This paper explores how human–AI collaboration might be reframed as a site of curiosity, imagination and pedagogical possibility in management education. Management education claims to prepare students for uncertainty, complexity and change. Yet much of its pedagogy remains oriented toward standardisation, predictability and performance optimisation (Barnett, 2000; Biesta, 2020). The rapid integration of artificial intelligence risks intensifying this paradox. Positioned as a tool for efficiency by automating feedback, streamlining assessment and personalising learning, AI may further narrow education to what can be measured, predicted and controlled (Selwyn, 2019; Williamson, 2023; UNESCO, 2023). This paper challenges this trajectory by asking a different question: what if AI could expand, rather than constrain, the conditions for thinking? Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s (1958) concept of natality, the human capacity to begin anew, it develops a conceptual argument for rethinking human–AI collaboration as a site of possibility rather than optimisation. From this perspective, the purpose of education is not simply to produce outcomes, but to create conditions in which something genuinely new can emerge (Arendt, 1958; Biesta, 2020). Emerging work in AI-augmented learning suggests that, when positioned as a creative partner rather than a solution engine, AI can support exploratory, dialogic and speculative forms of engagement (Luckin, 2018; Holmes et al., 2022; Zawacki-Richter et al., 2019). In such contexts, students do not simply use AI to complete tasks; they use it to generate alternatives, test ideas and interrogate their own assumptions. This shifts the role of AI from optimisation tool to epistemic partner, aligning with calls for more relational, co-creative models of education (Bayne, 2015; Gourlay, 2021; Biesta, 2020). The paper proposes a reframing of human–AI collaboration around three shifts: from optimisation to exploration, from efficiency to meaning-making, and from control to emergence. These shifts reposition AI as a catalyst for a “pedagogy of wonder,”