TLDR : The IGENSIA Education Group, a major player in higher education and professional training, will integrate a generative artificial intelligence training module into all its curricula starting in September. The goal is to develop students' critical thinking about these technologies and encourage the ethical and responsible use of GenAI tools.
Independent and non-profit associative group, with fifty years of expertise in higher education and professional training, IGENSIA Education continues to innovate by integrating, from next September, a common foundation of training in generative AI across all its programs. This initiative aims to promote a reasoned and ethical approach to GenAI tools.
Founded in 1975 under the name Institut de Gestion Sociale (IGS), the IGENSIA Education Group has built itself around a foundational mission: to offer an educational model open to all, focused on the development and commitment of learners. It structures its action around five poles: schools, work-study programs, continuous training, inclusion-integration, and orientation.
Present on four campuses in France (Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, and Nanterre) and a fifth in Casablanca, the Group welcomes nearly 15,000 learners each year, including 9,300 work-study students. It relies on an active network of over 10,000 partner companies, 80,000 alumni, and educational teams drawn from both academia and business.
Its training offer, which ranges from Bachelor to Bac+6, and up to Bac+8 with the Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA), covers a wide range of fields: human resources, commerce, finance, law, real estate, communication, computer science, or journalism. These programs are deployed within renowned schools such as IGS-RH, ISCPA, ICD, ESAM, IPI, IMSI, or the American Business School of Paris. The Group also supports student entrepreneurship through its incubator Why Not Factory and develops international academic partnerships in Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Training the Actors of Tomorrow's World
With this common foundation of AI training, the Group aims to develop the critical thinking of learners and encourage an ethical, responsible, and frugal use of GenAI tools.
Integrated into the transversal program Questions of the Present Time, this 15-hour training is structured around five modules:
- The AI Alphabet: understanding the fundamentals of AI (history, applications, and contemporary issues);
- AI Literacy: to go beyond simple usage and understand the limits and risks of GenAI tools;
- Ethics and Frugality: introducing a critical reflection on biases, responsible uses, and environmental impacts;
- Prompt engineering: training in the effective formulation of requests, a skill already valued in many professions;
- Use in the training path: creating personalized AI assistants without coding to support learning, transparently and in accordance with the Group's AI charter.
This common foundation is based on UNESCO's learning competency framework, ensuring pedagogical coherence and international recognition.
A Contextualized Professional Declination
Each school in the Group will adapt the training to its field. Thus, IMSI will mobilize AI around use cases related to real estate, such as automated property search or market trend prediction. At ISCPA and EMI, the topics will focus more on assisted writing, content verification, or deepfake detection.
This approach is part of a strategy of progressive integration of AI, initiated in 2024 with the Group's name change: 170 teachers and 70 collaborators have already been trained in tools and ethical issues, internal charters have been developed for pedagogical teams and students. The Group has also relied on technological partners such as the start-up BRIO, specializing in interview simulations, or Stellia, which develops personalized learning assistants.
Loren Resal, Director of Digital and Educational Development of the Group, summarizes this ambition:
"For the IGENSIA Education Group, it is important to imagine a future where AI and pedagogy combine to reveal talents. The approach we are taking internally reaffirms our role in training the actors of transformation, by placing artificial intelligence at the service of pedagogy, in a logic of sustainable, responsible, and above all ethical innovation".