TL;DR: IIM Bangalore ran “Business Analytics and Intelligence” for 15 batches. In 2025, they renamed it “Business Analytics & Artificial Intelligence” and called it transformation. The curriculum is 75-80% pre-recorded. The alumni status “isn’t on merit but open for everyone ready to invest money”—their words, not mine. Same MDP content with top-tier certification vs. no certification gets wildly different enrollment. Part 1 of 2 on why India’s GenAI executive education boom is mostly theater.
IIM Bangalore’s Executive Education team recently announced Batch 16 of their flagship analytics program. Except now it’s called “Business Analytics & Artificial Intelligence” (BAAI). The previous 15 batches? Those were “Business Analytics and Intelligence” (BAI).
Same faculty. Same foundational modules. New acronym. Press release ready.
15 batches of BAI became Batch 16 of BAAI. That’s not curriculum innovation. That’s SEO optimization.
The market pays for AI, so old wine gets new labels. And somewhere between the announcement and the actual learning, nobody asks the obvious question: what exactly changed besides the name?
This isn’t an attack on IIM Bangalore specifically. They’re simply the most transparent example of a pattern that runs through every major business school in India. The GenAI executive education boom isn’t about preparing professionals for the AI era. It’s about monetizing anxiety before the market realizes what it’s actually buying.
What You’re Actually Paying For
Let’s talk numbers, since that’s what IIMs claim to teach.
The typical IIM executive program in AI/ML costs between ₹3-5 lakh. IIM Calcutta’s APAL program runs ₹4,92,000 plus taxes. IIM Kozhikode’s AI/ML certificate is ₹3,12,000. IIM Bangalore’s short 5-day GenAI program costs ₹1,30,950 to ₹1,45,500.
For this money, you get—according to multiple reviews and program descriptions—a course that is 75-80% pre-recorded video content and 20-25% live online sessions.
Three-quarters of a ₹4 lakh “executive education” is content that could be a YouTube playlist. The remaining quarter is Zoom calls.
The official justification is flexibility. Working professionals can learn at their own pace. But let’s be honest about what flexibility means in practice: you’re paying IIM prices for edX delivery.
The real product isn’t the curriculum. It’s the alumni status. Program materials explicitly state that upon completion, you gain “access to all the essential benefits that IIM Executive Education Alumni receive”—updates, event invitations, chapter memberships. IIM Calcutta offers access to their “Elite Executive Education Alumni Network of 33,000 members.”
And here’s where it gets interesting. One industry review site put it bluntly: the uniqueness of being alumni “isn’t on merit but open for everyone ready to invest money.”
That’s not a critic talking. That’s the market honestly describing what’s being sold.
The Certification Experiment That Proves Everything
I run MDP (Management Development Program) sessions. The same content gets offered three ways: with a top-tier B-school co-branding, with a mid-tier institutional certification, or with no certification at all.
Guess which version fills up first?
It’s not even close. The top-tier branded version outsells the others by margins that would embarrass any educator who believes content quality drives enrollment decisions.
Same instructor. Same slides. Same case studies. Same learning outcomes. Wildly different demand. The only variable is the logo on the certificate.
This isn’t a commentary on participant intelligence. It’s a commentary on what the Indian professional market has learned to optimize for. In a system where hiring managers scan LinkedIn certifications before reading experience descriptions, where promotion committees count credentials before evaluating competence, where social proof matters more than demonstrated skill—rational actors buy logos, not learning.
The institutions know this. They’re not stupid. They’ve simply learned to give the market exactly what it demands.
The uncomfortable question: If you’re paying ₹4 lakh primarily for a LinkedIn badge, at least be honest with yourself that you’re purchasing identity, not capability.
The Faculty Skin-in-the-Game Problem
Here’s a thought experiment. Your AI course instructor—the one teaching you about organizational transformation through artificial intelligence—when was the last time they made a career bet on AI?
Not adding AI to their course titles. Not publishing papers about AI adoption. An actual career decision where their own professional future depended on AI succeeding.
The people designing your AI curriculum have less at stake than the people taking it. Faculty have tenure. You have a career.
I say this as someone who left XLRI—a brand that carries weight in every B-school conversation in India—to join Jaipuria AI Labs. Was it risky? Yes. Did colleagues think I was crazy? Some did. But the alternative was teaching about transformation while personally optimizing for stability.
How many faculty are willing to do that? The honest answer is: very few. And those who won’t stake their own careers on AI adoption are probably not the best guides for yours.
This creates a peculiar dynamic. Institutions employ faculty who teach change but practice continuity. Students pay for disruption insights from people whose own incentives favor the status quo. The curriculum mentions “leading through uncertainty” while the instructors themselves have structured their lives to minimize it.
There’s a pattern in how we confuse markers of prestige—titles, publication records, citations, committee appointments—with markers of quality. The two often diverge. Someone might hold back from publication because they want certainty in their data. Someone else might publish prolifically without saying anything new. The credential and the capability operate on different tracks.
The same confusion plagues executive education. The IIM brand is undeniably prestigious. Whether the specific GenAI curriculum delivers proportionate learning value is a separate question—one nobody seems to be asking.
In Part 2: The difference between teaching AI and being transformed by AI. Why Indians pay for recognition, not readiness. And the question nobody asked at Davos about India’s real AI preparedness problem.
Sources: IIM Bangalore EEP announcement on BAAI Batch 16, IIM executive education fee structures, program reviews and industry analyses
