Why Simulations Still Work When Students Have AI

AI is now part of almost every business classroom. Students use it to research, draft, and summarize. And, increasingly, to work through assignments and cases. For instructors, that raises a real question: if AI can produce a polished answer in seconds, are students still learning to think a problem through and make the decision themselves?

It’s a fair concern, and worth taking seriously. But the answer isn’t to try to keep AI out of the classroom. It’s to design learning that keeps students doing the thinking, even when AI is available. For a lot of business courses, a well-built simulation does exactly that.

Recent research shows just how widespread this already is. In a 2026 national survey, roughly 95% of undergraduates reported using AI, including on graded work. What’s telling is how differently students describe it. Some say AI frees them to focus on deeper analysis and understanding. Others are blunt — one student admitted, “I’m not using my brain at all.”

Same tool, very different outcomes. And the difference usually isn’t the technology — it’s what the course asks students to do with it. When an assignment can be finished by pasting a prompt into a chatbot, some students will. When it requires them to make and defend real decisions, there’s nothing to hand off.

This is where a business simulation fits naturally. A simulation doesn’t ask students to find the single right answer. It asks them to run a company and make decisions, with incomplete information, over several rounds, against competitors whose choices keep shifting the market.

There’s nothing fixed to look up, because the situation changes with every move. Students have to interpret what’s happening, commit to a course of action, see how it plays out, and adjust the next round. That cycle — decide, review the results, adjust, repeat — is where the learning happens. And it’s the part AI can’t do for a student, no matter how capable it becomes.

“Giving them practice dealing with the ambiguity is one reason I use a simulation.”

— Dr. Michele Yoder

It’s a reasonable thing to test, and several instructors have. In one experiment, a professor had Google’s Gemini play a simulation against 18 of his student teams. It performed respectably, but only because he guided it closely, reasoning through the strategy and correcting it when it went off track. Even then, it never finished first. In another informal test, ChatGPT playing an introductory business simulation landed in the bottom quarter of the class. And when students competed head-to-head against an AI “student,” the AI never earned a perfect round.

The takeaway was consistent: AI can genuinely help, but there’s no shortcut. Getting a strong result still takes a person guiding the decisions and exercising judgment.

That points to a simple, useful way to frame AI for students. AI is the assistant; the student is the decision-maker. AI is good at the fast work like gathering information, explaining a concept, producing a first draft to react to. The student does the part that builds real skill: interpreting the results, weighing the trade-offs, and making the decision.

Two habits help students use AI that way. The first is to ask better questions, not “what should we do?” but “what are the risks here?”, “what are we missing?”, or “argue against our strategy.” The AI contributes; the student still decides.

The second is to grade the reasoning rather than the polished output. When students have to explain why they made each decision and what they changed along the way, the thinking is what counts, and that’s far harder to outsource to AI.

AI will keep improving, and students will keep using it and that’s fine. The goal isn’t to compete with it, but to make sure students are still doing the thinking a business career will demand. A good simulation keeps them there: making the decisions, owning the results, and learning from both.

The deciding — the thinking — stays with the student. And that’s exactly the point.

At Interpretive Simulations, our business simulations are built to do exactly what this article describes: keep students making the decisions, round after round, across marketing, management, and strategy courses. And because students are going to use AI anyway, we built an AI assistant into the simulations — the Interpretive Guide — that explains how the simulation works and what the results mean, but won’t make decisions for students (and you can switch it on or off).

You’re also never on your own. Our team helps set up the simulation for your course and supports you and your students all semester.