Teaching AI governance in management education: A serious game for accountable decision-making under uncertainty

Abstract

Management education increasingly needs ways to prepare students for AI governance, yet students have limited opportunities to practise the organisational judgement involved in deployment decisions. This paper presents “Leading in the Age of AI”, a card-based serious game in which student teams assume asymmetric C-suite roles, make AI deployment decisions under constraints, and document their reasoning in Model Cards adapted from AI documentation practice. Conceptually, the paper frames AI governance education as accountable decision-making under uncertainty: students negotiate competing priorities, allocate scarce safeguards, respond to disruption, and prepare written accounts for scrutiny. The paper contributes a reusable game design, a pedagogical adaptation of Model Cards as justification artefacts, and design patterns for management-education contexts involving accountable decisions under uncertainty. An exploratory evaluation across two undergraduate cohorts used matched pre-test/post-test data ( N = 67 ), post-session evaluations, and descriptive artefact analysis of team-produced Model Cards ( n = 15 ). Students evaluated the activity positively and reported immediate confidence gains across knowledge, ethics, and governance composites ( d z = 0.44 to 1.00), while quiz gains were modest and not statistically significant. Model Card analysis suggests the activity generated inspectable governance reasoning, while leaving causal learning, retention, and transfer for future research.