The end of executive education as we know it
19 June 2026
John Dore who spent the last seven years running the Senior Executive Programme at London Business School sets out a manifesto for what comes next for executive education.
There is a question worth pondering before any serious conversation about the future of executive education begins. It goes something like this: if a brilliant, well-funded new entrant designed what we do from scratch today, knowing everything we already know about AI, hybrid work, and how adults actually learn, would it look anything like what we currently offer?
Most of us know the honest answer. Which means the choice is not whether to change, but whether we redesign ourselves or wait for someone else to redesign the market.
Writing recently, Bruce Wiesner made the provocative and correct observation that the very term “executive education” has become a liability, with “education” connoting something passively received, “executive” a relic of a prestige hierarchy that no longer maps onto how organisations think about learning. He is right. But if the name is the symptom, the structural transformation required goes much deeper. This piece tries to say where.
The unbundling problem
For decades, top-tier executive education has sold three things, bundled together and premium-priced: knowledge transfer, rare network access, and prestige signaling. The bundle held because it was genuinely hard to disaggregate. Participants and corporate clients came to a small cadre of schools because they had the research, the room, and the reputation, all in one place.
Artificial intelligence has now commoditised knowledge almost entirely. A senior leader can access a sophisticated strategic framework, explained lucidly and in depth, in seconds, for free. The content advantage, the thing that justified the lion’s share of the School’s fee, is gone.
This forces a reckoning. What is left that only a great institution can actually do? The answer is more interesting and more demanding than the question implies. It requires doubling down on the network opportunity and prestige in ways that are proactive rather than assumed, designed rather than inherited. And it requires adding something that was not always central to the old model: personal transformation.
The shift required is from information to formation, from teaching to emboldening. Helping leaders change how they think, not merely what they know. Many educators promise this. Too few make it the raison d’être. Given that shift, what will the next model look like?
Discovery over delivery
When all knowledge is available to everyone, competitive advantage shifts from knowing things to the capacity to generate insight through experience, encounter, and reflection. The most powerful learning doesn’t often happen in the lecture hall. It happens in a factory in Guangdong, a community health clinic in Nairobi, a start-up incubator in a city that didn’t exist twenty years ago. Silicon Valley, Singapore, Shenzhen, São Paulo are not field trips. They are the curriculum. The campus is wherever the world’s most interesting problems are being solved.
No AI or digital intervention can replicate this kind of discovery learning. It is the closest modern equivalent to the European Grand Tour of the nineteenth century: deeply ennobling, practically irreplaceable, and a powerful signal of institutional and personal ambition.
The practitioner as the real IP
When all knowledge is free, executives will not pay premium prices to learn from people who have never run anything. This will be uncomfortable in institutions where academic credentials remain the primary basis for faculty status. But the practitioner-academic combination, people who can integrate scholarly rigour with hard-won operational experience, is where the genuine intellectual property now lives. The question every institution must answer honestly is whether its faculty mix reflects that reality, and, if not, how urgently it intends to change it.
The cohort as curriculum
The close-knit cohort is one of the most genuinely defensible assets in executive education. But only if it is curated to create friction, challenge, and lasting relationships rather than comfortable consensus. Programmes that treat networking and debate as a side product rather than the central design principle will lose this advantage. The value is not in the room. It is in the diverse, senior, international group of people tackling real problems together under genuine intellectual pressure. That is something AI cannot replicate. The design of that experience, not the content, is where competitive advantage lives.
Identity workspace, not identity consolidation
Earlier this year, I wrote an article with Herminia Ibarra where we argued that once you reach the top of your profession, you no longer need more content. You need the right context: a trusted space to explore who you are becoming next. Places and spaces that provide the safety, stimulation, and stretch required for genuine renewal are especially crucial at times of transition. The place does not need to be a tiered lecture theatre. The best executive programmes have always offered something close to this but rarely made it explicit. Making that space intentional and designing for it explicitly is a significant and largely unclaimed opportunity.
Transformation partner, not vendor
The vendor model, selling courses by the unit to whoever shows up, is being squeezed from above and below. From above, by organisations that want something more bespoke, more embedded, more strategically responsive. From below, by digital platforms that will always undercut on price. The alternative is to move upstream: to become a thought partner to organisations, co-designing strategy and learning together rather than delivering programmes to them. This is where the real differentiation lives. It is also where every major consulting firm already operates. The question is whether business schools have the will and the commercial architecture to compete on that ground.
Prestige earned, not assumed.
Institutional brand still matters enormously in some industries. But reputation is not a fixed asset. It depreciates. Prestige that is inherited rather than renewed becomes, over time, an obstacle rather than an advantage: a reason not to change, a comfort that delays necessary discomfort. The institutions that will thrive treat prestige as something earned in every cycle, amplified through outcomes, impact stories, and alumni advocacy. Business Schools have focused on developing and deepening alumni relationships with degree programme graduates, whilst in a world of lifelong learning and older executive cohorts, the same discipline, applied more intelligently, is overdue for executive education.
A creative response to AI
There is a broader structural shift that deserves direct attention. As AI becomes capable of performing more and more routine analytical tasks, financial modelling, data synthesis, competitive analysis, and even certain kinds of strategic planning, the tasks that remain irreducibly human become more, not less, valuable.
Leadership, imagination, ethical judgement, the ability to navigate genuine uncertainty, the capacity to build trust and cohesion across difference: these are not soft alternatives to rigorous thinking. They are the premium offer. Finance, accounting, and technical courses will quickly lose relevance. Leadership and transformation will grow. But here is the harder question most schools have not yet faced: how many are genuinely excellent at developing creativity, artistry, and imagination as leadership disciplines? And how many are simply hoping nobody notices the gap?
In the future, executive education needs to be rebuilt ruthlessly around a mindset shift toward adaptive reasoning, navigating ambiguity, ethical judgment, and leading through uncertainty. Not the routine analytical frameworks that AI now executes faster and more reliably than any human.
The human skills sanctuary
We might call it the human skills sanctuary. A protected space where the things that are not just hard to automate but actively more valuable because AI has automated everything else receive the serious, designed attention they deserve. Presence. Persuasion. The ability to read a room, build a coalition, hold difficult ground, and inspire people to follow in conditions of genuine uncertainty.
Julian Birkinshaw, Dean of Ivey Business School, articulates the enduring core of this with precision:
“We need human leaders to define the purpose of our work and articulate it in a way that people find inspiring; we also need them to live the values of the organisation, to define the boundaries we should not cross, and to take responsibility for the incentives and penalties that shape our behaviour.”
These are not capabilities that can be taught through frameworks and case studies alone. They require something that emboldens leadership. That is precisely the territory executive education must claim, and it requires faculty and educators who have genuinely led, not merely studied those who have.
The AI imperative: two conversations at once
Institutions that treat AI as simply a new topic to add to the curriculum are missing the point. There are two entirely distinct conversations to have, and both are urgent.
The first is personal. Every executive in every programme is operating alongside AI agents or will be very soon. Many are uncomfortable with this and uncertain about what it means for their authority, relevance, and daily practice. The question is not whether to use AI tools. It is how to lead as human plus agent: how to direct, evaluate, and contextualise AI outputs with the same confidence and critical literacy that a previous generation brought to financial statements. As Birkinshaw observes, “you won’t lose your job to AI, but you will lose your job to someone who has learned how to use AI.” That argument applies with equal force to leadership. Building personal fluency and genuine judgement here is a huge and largely unmet need. Programmes that provide it will have an immediate and tangible value proposition.
This connects to a point Wiesner makes compellingly: AI should not simply be added to curriculum topics. It needs to be lived in the design, delivery, and fabric of programmes themselves. Schools that teach AI innovation whilst running operationally as they did in the last decade will find the contradiction hard to sustain.
The second conversation is systemic.
Beyond using personal tools lies a deeper question that the best executive minds should be wrestling with: what does AI mean for the organisations they lead? For jobs, structures, ethics, and the competitive dynamics of entire industries? This is not a technology question. It is a leadership and governance question – even a moral dilemma – and it belongs at the heart of senior executive programmes rather than as a specialist module at the edge. Teaching executives what to do with AI, the judgment, the ethics, the organisational leadership, rather than how it works, is the territory where great institutions can be genuinely selective and deep, rather than comprehensive and undifferentiated.
The premium has shifted
There is a third dimension worth naming. AI is already changing how learning itself works. Participants arrive better informed, better briefed, and with a lower tolerance for generic content. In some cases, they arrive having used AI to generate a more personalised introduction to the subject than any programme curriculum could offer. The implication is not that programmes need to compete with AI on breadth. It is that they need to offer something qualitatively different: the friction of encounter, the texture of genuine debate, the experience of being genuinely challenged by peers who hold fundamentally different mental models of the world. AI can prepare you for a conversation. It cannot have the conversation for you.
The shift
I am not saying that these issues are not already being wrestled with. Clearly, the very best providers are doubling down on deepening the experience of cohorts, doing innovative things with AI and discovery learning, and making the impact for leaders, not just personal but organisational.
My argument is that these elements become the reason for being, not the byproduct of refining older formats of learning, delivery, and experience. Adapting Case Learning for this new paradigm by asking participants to compare their Agents’ answers is not a curriculum upgrade. Building a collaborative experiment across a cohort with different approaches will still create more learning, energy and engagement than a group deferring to the tool expert who can craft the prompt more effectively.
In summary, what is actually required is a fundamental reimagining of purpose: from the delivery of executive education to the creation of conditions for cohesive development, the kind of development that produces leaders capable of building coherence, making sense of complexity, and holding organisations together when nothing is certain.
That is work AI cannot do. It is work that only serious institutions, with serious leadership, serious design, and serious ambition, can aspire to.
The question is how many will choose to do it.
About the author
John Dore is a leadership facilitator, speaker and executive programme director. He believes that the organisations that truly thrive are those in which talented people are deeply connected to one another, to their purpose and their customers. He calls that connection glue. His book GLUE: Transforming Leadership in a Hybrid World won Business Book of the Year 2024 in the Leadership category and provides the framework. The real work happens in the room. With over twenty years of working with senior leaders worldwide, directing executive programmes, including for seven years the Senior Executive Programme at London Business School, ranked #1 for Open programmes by the FT.
You can find out more at:
www.waveyourarms.com