Confident Yet Underprepared: The AI Literacy Business Education Is Missing
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” says the replicant Roy Batty at the end of Blade Runner, a film that imagined the year 2019 full of artificial intelligences. I closed my presentation at the Marketing Management Association (MMA) Fall Educators Conference in New Orleans in September 2026 with that line. And the truth is that in our research we also saw something hard to believe: everyone feels confident using AI, but not everyone is prepared.
The study, which I wrote with my colleagues Sara Willox and David Penn of the Integrated Business (IB) program at the University of Central Florida (UCF), was published in the conference proceedings under the title Confident Yet Underprepared: The Case for AI Literacy in Business and Marketing Education. Today I’m sharing what we found, because this is not just an issue for universities: it matters to any company that hires young talent.
What Employers Are Asking for Today
Business schools are already adopting AI, but not uniformly. According to AACSB (2025), the focus is more on policy and implementation than on developing students’ AI competencies, and there is no single formula for doing it (AACSB, 2026).
Meanwhile, the job market isn’t waiting. According to NACE (2026), 35% of entry-level positions already require AI skills, and 57.8% of employers assign AI-related tasks to their interns. AI is not eliminating these positions; it is transforming them. And employers are clear about what they are looking for: knowing how to choose the right tool, write good prompts, review what AI produces and use it to be more productive.
The Paradox: Confident, but Not Prepared
Most studies on AI in education listen to one or two groups. We wanted a 360-degree view. Between October and November 2025, we surveyed 218 people from the IB program: 152 students, 38 alumni, 14 employers who have hired our graduates and 14 faculty members.
When we asked how confident they felt using AI properly and ethically, all four groups responded positively: 74% of students, 73% of alumni, 83% of employers and 92% of faculty, the most confident group of all.
But that’s where it got interesting. Eighty-two percent of students consider themselves competent to use AI at work, while only 58% of employers see our graduates that way, and only one of the 14 employers rated them as “extremely competent.” In addition, when we asked students whether they would get a job thanks to their AI knowledge, the most frequent answer was “neither agree nor disagree” (43%). Sixty-seven percent of faculty rated their students’ preparation as “average,” and 72% of alumni said they had no AI project to show an employer.
In other words, confidence is not the same as competence. Often, confidence reflects that we don’t yet know what we don’t know.
What Everyone Asked for Without Coordinating
The second surprise came with the question: what should be taught that isn’t being taught today? Without coordinating with one another, all four groups asked for the same things. That tells us the problem isn’t one student or one professor, but the curriculum. As one of our faculty members wrote: “Don’t leave it to chance or the goodwill of each faculty member—it needs to be incorporated as a hard learning objective/skill in all courses.”
Based on their responses, we propose six foundational areas for an AI literacy course in business and marketing:
- Prompt engineering: knowing how to ask AI for what you really need.
- Responsible use: using AI as a support tool, not a substitute for your own work, and avoiding overreliance on it.
- Verification and citation: reviewing what AI produces, because it can make mistakes or fabricate information.
- Ethics, bias and privacy: understanding the risks of data and automated decisions.
- Tools beyond ChatGPT: knowing the real ecosystem companies use.
- The future of work: understanding how AI is transforming jobs and careers.
For those of us who work in marketing and sales, this is urgent, because AI is already changing core functions such as customer analytics, content creation and sales communication (Grewal et al., 2025).
What About Your Company?
Business schools need to move from showcasing isolated tools to teaching structured AI literacy with clear learning objectives. Our next step is to design that course together with the four groups, teach it and measure whether the gap between what students believe and what employers expect narrows.
But the lesson also applies to companies. If your team says it “already knows how to use AI,” ask yourself: Does it know how to verify what AI produces? Does it understand the privacy risks? Can it show you a concrete result? Confidence is a good start, but it is not the same as being prepared.
Roy Batty ends his speech by saying that all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. As educators and professionals, if we don’t keep up, we will be like tears in rain.
References
AACSB. (2025). GenAI adoption in business schools: Deans and faculty respond.
AACSB. (2026). AI adoption in business education [Report].
Grewal, D., Guha, A., Satornino, C. B., & Becker, M. (2025). The future of marketing and marketing education. Journal of Marketing Education, 47(1), 61–77. https://doi.org/10.1177/02734753241269838
National Association of Colleges and Employers. (2026, April 20). Demand for AI skills in entry-level jobs nearly triples since fall 2025.
Valdez, C., Willox, S., & Penn, D. (2026). Confident yet underprepared: The case for AI literacy in business and marketing education. In B. Houran & M. Martin (Eds.), Artificial, living, and human intelligence in marketing education: 2026 Fall Educators Conference Proceedings. Marketing Management Association.
Author: Dr. Carlos Valdez
Date: July–August 2026
Editorial assistance: Claude.
Image generated with: ChatGPT and Gemini.
Publication: Revista Mercadotecnia y Ventas.
© All rights reserved, Revista Mercadotecnia y Ventas 2026.
Reproduction without the author’s permission is prohibited.
Editorial syndication: This content is available for syndication. For editorial licensing or collaborations, contact carlos.valdez@mercadotecniayventas.com
