Beyond the Prompt: How ENTR 623 Teaches MBAs to Question AI, Not Just Use It

Entrepreneurship has always rewarded people who can tolerate ambiguity, question their own assumptions, and make a call before all the evidence is in. At Pepperdine Graziadio Business School, that hasn't changed, but the tools students use to get there have.

In ENTR 623: Creating a New Business Opportunity, MBA students spend eleven weeks building a venture from a raw concept to an investor-ready pitch, working through foundational frameworks along the way. What's new is how deliberately AI has been woven into that process as a structured part of thinking, not as a shortcut. 

We sat down with the course's instructor, Dr. Mohamed Y. Amer, PhD, Adjunct Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, along with two students who put the course's approach to AI into practice: Namya Sandal (MBA ‘27), with a marketing concentration, and Yuka Sato (MBA ’26) with a finance concentration.

Why Build AI Into an Entrepreneurship Course?

For Dr. Amer, the decision was a response to where his students already were.

"The students in ENTR 623 are full-time MBA students who arrive with real pre-MBA work experience across a wide range of industries," Amer explains. "AI tools are already part of how they've operated professionally, and they're entering the program at exactly the moment when the stakes around AI in business are rising fastest."

What he wanted to avoid was treating AI as a novelty. Instead, he built structured AI workshops that put the technology in direct conversation with the course's core scholarship, asking students to apply real theory to their real ventures, then reflect individually on what AI actually contributed versus what it got wrong.

"AI has raised the minimum viable baseline for entrepreneurial work," Amer says. "Competitive landscape mapping, market sizing, and assumption stress testing used to take weeks but now take hours. That's not a minor efficiency gain, it's a structural shift in what investors expect to see."

Amer is quick to add the caveat that shapes the whole course: AI synthesizes existing patterns, but it doesn't notice what isn't already legible in data. The entrepreneurs who benefit most, he argues, are the ones who develop a disciplined approach to spotting opportunity first, and use AI to accelerate the work, not replace the thinking that creates the opportunity in the first place.

"The entrepreneur's edge isn't access to better AI. It's bringing something real to the problem, a perspective, a frustration, a conviction, that AI simply does not have." - Mohamed Y. Amer, PhD, Adjunct Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at Pepperdine Graziadio Business School

Learning to Distrust the Output of AI

If there's a common thread in how students describe the course, it's that AI earned their trust the same way a new hire would: slowly, and only after being tested.

For Namya Sandal, the shift started with a misconception. "I assumed AI was mostly a search or writing tool, useful for pulling together information faster or cleaning up a draft, but not something you'd bring into the earlier, messier part of building a business," she says. "This course reframed that for me. AI turned out to be most useful before we had a clear direction, when we were still testing whether an idea held up at all."

That reframing played out directly on her team's venture, a sustainable textile take-back platform. Working through frameworks like Teece and Eisenmann, Namya's team used AI not to confirm their model, but to pick it apart. "It didn't validate our assumptions, it questioned them, which was more useful," she says. "Having five people on a team, we could easily convince each other we were right. AI didn't have that bias, so it forced us to defend our thinking with something more than internal agreement."

"AI is only as useful as your willingness to let it challenge you, the moment I stopped using it to confirm what I already believed, it actually started teaching me something." - Namya Sandal, MBA '27

Yuka Sato, who came into the program with prior experience running her own business, had a similar recalibration. "My biggest misconception was underestimating AI's capabilities," she says. "At first, I viewed it as a tool for administrative tasks and simple research, but I was surprised by how effectively it can support everything from the inception of business ideas to problem analysis, planning, and execution, and even exit strategies."

That shift changed her whole approach to research. "The course shifted my approach from spending hours researching every detail from the ground up to using AI to quickly build an informed starting point," Yuka explains. "I then validate the most important information through fact-checking and critical thinking in a more top-down approach. This saves time while allowing me to focus more on analysis and decision-making."

“AI has also become an excellent learning partner by explaining complex theories and concepts through practical examples that match my learning style.” - Yuka Sato, MBA ‘26

Where the Line Actually Sits

Ask any of the three where AI stops being useful, and the answer converges on the same idea: judgment doesn't scale.

Dr. Amer built that principle directly into the coursework through what he calls the AI Integration Portfolio, individual reflections tied to each unit where students document their prompts, their outputs, and critically, the moments AI gave them false confidence or steered them in a direction they had to walk back. "That last question is not optional," he says. "I want students to develop the habit of identifying the specific moments when AI steered them wrong, because that's where real learning lives."

For Namya, that discipline shows up as a personal rule: "I treat anything AI gives me as a starting point, not a finished answer. It's good at widening the range of options I'm considering, but the judgment calls, what actually fits the strategy, the audience, the brand, are still mine to make. If I can't explain why an AI-generated recommendation is right, I don't use it."

Yuka frames it as a question of identity. "I see AI as a tool, not a substitute for judgment," she says. "If you know who you are, what you value, and what you're trying to accomplish, AI becomes a powerful complement to your thinking. It can expand your perspective, but it can never replace the unique qualities that make you you."

Dr. Amer sees the same distinction playing out at the level of what will separate future entrepreneurs from the pack. "A distinctive perspective, first," he says. "AI cannot authentically occupy that position. It synthesizes what's already been documented about an industry, it cannot feel the frustration that drives a genuine breakthrough, nor bring a perspective that doesn't already exist in its training data."

Advice for the AI-Hesitant

Not every student walks into ENTR 623 sold on using AI as part of their entrepreneurial toolkit. For those still on the fence, the advice from students who've been through it is consistent: don't decide from a distance.

“Don't decide how you feel about AI from a distance,” Namya says. “Most of the hesitation I see comes from people who've only used it for simple tasks and assumed that was the ceiling. Test it on something low-stakes and you'll get a much more accurate read.”

Yuka's advice leads with curiosity over caution: "Approach AI with curiosity. Use it to strengthen your work by exploring different perspectives, improving communication, and accelerating learning, but don't let it do your thinking for you. The greatest value comes from combining AI's capabilities with your own judgment and expertise."

The Takeaway

What emerges from ENTR 623 isn't a course about AI tools, it's a course that uses AI to sharpen the same instincts entrepreneurship has always demanded: skepticism, judgment, and the willingness to defend an idea with something better than confidence.

As Dr. Amer puts it, the goal was never to teach students how to use AI. "I want them to leave knowing how to think like an entrepreneur, which means tolerating ambiguity, validating assumptions before committing resources, and making strategic choices under uncertainty. The AI component is deliberately in service of that larger goal."

For Namya, Yuka, and their classmates, that goal is already showing up beyond the classroom, not as a specific career pivot, but as a baseline expectation. As Namya puts it: "Knowing how to use AI as a thinking partner rather than a shortcut is becoming table stakes, not a specialization, regardless of industry."

Ready to think like an entrepreneur? Explore Pepperdine Graziadio's MBA programs and take the first step toward a career driven by purpose.