Executive education has a business model that only works if you do not look at it too closely. You pay several thousand dollars, you watch recorded videos, you post in discussion threads, you complete assignments that are lightly assessed, and at the end you receive a certificate of completion from a school whose degree programmes are genuinely difficult to get into. The value is real but it is rarely located where the marketing implies. Kellogg's AI Strategies for Business Transformation is a good example of the category, done competently, at a price you should think about carefully.
The programme runs nine weeks across eight modules at four to six hours a week, for $3,300, entirely online, with optional live webinars that are recorded for anyone who cannot attend. The academic director is Mohanbir Sawhney, Kellogg's Associate Dean for Digital Innovation, and unlike a lot of programmes where a named professor appears in the brochure and nowhere else, his framing runs through the curriculum. The eight modules move from AI foundations, described as a progression from prediction to creation to autonomy, through customer experience, operations, business support functions, selected industries, creative industries, then strategy, capabilities and governance, and finally society, ethics, regulation and jobs. Two things stand out.
The first is that agentic AI is treated as a strategy and governance question rather than a product demonstration. Most executive programmes in this space are still teaching generative AI as though it were 2023, with a module on prompting and a nod to copilots. Framing autonomy as the third stage after prediction and creation is the right mental model and it is the one that will still make sense in three years. The second is that the ethics, regulation and jobs module is a full eighth of the programme rather than a compliance flavoured coda.
Executives are the people who will actually make these decisions, badly and at scale, and giving them a proper module on it is defensible. The industry applications and creative industries modules are the weakest, and that is structural. Nine weeks split eight ways gives each topic about a week, and a week of four to six hours cannot do more than survey. If you already work in one of the industries covered you will find that module thin.
If you do not, you will find it interesting and forget it. That is the trade every broad executive programme makes and it is not specific to Kellogg. On the money, be clear about what you are buying. The concepts in this programme are not scarce.
Sawhney's thinking is available in books, talks and interviews, and every consultancy on earth is publishing on AI transformation. What $3,300 buys is a curated sequence, a deadline, a cohort of senior people from other industries to argue with, and a Kellogg line on your development record. The cohort is genuinely valuable when it is good, and it is the one component you cannot evaluate before you pay. That asymmetry is worth naming.
There is no hands on component, which is a deliberate choice and the right one for the audience, but it has a consequence. Somebody who completes this will be more articulate about AI strategy and no better equipped to tell whether a vendor is describing something real. That gap has cost companies a lot of money over the past two years and no amount of strategy training closes it. If you are the person signing off on AI spend, pair this with somebody technical you trust.
My 3.5 is for a thoughtfully built, well sequenced executive programme with unusually serious governance content, priced according to what the Kellogg name can command rather than what the delivery costs. If the company is paying, take it. If you are paying, read Sawhney's work first and see whether you actually need the rest.