The dead classroom theory: exploring ai-Driven Education’s impacts on marketing learning

This conceptual paper introduces Dead Classroom Theory (DCT) to understand how generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) reshapes teaching and learning in marketing education. We develop a recursive process model mapping seven stages of course delivery and show how GenAI use, without sufficient critical thinking and intellectual input from students and marketing instructors, can displace human cognitive effort and result in epistemic erosion, producing a “dead” classroom. Drawing on expectancy theory, we classify four types of classroom situations (dynamic, futile, fatuous, and dead) based on different levels of instructor and student engagement. The DCT enables diagnosis of epistemic risk in marketing education and highlights points of intervention to preserve critical thinking, moral judgment, and co-constructed knowledge. The DCT urges reflexive, values-driven integration of GenAI to ensure that marketing programs remain spaces for genuine human learning and professional formation in an AI-pervasive era.