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By: Dr. Steven White
SOM Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship Steven White attended the QS Higher Ed Summit: Asia Pacific 2025 that took place at Korea University in Seoul from 4–6 November 2025, under the theme “Advancing Generational Potential: Skills and Partnerships in the Asia Pacific.” There he gave a presentation on the need and challenges of integrating AI into the business school learning experience, titled AI: Crutch or Magic Wand. He was able to network with a wide range of professors and administrators from business schools across the region, both spreading AIT-SOM’s name and planting the seeds for potential collaborations in the future.
Now in its 21st year, the summit is one of the region’s leading collaboration platforms, gathering more than 2,000 participants—university leaders, educators, policymakers, industry experts and government officials—from across Asia-Pacific and beyond. Across three days, delegates from a wide range of universities and national systems met for keynote addresses, panel discussions, best-practice workshops, rankings and data deep dives, and networking events. High-profile speakers included former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon, underscoring the summit’s blend of academic, policy and industry perspectives.
The program combined plenary keynotes on the future of higher education and AI, regional talent and skills, and internationalisation strategy, with dozens of parallel sessions focusing on issues such as performance metrics, employability skills, lifelong learning, regional mobility, and partnership models.
Value for attending universities
Participants consistently emphasized the summit’s role as a networking and partnership hub, where universities can translate rankings conversations into concrete collaboration. QS positions the event as a space to exchange strategies to strengthen global visibility while enhancing educational quality, and feedback from previous editions highlights the value of “making new friends and collaboration” and building more connections than in a typical year of bilateral visits. In addition, the summit hosted QS Stars and rankings recognition ceremonies, giving institutions a stage to signal quality improvements and international ambitions—illustrated by multiple universities receiving new QS Stars ratings during the event.
How AIT School of Management benefits
AIT-SOM plans to continue sending representative to this conference, as it offers several concrete opportunities:
1.Strategic positioning and benchmarking
Sessions on rankings, data analytics and performance indicators allow SOM to understand how peers in the region interpret and respond to QS metrics, and how they link rankings strategy to curriculum design, research focus and partnerships.
Insights from these discussions can inform AIT SOM’s own positioning in areas such as sustainability, AI in business education, and regional impact.
2.Building a pan-Asian business school network
With more than 2,000 delegates from across Asia-Pacific, the summit is effectively a dense marketplace of potential partners—from large public universities in Korea, Japan and China to fast-rising private institutions in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
This provides AIT SOM, for example, with the opportunity to:
Explore dual or joint degree programs with business schools in Korea or Indonesia.
Develop short executive programs or “summer/winter schools” in entrepreneurship, sustainability or AI in business, co-branded with regional partners.
Set up research clusters on topics like innovation ecosystems or green/blue economy, building on conversations initiated in focused sessions and hallway meetings.
3.Connecting with government and industry
The presence of ministers, mayors and industry leaders—alongside university presidents—creates opportunities to connect AIT SOM’s research and executive education to policy agendas and corporate talent needs in the region.
For example, joining or convening a side-meeting around themes like “AI and future skills in ASEAN” or “Sustainability and innovation ecosystems” could position AIT as a convener and thought leader.
4.Learning from concrete collaboration stories
Panels such as “How Universities are Shaping ASEAN’s Tomorrow” bring together rectors and presidents who share specific models of cross-border collaboration, student mobility and regional skills initiatives.
AIT SOM could learn from these models—for instance, multi-partner ASEAN mobility schemes or co-taught online/offline courses—using contacts made at the summit as the starting point.
In short, the QS Higher Ed Summit: Asia Pacific 2025 in Seoul was not just a rankings conference; it was a large, highly networked forum for designing the next generation of skills, partnerships and institutional strategies in Asia-Pacific higher education. For AIT’s School of Management, active participation—through sending delegates and speakers—can be a powerful way to deepen its regional network, refine its strategy, and co-create new programs and research with peer business schools across the region
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