How Can Harvard Business School Students and Alumni Prepare for Their Long-Term Career Journeys in an Accelerating AI-Focused Society?

Christopher Stanton, Ph.D., is Marvin Bower Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at the Harvard Business School. Stanton's research streams focus on personnel economics, organizational economics, labor markets, and entrepreneurship.

His MBA elective, Managing the Future of Work, explores the challenges and opportunities surrounding artificial intelligence, robotics, digital labor markets, and training for the modern workforce.

Stanton’s research has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economic Studies, Management Science, the Journal of Labor Economics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, among other publications; and it has been covered by major media outlets including The Economist, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Bloomberg.

Stanton earned a Ph.D. in business administration from Stanford University and B.A. and M.A. degrees from Emory University.

In an era in which generative AI tools like ChatGPT have infiltrated boardrooms and cubicles alike, the anxiety among ambitious professionals—especially those from elite business schools—is palpable.

Will AI render white-collar expertise obsolete? Or will it amplify human ingenuity, creating roles we have not yet imagined?

Professor Stanton, from the popular MBA elective Managing the Future of Work at HBS, has invested over 15 years analyzing the effects of technology on labor markets, freelancing platforms, and the gig economy’s underbelly.

Stanton’s research, including the 2023 HBS case “Generative AI and the Future of Work,” underscores a pivotal truth: AI will not eliminate jobs en masse in the near term, but it will reshape them, demanding adaptability over rote skill.

Drawing on recent data from 2024–2025 employment reports and AI adoption surveys, Stanton offers a roadmap for readers to build resilience in tomorrow’s workforce.

Q. With the stress that many HBS students and alumni feel given the uncertainty of sustainable careers within emerging AI technologies, what advice would you convey to them?

A. Stanton: As we have seen over the past few months with downsizings at not only consulting firms but also Fortune 500s like biopharmas, the stress levels are quite high across industries. It is not surprising as I recall reading how after shedding more than 14,000 jobs in 2024, the biopharma industry surpassed 13,000 layoffs by July 2025, a 31% year-over-year increase at the halfway mark.¹

While the constant chatter around AI displacing jobs adds to the angst, my research² on personnel economics and digital labor markets has shown that technological shifts, from online freelancing platforms to robotics, rarely obliterate entire professions. Instead, they amplify disparities: those who integrate tools like AI thrive, while laggards falter.

Take radiology, a field under intense AI scrutiny due to its image-analysis core. A 2024 European Society of Radiology survey of 572 members found that nearly half now use AI tools routinely, compared to approximately 20% in 2019, primarily for workflow efficiency, not replacement.³

Radiologists in complex subspecialties like interventional or pediatric imaging, which blend hands-on procedures with interdisciplinary judgment, remain indispensable.

As for those stuck in routine chart-reading? Many will likely pivot to AI oversight roles, where human nuance catches algorithmic blind spots, such as contextual patient histories (at least in the near-term, where those blind spots are present).

As a 2025 npj Health Systems study notes, AI can help address U.S. radiology shortages (projected at 44% by 2025) by handling demand management and capacity building, freeing experts for high-value diagnostics.⁴

Even blue-collar “safe havens” like HVAC installation are not immune. While I believe the front-line installers are fairly safe, those involved in back-office scheduling and other easily automated functions will need to seek new skills around how to use AI to augment their work. On a per-capita basis, we’ll see fewer people doing more.

For HBS students eyeing summer internships or post-grad roles, the 2024 M7 employment reports paint a realistic landscape of how their peers at other schools are pursuing similar career verticals, including the ever popular big four areas of finance, consulting, technology, and healthcare. With limited demand for MBA students assuming historically popular roles and a surplus of top MBA student supply, the competition for jobs is high.

My advice is to audit your “value triad”—three crisp propositions you deliver immediately, such as AI-enhanced market forecasting or ethical implementation strategies. Tools like my HBS case on Freelancer Ltd. illustrate how platforms democratize talent; and so consider leveraging them to prototype skills before graduation.⁵

Newer platforms, like Mercor, make the matching process especially easy. Then, you can have some concrete examples to demonstrate your potential value from day one.

Finally, be flexible when considering prospective employers given AI’s shifting dynamics, which tend to favor agile players. McKinsey, Bain, and BCG have historically scooped up a significant percentage of HBS consulting hires, leveraging strategy prestige, but digital natives like Accenture and IBM, veterans in tech implementation, can potentially offer interesting career growth as well amid Fortune 500 AI pushes.

Moreover, Big Four firms (Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PwC) offer interesting career opportunities too. Still, per this chart, MBAs have been pivoting away from consulting to other verticals.

Q. Given AI’s accelerating disruption of MBA career tracks, what are your top three recommendations for the readership?

A. Stanton: First, if you have decided to pursue the traditional professional services tracks, master AI tools as table stakes, not novelties. Just as Excel fluency defined analysts for decades, proficiency in prompts for models like GPT-4o or Claude is non-negotiable if you are going into investment banking, consulting, and PE/VC.

As for those pursuing Fortune 500 career paths, recognize that you can not delegate this skill set to the CIO and or those consultants. As the MIT Center for Information Systems Research recently pointed out, companies with both digital and AI-savvy boards delivered an average return on equity of 10.9 percentage points above the industry average, compared with the 74% of companies with non-savvy boards, which averaged -3.8 percentage points below their industry average.⁶

If you are a typical HBS student aspiring to the C-Suite ranks, take executive classes, participate in extracurricular continuous learning sessions, and/or connect for coffee with your IT friends, but get moving since Boards value such experiences.

Second, if you have elected to pursue a start-up venture, search for those opportunistic edges where AI lowers barriers. User-friendly platforms like Cursor, Lovable, or Base 44 (AI coding aids) let non-tech founders prototype MVPs in days, not months.

Subsequently, I have observed how startups have hit revenue milestones faster than ever before and this is with some teams led by just non-technical founders.

For those of you incoming to HBS, I look forward to seeing you in “The Entrepreneurial Manager” (TEM), an introductory course on entrepreneurship offered in the first year at Harvard Business School, which is intended to inspire and teach students how to imagine, create, and lead a variety of entrepreneurial endeavors.

To calibrate expectations, it is not a course only about “starting companies,” it is for everyone who aspires to lead innovation and drive impact, whether by building a startup, leading transformation inside a global company, advancing technical breakthroughs, or launching new initiatives in the public or social sector.

Moreover, entrepreneurship has flourished for our Harvard undergrads, moving from a topic once limited to extracurricular programs and social enterprise workshops. The College now offers half a dozen classes on startups, venture capital, and innovation.⁷ 

Third, fortify your “personal moat,” that unique blend of curated intellectual and social capital which AI struggles to commoditize. With AI lowering the barriers to entry for anyone around the globe to compete in a business market, leverage the intellectual capital that you have as a student/alum of HBS and/or other M7 schools as I recognize the readership are not just HBSers.

With access to Baker Library (at HBS), Dewey Library (at MIT Sloan), and Lippincott (at Wharton), you have world class curated content that have less risk of hallucinated inaccuracies. Of equal importance is the social capital (trusted friendships and earned reputations) that you have the potential to secure while on campus as well as via long-time connections forged at alumni events.

Finally, as The Wall Street Journal recently pointed out, “Genuine learning, growth, adaptation…it comes from doing the hard work…it’s those moments of challenge, of hardship—that’s the crucible where people grow, they change, they learn most profoundly.”⁸

If there are fewer entry-level roles at the large-scale employers, it is up to you to secure those personal growth opportunities where supervisors are part of the on-the-job training. Unless and/or until the job market changes back to historical hiring and onboarding, tap into those MBA assets which are right in front of you.

About the Author

Michael Wong is a Part-time Lecturer for the Wharton Communication Program at the University of Pennsylvania. As an Emeritus Co-President and board member of the Harvard Business School Healthcare Alumni Association as well as a Contributing Writer for the MIT Sloan Career Development Office, Michael’s ideas have been shared in the Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review.

References

1. Bilodeau, Kelly, Biopharma layoffs rise as drugmakers tighten belts and reorganize, Pharmavoice, August 18, 2025
2. https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/is-the-world-ready-for-the-next-wave-of-ai
3. https://insightsimaging.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s13244-024-01801-w#:~:text=AI%20impact%20on%20radiological%20work,less%20focused%20on%20radiology%20subspecialties
4. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44401-025-00023-6
5. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=57572
6. Burnham, Kristin, Successful companies now have AI-savvy boards, MIT Sloan Management Review, May 21, 2025
7. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/10/30/entrepreneurship-course-harvard-college/
8. Ellis, Lindsay and Bindley, Katherine, AI Is Wrecking an Already Fragile Job Market for College Graduates, The Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2025