When AI Meets Faith: Lessons From Darden’s Participation in an MBA Case Competition on Faith and Belief at Work

On a chilly February morning in Provo, Utah, a large auditorium at Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Business fell quiet. At the front, Ritu Deswal and Aishwarya Agarwal pressed their palms together at their chests and began the Gayatri Mantra, an ancient Hindu prayer.

In the audience sat their teammate, Selamawit Hailu.

It was the opening day of the Fourth Annual Faith and Belief at Work MBA Case Competition, where the three represented the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. Deswal and Agarwal are Full-Time residential MBA students in the Class of 2026 while Hailu is an Executive MBA student in the Class of 2027.

Every session began with a prayer — not led by BYU staff, but by students participating in the competition. Throughout the event, prayers reflected a range of traditions, including Muslim, Catholic, Hindu and Jewish faiths.

Associate Professor Jared Harris, appointed to the Samuel L. Slover Research Professorship, teaches both “Ethics” and “Strategy” courses in Darden’s MBA program and a doctoral seminar on corporate governance and ethics.

“The Gayatri Mantra is recited at the start of auspicious occasions,” said Deswal, who assembled the team with faculty mentor Jared Harris, the Samuel L. Slover Research Chair and an academic director at Darden’s Institute for Business in Society.

The 2026 competition, which drew teams from 16 business schools across the US, challenged students to explore the role of faith and belief at work and propose solutions to real-world business problems.

“There are all kinds of case competitions in the MBA landscape, and they can be about entrepreneurship or innovation or FinTech or international expansion or a thousand other things,” said Harris. “This was a really interesting gathering of MBA students from across the country, from all kinds of different institutions, public and private, from different faith traditions, all focused on thinking more carefully about faith and belief in the workplace.”

What struck Harris about this competition was how all those gathered — from schools across the country — were motivated to tackle challenges related to faith and belief at work, and that this was acknowledged as an important issue in the business world. The corporate sponsors were impassioned in this regard, and the case itself presented a particularly thorny faith-related business challenge that straddled faith, global strategy, and technology, including the deployment of artificial intelligence.

“The case touched on an interesting and important issue for modern organizational life: If faith is an important value of individuals, and values are important for business, how might the business world better harness good analysis to address issues involving workplace faith and belief?” he said.

The Challenge

The case used for the competition centers on ServiceNow, an AI software company, whose competitor recently lost a $400 million contract in the Middle East after an AI agent delivered an inappropriate response.

It follows Nish, a real-life strategist, as the company prepares for a high-profile AI launch in the region.

“The client’s abrupt and unceremonious termination of the competitor’s multi-million-dollar contract left the lead strategist responsible for global expansion — and protagonist of the case who was also present for the competition and one of the judges for the finale — anxious yet clear that local value alignment was not just a nice to have but a necessary capability for growth and global acceleration,” explained Hailu.

Teams had to navigate tensions among faith, artificial intelligence and global business strategy, recommending one of three technical architectures to address “value friction” — when an AI system produces an intended result that is not culturally, religiously, or morally appropriate.

In practice, that could mean an AI system delivering an answer that is technically correct but misaligned with local customs, religious norms, or expectations.

Nish realizes ServiceNow faces the same risk. Its AI agents, largely trained on Western data, may default to assumptions that do not align with faith-centered or culturally specific markets.

With a major contract and global expansion at stake, the challenge becomes clear: how to design AI systems that operate effectively across very different moral and cultural environments.

Moreover, the Middle East market is valued at hundreds of millions of dollars and growing rapidly, and the broader global governance and compliance sector represents an even larger opportunity.

At its core is a tension between global scale and local values.

To address the problem, Nish is presented with three options:

• A “universalist” approach, using a single model supplemented with local context, allowing for fast deployment and simpler management.
• A “hyper-local” strategy, building separate models for each region.
• An “agent org chart” system, using multiple AI agents in sequence — drafting, reviewing, culturally checking and supervising — before delivering a final answer.

Each reflects a different balance between speed, scalability, cost and cultural sensitivity.

Aishwarya Agarwal, Selamawit Hailu, and Ritu Deswal emphasized the “irreplaceability of humans” in their case presentation.

Team Darden’s Approach

“Our perspective was that there had to be a human element,” said Deswal, who was awarded best presenter.

“We started building our case around the question: What is the most important thing for us? We started less from a quantitative lens and more from a values lens. We asked: What are the values of the company?”

The team started with values, and then worked to integrate the technology while keeping a human-in-the-loop system.

“Our team emphasized the irreplaceability of humans,” said Hailu. “That although AI has become a super intelligence, way beyond our abilities to solve problems, it lags behind in wisdom, values, and cultural awareness on its own.”

The team recommended a solution that “lived the company’s values that the case company summed up into two words, Hungry and Humble,” added Hailu, the incoming VP of People, Inclusion, and Culture on the Executive MBA Student Association (ESA) board. “We recommended maintaining a base model that remained hungry, pushed the frontier and maintained a best-in-class model that could manage global scale and real enterprise impact.”

Their “globally local hybrid” model combined the accuracy of a localized approach with the speed of a global system, alongside layered oversight.

“It turns our employees’ cultural wisdom into a plug-and-play technical asset, making ServiceNow the only truly ‘Native’ global platform,” the trio wrote in their presentation.

A Broader Lesson

“Darden is pretty diverse,” said Deswal, “but the diversity in thinking that I experienced in this competition was amazing.”

Working across different perspectives — faith-based, cultural and professional — pushed the team to think beyond traditional business frameworks.

The experience underscored a broader reality: as companies deploy AI globally, technical performance alone is not enough. Systems must also reflect the values and beliefs of the communities they serve.

For Hailu, it was even more personal — a reminder of the importance of embracing one’s faith within a business context.

“You can love God and still be a highly astute economist,” she said. “You can love God and be a highly ambitious professional.”

Hailu was moved by the ritual of beginning each session with prayer. “The call isn’t to conform, but to be exactly who you are, and to make space for others to do the same,” she said.

Harris added: “Business should improve the world. It should inspire. It should create value. For many individuals, their faith calls them toward similar goals. What higher aspirations are there?”