From vision to impact: How ESCP is transforming education with Generative AI

After an eight-month pilot, ESCP Business School rolls out ChatGPT Edu at full scale—unlocking 200+ new use cases.

Pioneering education innovation through GenAI

In October 2024, ESCP announced a strategic collaboration with OpenAI, the global leader in Al research and deployment, to experiment with ChatGPT Edu in a structured academic framework. The goal: to offer students and staff full access to generative AI, while encouraging a critical and creative application of this technology in teaching, learning, research, and administrative activities.

A school-wide proof-of-concept phase involving 1,000 early adopters of the ESCP community—students, professors, and staff—explored the practical applications of ChatGPT Edu in their daily activities. These diverse profiles delved into AI’s everyday possibilities through an innovation-driven, test-and-learn approach.

“For several months now, our school has been boldly exploring the transformative potential of generative artificial intelligence. True to our identity, we’ve approached this emerging technology with rigor, curiosity, and collective intelligence,” explains Prof. Léon Laulusa, Executive President and Dean of ESCP Business School.

“ESCP’s thoughtful adoption of AI stands out as a unique case study for other institutions—a model worth following. We’ve seen that for ESCP, deploying OpenAI’s ChatGPT Edu is more than switching on tools – instead it’s building champions, community, and empowering professors and students to push the boundaries of how AI will be used across fields and functions. They’ve treated their ChatGPT Edu rollout as a change management and business school transformation process, not a tech rollout, and are seeing huge impact as a result,” said Leah Belsky, General Manager of Education at OpenAI.

Feedback from the field

Among the 200+ projects developed by participants in this pilot phase, four initiatives illustrate the diversity of use cases and the benefits associated with generative AI:

• Professor Vitor Lima (Teaching) is designing immersive AI-based role-playing experiences, set in a dystopian metropolis and starring a GPT-powered character of a visionary business leader. Immersing students in high-stakes marketing challenges, this original scenario empowers participants to cultivate critical thinking, strategic agility, and creativity. “It’s our moral responsibility as scholars to research, teach, and develop AI to truly help people, businesses, and society at large move forward to better futures.”
• Professor Sandrine Macé (Research) explores how ChatGPT Edu can support students with their research dissertations by helping them experiment directly with AI’s statistical tools. The goal: to foster autonomy and critical thinking when working with data, while using AI to clarify concepts, verify results, and interpret analyses. She highlights: “Using generative AI in education is truly exciting. It opens up new possibilities to enhance how we share knowledge, skills, and values. Being part of the AI Champions initiative allows me to connect with peers, exchange practices, and explore teaching ideas where I didn’t expect them.”
• Jiao Liu, a first-year Master in Management student (Digital Transformation track), describes her journey from AI novice to confident user: “I grew from being AI-illiterate to someone who now understands and collaborates confidently with AI. I’m especially excited to help my classmates explore how to work with AI in meaningful and creative ways. As a student in the Digital Transformation track of the Master in Management programme this semester, I’m proud to be part of the transformation force at ESCP”. Her experience highlights AI’s power to support learning across cultures and languages by enhancing expression, reasoning, and idea generation.
• Akram Boudiar, Work Experiences Officer, is designing a Custom GPT to enhance how the Career Services team handles student requests. “By connecting the tool to our mailbox and feeding it structured data, we aim to provide faster, more personalised answers. It’s not just about automation, it’s about offering clearer, more responsive, and reassuring guidance for our students.”

As Prof. Francesco Rattalino, Executive Vice-President for Academic Affairs and Student Experience, highlights: “By weaving ChatGPT Edu into every discipline and core system of the school, we are forging a new model of human-AI collaboration in business education. Our early pilots prove that generative AI, when guided by rigorous pedagogy, can elevate critical thinking, discernment and creativity: AI can act as collective intelligence for the common good.

As we scale up, we will open spaces like the ChatGPT Hackathons where students can test, build, and reflect. This ecosystem allows our faculty to keep redefining the skill sets that will shape leadership in the AI age.”

Expanding to the entire ESCP Community

Following the success of the Proof-of-Concept phase, ESCP is now moving forward with a full-scale deployment of ChatGPT Edu, granting access to the most advanced GenAI platform to all students, faculty, and staff members across ESCP Business School’s six campuses.

“Rolling out more than 10,500 OpenAI licenses across ESCP demonstrates our commitment to innovation anchored in pedagogical integrity. We are integrating these tools within carefully designed learning environments that put people first. This next phase deepens our collaboration with OpenAI to co-create solutions tailored to education. Expanded access will spark student creativity and drive faculty research, ensuring generative AI becomes a transformative, inclusive force throughout our learning community,” adds Prof. Louis-David Benyayer, ESCP AI Initiatives Coordinator.

Our close work with OpenAI allows us to actively contribute to the evolution of ChatGPT Edu, helping to shape its development to better serve the needs of the education sector. At the same time, ESCP faculty are deepening their research into the impact of AI and the emerging skills required for a world increasingly shaped by this technology.

This wider rollout is part of the school’s broader educational transformation strategy: shifting from the occasional use of AI in the classroom to a deeper reflection on how to teach and learn in a world shaped by AI.