Corporate leaders turn to new doctorate to strategise AI adoption

PolyU Business School’s DBAI programme aims to equip senior leaders with the skills to build AI-native companies, as the city intensify efforts to become a regional tech hub

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For modern-day businesses, effective AI adoption is increasingly seen as make or break if they are to stay competitive. Executives do see this potential but frequently reduce it to little more than a tool for drafting reports or creating slides.

The goal is to give senior professionals the insight required to weave the technology into strategy, operations and organisational culture from the outset.

“The real gap is AI strategic leadership. Many companies today have AI pilots, but not AI transformation. They have tools, but the way these tools is deployed is not strategic. They have technical teams, but not always board-level AI judgement,” said Prof Michael Xu, who directs the programme, of the major shortfall the DBAI seeks to tackle.

“If you don’t want to be replaced by AI, the only way is to understand it deeply,” he said, acknowledging that the speed of change in the sector left him with few alternatives.

Prof Xu’s own path, from civil engineering to psychology, an MBA at Wharton, global investment work and chief technology officer positions, feeds directly into the design of the curriculum.

“AI transformation is never only a technical issue. It is simultaneously a strategic issue, an organisational issue, a governance issue, a human issue and ultimately a leadership issue,” he said.

The programme encourages participants to move away from “AI-first” methods, where AI is added onto existing operations, towards truly AI-native models in which the technology forms part of the core infrastructure from the start.

“AI-native leadership means treating AI not as an add-on, but as part of the enterprise’s core operating system,” he explained.

“They must define a real business problem… test assumptions and evaluate measurable outcomes.”

One student has developed virtual avatars for teaching and customer service, while others in cybersecurity use AI to run red-team and blue-team simulations that uncover system vulnerabilities.

Li described such work as useful. He has seen how AI can model both attacks and defences, enabling companies to test their setups far more quickly. At the same time, he warned against over-reliance on the technology. “You cannot just fire people and rely only on AI,” he cautioned. “Human judgment remains indispensable.”

Prof Xu took a comparable view on jobs. He cited the example