Reframing AI as a Tool for Strategic Thinking at AKSOB
A faculty-led initiative is teaching students to question, analyze and reconstruct knowledge rather than accept it at face value.
At LAU’s Adnan Kassar School of Business (AKSOB), innovation in teaching is not measured by novelty alone, but by the intellectual depth and agency it cultivates in students.
As artificial intelligence (AI), immersive technologies and cross-border collaboration reshape professional practice, AKSOB Associate Professor of Marketing Zahy Ramadan is redesigning learning experiences to ensure that students do not merely absorb information but actively interrogate, construct and apply knowledge.
In his marketing strategy courses at both the MBA and senior undergraduate levels, Dr. Ramadan addressed a challenge that has become increasingly visible in business education: Students’ growing reliance on AI-generated answers without sufficient reflection on how those answers are produced. Rather than discourage the use of AI, he reframed its role entirely. His reverse prompt-engineering initiative shifted the focus away from outputs toward the cognitive processes behind them, requiring students to analyze, question and reconstruct AI reasoning.
Students were given a marketing case accompanied by an AI-generated strategic response. Instead of evaluating the quality of the answer, they were asked to deconstruct it—identifying implicit assumptions, logical structure and strategic framing—and infer the hidden prompt that generated the response. The students then rewrote the prompt to produce a more rigorous and context-sensitive output, supported by an explanation of what had changed and why. In doing so, the assignment inverted traditional assessment logic, placing human reasoning after AI generation rather than before it.
The learning experience was further enriched through a mobile application that provided automated similarity scoring. Once students entered their reconstructed prompt, the system compared it with the original hidden prompt, generating a similarity score along with brief feedback. This immediate loop transformed the exercise into an interactive and iterative process, encouraging experimentation, refinement and deeper engagement.
“The aim was to convert AI from a shortcut into a thinking partner,” said Dr. Ramadan. “When students understand how an answer is constructed, they stop accepting it at face value and start engaging with it strategically.”
Student feedback confirmed the benefits of this design. Many reported stronger critical thinking, strategic reasoning and digital literacy, noting that the activity required deeper cognitive effort than conventional AI-based tasks.
Several reflected that it made them more skeptical, analytical and intentional in their use of AI, particularly in strategic contexts. While designing an assignment where AI could not replace human thinking posed challenges, positioning the core cognitive task after AI output proved effective. Even the iterative refinement of the scoring mechanism became pedagogically valuable, as student feedback informed subsequent versions of the activity.
Aligned with AKSOB’s strategic emphasis on experiential and technology-enabled learning, the initiative provides strong evidence of learning impact relevant to AACSB expectations. Dr. Ramadan plans to expand and adapt the approach across additional courses in future semesters.
“Innovative teaching should reshape how students think about knowledge,” Dr. Ramadan said. “The future of learning lies not in asking AI for answers, but in understanding how those answers are constructed and being able to reconstruct them in smarter and more strategic ways.”