AI Impact Series: Redesigning Business Processes for the Generative Era with Dr. Greger Ottosson
Dr Greger Ottosson explores how businesses evolve from AI-assisted tasks to intelligent, self-orchestrating operations in EDHEC’s AI Impact Series: Redesigning Business for the Generative Era.
A detailed case from the B2B health insurance sector will illustrate each stage of adoption. Participants will see how sales teams evolve from using chatbots for support, to automating policy comparisons, to creating fully personalised client interactions. The session concludes with a look at autonomous orchestration, where AI coordinates the entire sales cycle from start to finish.
Reimagining business processes for the generative age
Artificial intelligence is moving beyond personal productivity and into the very core of how organisations operate. So, in the first instalment of EDHEC’s AI Impact Series, Dr Greger Ottosson, founder and CEO of Cube5 AI and Expert in Residence for the EDHEC Global MBA Programme, examined how companies are redefining business processes in response to Generative AI, exploring what it means to design workflows where AI is not a tool, but an active participant.
As Greger puts it, “It’s a pretty fast-evolving field … it’s interesting to see where AI is affecting us not just personally but also how it’s being introduced in enterprises and organisations.”
His observation reflects a broader reality: while many teams are already using AI daily, few have yet restructured their operations to capture its full potential.
Expertise from the intersection of business and technology
Greger brings both technical authority and business pragmatism to his work. His work at Cube5AI focuses on generative AI for business automation and process transformation, developing solutions that prioritise measurable outcomes over experimentation.
Holding a PhD in Computer Science from Uppsala University, his role at EDHEC has him supporting students and staff in staying ahead of the technolo ical curve, translating fast-moving advances in AI into insight for leadership and management practice.
He is known for an innovative, entrepreneurial, and grounded perspective, helping companies move from concept to implementation with tangible results.
From personal tools to process-wide transformation
According to Greger, the business impact of AI unfolds in three distinct stages of maturity.
The first stage, what he calls the copy-paste era, is familiar to anyone using generative AI tools at work. “We have to leave our workflow … access our chatbot, provide that chatbot with some context … and then we basically try to refine that output and paste it back,” he said. This kind of fragmented use creates “localised productivity gains,” but the underlying way of working remains unchanged. “We’re not changing how we do things, we’re just doing it slightly faster.”
The second stage marks a more significant shift: AI becomes embedded directly into business processes. “Instead of you taking your work to AI, AI is coming to you,” he explains. “Wherever you are in your process, whatever documents and data you’re manipulating, AI is now integrated into that workflow and that means that it’s context-aware.”
At this point, employees no longer need to copy and paste between systems. AI operates within their existing tools, drawing from live enterprise data to analyse, summarise, and recommend actions automatically. This leads to greater accuracy, faster response times, and measurable returns on investment.
The third stage is the most advanced: the rise of Agentic AI. “The term ‘agent’ has been quite a bit overused,” said Dr Ottosson, “but in its true meaning we’re talking about an agent it is goal-oriented, it is autonomous, and it can drive the process forward independently.”
In this vision, AI systems orchestrate workflows end-to-end. Humans become supervisors rather than operators, approving exceptions, reviewing outputs, and guiding strategy while AI agents handle execution. For operational leaders, this represents a fundamental shift from doing work to managing intelligent systems that do it on their behalf.
A practical illustration: B2B health insurance
To demonstrate these phases in action, Dr Ottosson presented a case from the B2B health insurance sector. The example followed a sales agent’s evoltion through each stage of AI adoption.
At first, the agent used chatbots to assist with document drafting and comparisons, a classic copy-paste workflow. Over time, AI became directly embedded in the sales process, allowing real-time policy comparisons, data extraction, and client-specific recommendations within the same interface. Eventually, in the agentic stage, AI will be able to manage the full sales cycle, from analysis and proposal generation to contract preparation and client communication, while humans intervened only to review or approve.
This step-by-step evolution captures what many industries are experiencing today: early experimentation giving way to structured integration, and eventually to intelligent orchestration. It also reveals a key insight: that AI’s true value is realised when organisations redesign processes, not when they merely speed them up.
The operational frontier
The three-step adoption framework positions AI as an operational catalyst rather than an abstract technology. It redefines productivity, reshapes collaboration, and exposes the bottlenecks that human-centred workflows have long accepted as inevitable.
When asked about what prevents companies from progressing beyond early-stage experimentation, Greger highlighted familiar challenges: unclear objectives, unrealistic expectations, and a shortage of technical capability. Yet he also pointed out that adoption is happening faster than with previous technology waves. “We’re seeing a rapid uptake in AI for work use,” he noted, citing the growing number of employees using AI daily to brainstorm, analyse, or automate routine tasks.
These everyday uses may seem modest, but they form the foundation for more sophisticated transformation. Each successful experiment, he suggested, builds the understanding and confidence organisations need to integrate AI at scale.
A forward-looking MBA with AI at its core
The EDHEC Global MBA reflects this same trajectory. AI is woven into the fabric of the programme curriculum from start to finish. For added depth, participants can opt for the programme’s AI & Innovation track—one of the programme’s key specialisation options— which equips participants to understand and apply AI in real business contexts.
By embedding this kind of expertise within the curriculum, EDHEC ensures that participants are not only learning about technology, but learning from those actively driving it.
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