve students of valuable AI skills, according to Wang. Plus, studies have shown that technology promising to detect AI-based plagiarism has proven to be unreliable. The solution, according to Wang, is to embrace AI-based learning that is personalized, adaptive, and voice-powered, helping students think critically and engage deeply with course material while keeping case discussions inclusive, practical, and challenging. 

Enter CAiSEY (Classroom Artificial Intelligence Studio for Engaging You), an AI-based, voice-powered discussion tool created by Wang alongside CBS alumni Jill Cohen ‘20 and Johnny Lee ‘23. What began as a prototype used solely in Wang’s Technology Strategy course has, in just two years, grown to be a robust, instructor-led platform used by 3,000 students in 10 different business schools globally.

CAiSEY takes the case method to another level, allowing students to practice having conversations with an AI partner on an array of class topics, scenarios,  and discussion questions before class. The result is a more immersive, personalized learning experience that boosts student preparation and participation in classroom discussions.

“When a person has a conversation with an AI partner by voice, that's a personalized discussion—that's really different from having a conversation with 50, 60, or 70 other people,” Wang says. “That discussion that you have with the AI, it's the first time that that discussion has ever occurred. That's entirely novel, entirely generative."

Any voice data inputted into the CAiSEY demo will not be stored and none of it will be used to train any large language models.

CAiSEY’s Inception and the Classroom

Wang and Lee’s prototype, built in 2023 using the machine learning platform Hugging Face, allowed students to have a text-based dialogue with an AI-based chatbot fine-tuned with Wang’s notes and instructions.

When voice-based APIs became available in 2024, Wang brought Cohen onboard, and the team decided to explore a voice-based conversation model, rather than just text. Through countless iterations and testing, the team refined the model, giving rise to the first beta version of CAiSEY in 2025. 

After deploying CAiSEY to nearly 300 students in the spring of 2025, Wang found that on average students spent 22 minutes per voice-based assignment, with some spending up to 45 minutes.

Over 93% of students said the CAiSEY experience was ‘’great’ and that they wanted more, with many citing benefits like feeling better prepared for class. Wang noted that from on-going research on CAiSEY, using voice-based conversations led students to engage in a wide variety of topics, stimulating more creative and unexpected insights, t compared to text-based interactions.

Students had a more personalized discussion with CAiSEY compared to a traditional classroom discussion with their peers, but the application also had a tremendous impact on the classroom as well, according to Wang.

"With voice-based conversations, students covered a much bigger diversity of topics than students who did text-based conversations, which resulted in a lot more convergence in terms of their thinking,” Wang says.

When students came to the classroom, they were better prepared, more ready to debate, and to accommodate other views, Wang added. That meant classroom discussions became richer, lasted longer, and were more civil as a result of the CAiSEY preparation.

This fall semester, CAiSEY was piloted across the core Strategy Formulation course, a requirement for the 1,000 first-year EMBA and MBA students at CBS. In addition to spawning playful memes across social media about CAiSEY’s adversarial guidance, students consistently reported that CAiSEY helped them absorb class material more effectively while elevating their engagement in classroom discussion. Implementations of CAiSEY are also either planned or active in other core and elective courses across CBS.

Learning Differently

Around 20% of US adults are dyslexic or dysgraphic, which makes it difficult for them to read and write. The traditional education system is set up for students without these learning conditions, effectively ignoring one in every five students, according to Wang.

CAiSEY provides an accommodating learning experience for these students, as they can learn better by listening and speaking rather than just reading and writing. In countless feedback sessions, students who are dyslexic or dysgraphic — a neurological condition that impairs writing — told Wang that hat CAiSEY was the first educational tool that truly accommodated their learning style.

"I cannot tell you the number of students who wrote to me during the spring semester who said, ‘Finally, this is the first time in my educational career, 20 years of school, in which there has been something that has accommodated my learning style. I learn better by listening. I learn better by speaking and engaging.’”

Wang received similar feedback from students who speak English as their second language, who are often intimidated by the language barrier in classroom discussions.

Practicing discussions with CAiSEY, an empathetic AI partner, allows these students to feel more comfortable trying out different ways of expressing themselves without judgment.

This type of practice is more beneficial than trying to discuss with native English speakers, where the language barrier can be more daunting.

Looking Ahead

Wang believes CAiSEY has the potential to fundamentally change classroom dynamics and discussions, but also sees potential for CAiSEY to be used in a variety of educational and training contexts beyond just business schools. 

“One of the joys of developing CAiSEY is that we've gotten a lot of inbound interest from folks. They email and say, ‘can I use this?’ And there are different settings that I wouldn't have imagined, and I can't tell them whether it would be effective or not. I can only tell them that you've got to try it out and see.” 

He noted that CAiSEY provides a "privileged view" into how AI could reshape educational settings in the future, beyond just automating existing tasks. The voice-based, generative nature of the AI interactions points to new possibilities for how technology can be integrated into learning.