The $200,000 Conversation With AI

You can now practice genuine strategic thinking every sodding day.

Here’s a truly galling observation, one that gives my already dodgy lower intestine a fresh twist of despair. The one genuinely useful thing humanity ever invented has now been cheapened and democratised by a machine. I speak, naturally, of the tedious, soul-sapping Business School.

Those six-figure bills they slap you with, that vast, stomach-churning sum that could otherwise buy you a small, damp flat in the North or a lifetime supply of mediocre biscuits. That was just window dressing, a bit of pointless theatre. The real education, was the one they barely let you peek at, learning how to think when the data was as patchy as an old bathroom carpet. How to grope around in the financial gloom and make a confident decision despite not having all the facts.

That was the point. Everything else, the ghastly networking mixers that smell faintly of desperation and cheap aftershave, the glossy case studies written by some retired bloke with a yacht, was just expensive, glorified overhead. The actual learning happened in those twenty excruciating minutes when some irritating, overly bright sod challenged your figures and you had to defend your position like a badger defending its sett.

That, they convinced us, was worth more than a kidney.

But here’s the grim news for those poor, debt-saddled alumni: that one, single, valuable thing they sold you has now been reduced to the price of your monthly electricity bill.

You can now practice genuine strategic thinking every sodding day, with an artificial intelligence acting as your relentlessly abrasive, entirely unemotional sparring partner. Forget the networking, forget the credential that’s already shedding value faster than an old sofa in a skip. You now have the actual skill on tap.

Pick a dead-end company, any company. Ask the AI to write a case study, a proper, mucky, incomplete one, full of red herrings and conflicting data. You analyse it. You write down your decision, your bold, genius move that will save the firm.

And then you ask the machine to be a total arsehole.

Get it to act as the CFO who thinks your cash flow projections are a fantasy dreamt up during a bout of food poisoning. Get it to be the hostile board member who thinks you’re moving with the sluggish urgency of a broken-down bus on a Bank Holiday. Get it to embody the ruthless competitor who sees the gaping, obvious flaw in your masterplan that you missed while you were busy congratulating yourself.

Do that fifty times, get punched in the intellectual face fifty times by a relentless digital adversary, and you’ll have learned more practical strategy than some poor chump learns in two years of being gently managed through a curriculum. Do it two hundred times across different sectors, and you’ve built something no expensive institution can sell: genuine, battle-hardened practice.

Does it replace the glad-handing network? No. Does it replace the expensive piece of paper? Not yet. But it replaces the learning almost entirely.

The education was never the expensive bit, you see. That was always relatively cheap and easy to reproduce. The genuinely expensive part was the permission slip to say you were educated, the velvet rope that separated the ‘thinkers’ from the rabble.

AI hasn’t made business school obsolete; it’s simply ripped the intellectual heart out of its business model and given it away for free. It’s a wonderful victory for the masses. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to find a damp rag to wipe this begrudging grin off my face.