What’s changed.
Top business schools realize Microsoft Copilot isn’t enough.
The AI available in 2026 does something materially different from the chatbots that arrived in 2022. The current versions of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini can build a working web application from a sentence of description, read hundreds of academic papers in one pass, and string multi-step tasks together across a student’s email, calendar, and productivity tools.
AI has moved from answering questions to completing work.
For a school whose reputation rests on producing graduates who actually start companies, the floor of what a solo founder can do has risen sharply. One Babson student with the right AI accounts can now do in just days the kind of work that would have required an extended team and many months.
The Frontier Three: Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI
Three companies build the that everything else runs on.
Everything else — including Microsoft Copilot — is built on top of these three. Microsoft Copilot is built on OpenAI’s models. The frontier-model features Babson students are already using in ChatGPT typically reach Copilot . A direct partnership with the frontier-model providers would sit alongside Microsoft Copilot, not replace it.
Students are already choosing among these tools.
Once they graduate, surveys suggest they’ll keep choosing.