‘Educating with the machine’: The microfoundations of working with artificial intelligence in management education

The advent, and large-scale adoption, of artificial intelligence in management learning and education poses complex questions about the discipline, its pedagogy and institutional contexts. Despite its rapid evolution and uptake, we still know little about how academics themselves experience – and shape – the transition to ‘educating with the machine’. Guided by microfoundational perspectives, this study asks how an external artificial intelligence shock travels through educators’ cognitive–emotional framings, resource landscapes and assessment practices to generate artificial intelligence–aware institutional policy. We draw on 30 semi-structured interviews with academics at all career stages in a UK business school. The findings trace a four-stage macro–micro–macro pathway starting with (1) generative artificial intelligence as a disciplinary macro shock ; contributing to (2) different cognitive–emotional framings at the micro level; revealing (3) uneven, micro-level resource landscapes, horizontal interactions and artificial intelligence-enabled assessment practices ; and leading to (4) norm disruption at the macro level. Those stages are supported by four linkage mechanisms: cognitive framing (L1), affective response (L2), resource-to-practice translation (L3) and norm reinforcement/disruption (L4). We conclude by outlining the study’s empirical contributions to microfoundations scholarship and to debates on artificial intelligence in management learning and education.