The transition to Industry 5.0 places executive education under mounting pressure to equip leaders with the competenciesrequired to navigate digital transformation, sustainability imperatives, and human-centric values simultaneously. Acritical bottleneck impedes this mission: educators’ well-documented capacity to acquire and assimilate externalknowledge is seldom matched by a corresponding capacity to transform and exploit that knowledge through pedagogicallyeffective teaching materials. This conceptual study addresses the gap by introducing pedagogical absorptive capacity, amicro-foundational capability that extends the PACAP–RACAP framework to the educator-as-knowledge-integrator,and proposes generative AI as the primary mediating mechanism bridging the two dimensions. Employing DesignScience Research (DSR) methodology structured around the six-phase Peffers process model and evaluated againstHevner’s seven guidelines, the paper presents the design of an AI-powered Case Study Builder. Human-AI symbiosisis theorised to operate through three discrete mechanisms: augmented problem sensing, which extends educators’perceptual reach across diverse knowledge domains; scaffolded solution assembly, which reduces the cognitive viscosityof narrative construction while preserving educator agency; and accelerated validation and reflection, which compressesiterative feedback cycles from weeks to minutes. The artifact embodies five design principles, augment rather thanautomate; support iterative refinement; provide structure with customisation; build in feedback loops; and designfor diverse institutional contexts, derived from the theoretical framework and formulated as transferable prescriptiveknowledge. The paper contributes an extension of absorptive capacity theory to pedagogical contexts, a mechanism-levelaccount of human-AI knowledge integration, and actionable design guidance for business schools seeking to enhancefaculty capability in the Industry 5.0 era.
Taiwo et al. (Mon,) studied this question.