Daring to Use AI: WFI MBA Students in Silicon Valley

A week in Silicon Valley, a visit to Meta, VISA, Oracle, and other global giants, and one clear message: What Germany is currently debating as the latest AI trend was everyday practice in Silicon Valley two years ago. As part of the Global Immersion of WFI's part-time MBA, our students travelled to Silicon Valley, USA, with Academic Director Prof. Dr. Shashi Matta and program coordinator Maximilian Bauer. The regional newspaper Donaukurier reported on the trip.

Agentic AI: when the AI does the planning

The focus was on agentic AI. Unlike generative models such as ChatGPT, which answer a prompt, AI agents work on their own: They break a goal into steps, plan the workflow, use digital tools, and coordinate with other agents. For Bauer and Professor Matta there is no doubt that this technology will reshape industries that in Germany are only beginning to feel the change.

MBA student Christoph Biedermann, who works at Audi, has already built two AI agents of his own. His attitude: Those who use opportunities get new ones. For him, the biggest benefit of the MBA is the exchange across industries, where engineers, physicians, and physicists approach the same question in very different ways.

Innovate, copy, regulate

A central theme of the trip was the comparison of innovation cultures. "In the past, the USA has always innovated, then China copied, and Germany regulated," says Maximilian Bauer. Germany does not need to invent its own AI, Professor Matta argues, but it does need to learn to work well with it, and that requires more appetite for risk and a different attitude to failure. In Silicon Valley, failing is part of the process; in Germany it is still too often seen as a flaw.

What the trip gives the MBA

The Global Immersion is meant to give students more than knowledge about technology: Courage, motivation, and the readiness not to stop at the first AI-generated answer, but to question results, combine them, and decide for themselves. Because in the end, as Bauer puts it, it is still a human who writes the prompt.

Experiences like this are what defines WFI's Hybrid, Part-Time MBA. As a mandatory, credit-bearing part of the curriculum, the Global Immersion puts every cohort in the boardrooms of companies such as Oracle, VISA, and Meta, for direct, one-on-one conversations with top-level executives across multiple industries, encounters that are only possible because of our deliberately small, hand-picked cohorts. Applications for the upcoming intake are open now, with the deadline on September 30, 2026.

KU News on the Immersion: here

Here to the MBA program (applications open until Sept 30): here