ESCP Business School partners with Hugging Face to integrate open-source AI into management education
ESCP Business School has announced a partnership with Hugging Face, the open-source AI platform co-founded by ESCP alumnus Clément Delangue. The collaboration will give the School’s 11,000+ students and 1,000+ faculty and staff free access to Hugging Face models and tools, supporting learning, research, and entrepreneurship across ESCP’s six European campuses.
The partnership builds on ESCP’s recent initiatives to embed artificial intelligence in teaching, research, and student services. This includes its collaboration with OpenAI for ChatGPT Edu access, the training of 1,000 “AI Champions” among students, faculty, and staff, and the integration of AI into programmes and operations. The collaboration also extends to Hugging Face’s “Learn” hub, reinforcing AI literacy across ESCP’s six European campuses.
“By partnering with Hugging Face, our students, faculty and staff are not only learning about artificial intelligence, they are building with it. This partnership reflects our ‘Bold and United’ strategy, and reinforces our conviction that AI is not just an augmented tool but a new language for management and innovation,” explains Prof. Léon Laulusa, Executive President and Dean of ESCP Business School. “Our next ambition is to create a transformative platform for our community which will redefine personalised learning, research, and administration, while fostering a vibrant entrepreneurial culture around AI.”
For students, the Hugging Face platform will open up opportunities to:
- Engage with large language models (LLMs), vision and multi-modal AI systems in class projects and research.
- Showcase and validate expertise by publishing projects on Hugging Face’s global platform and contributing to open-source work visible to employers.
- Support entrepreneurship through the integration of open-source AI into prototypes and ventures without the high costs associated with commercial platforms.
Faculty will have access to Hugging Face for creating interactive resources, customised learning materials, and research applications. Tailored training sessions for faculty are scheduled for September 2025, with students being onboarded in October.
“I started my entrepreneurial journey at ESCP Business School 15 years ago, so I’m beyond excited to be able to give back and foster the next generation of builders here in France and across ESCP’s European campuses,” says Clément Delangue, co-founder & CEO at Hugging Face and ESCP Alumnus (Master in Management, 2012). “AI is transforming education, and it’s great to see ESCP Business School, the oldest business school in the world - created in 1819, completely embracing it. By joining the Hugging Face academia hub, its 12,000+ students, professors and staff will not only be able to use AI but take an active part in building AI themselves, thanks to open science and open-source AI, all for free!”
“At ESCP, we advocate for the responsible use of AI under the shared conviction that technology itself isn’t good or bad, it's how we use it that counts. We are proud to partner with Hugging Face whose commitment to open-source development and ethical AI complements our values and offers practical benefits across the School’s academic and entrepreneurial ecosystem,” concludes Prof. Louis-David Benyayer, AI Initiatives Coordinator at ESCP Business School.
To learn more about ESCP’s approach to AI in higher education, visit: escp.eu/ai. To follow ESCP’s activity on Hugging Face, follow: hf.co/escp.