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Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is challenging how knowledge is produced, validated, and taught in higher education. This creates both new opportunities and acute tensions in management education. While management educators aim to foster critical thinking and character development, many students are increasingly relying on AI tools and focusing on developing AI-related skills for the labor market. The required market skills often exceed what current business curricula provide. As higher education seeks to cultivate transferable habits of critical reflection, a central question arises: How can management educators prepare students to engage in ongoing moral reflection about their experience with evolving AI systems while using these technologies to enhance students’ problem-solving capabilities and to contribute to the formation of their moral characters?

In this paper, the author proposes applying the Daoist principle of wu‑wei (i.e., effortless, harmonious action) in management education for educators to know how to navigate the quickly changing AI landscape and answer the critical question above. This framework invites educators to cultivate an embodied presence marked by delight, responsiveness, and ethical discernment as they refine their own pedagogical skills and prepare students to become future ethical leaders. From this stance, educators guide students in using AI thoughtfully to address context-specific problems while jointly generating deeper questions about identity, becoming, and habitual patterns of mind. Through reciprocal learning with students, educators develop skill‑scaffolding approaches that integrate AI in ways that enhance students’ foundational competencies instead of replacing them. When management educators embrace wu wei, they strengthen their capacity to intuitively discern what truly matters in complex situations and to seek synergistic possibilities with patience, presence, and moral clarity. They continually attune themselves to the dynamic relationships among students, AI tools, learning processes, and their broader environment, allowing them to experience a sense of “flow” in their work. Educators will go beyond the epistemologies bounded by AI, and they will engage in ongoing inquiry about AI and practice epistemic flexibility, humility, and vulnerability. They clearly communicate to students why certain human-centered skills must still be learned without the supplement of AI. As their pedagogies evolve in alignment with the greater common good, Da (the principle of the Universe) and De (virtue of the Universe), educators help students heighten their awareness of their own habits of mind and patterns of becoming. Students, in turn, are empowered to examine their prompting practices, refine their engagement with AI, and generate more contextually relevant and ethically grounded AI-supported solutions. Ultimately, both educators and students become wiser and unlearn the direct knowledge they acquire from AI as they experience their deep inner-strengths of being reflective beginners in different circumstances, moving toward the ideal state of wu wei and opening pathways for spiritual and moral growth.

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