Information technology (IT) has increasingly modified the business landscape in recent years. Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) worldwide have witnessed an increasing interest in digitalization. Some HEIs offer technology as an opportunity to extend the academic program without adding more bricks and mortar. For other HEIs, digitalization was combined with traditional on-site courses, resulting in 'blended' approaches. Digitalization in education has been described as a fundamental, holistic process that goes beyond simply supplementing teaching with online tools.

At the workplace, there is an increasing demand for digital skills for all young employees as employers expect graduates to have the digital skills to be ready to work. These new competencies must be perfected during HEI studies, since the employers expect that HEIs will adapt to meet their demands of a digital society.

One way of meeting employer expectations is to integrate more information technology by enhancing students' skills through new digital tools. However, deciding what should be used and for what purpose is an ongoing debate. Many technological solutions are touted for saving time, but are equally responsible for pushing a time-motivated education instead of a reflective and critical-thinking environment, competencies that are decisive for both our students’ academic education and their professional careers.

Technology boasts speed and practicality and gives instantaneous gratification. Social media, for example, have been designed to grab our attention, distracting us with their content and keeping us searching for more. Students are being pushed toward constant changes in their attention, quick fixes, and rapid responses at the detriment of time-consuming and potentially' boring' tasks that are needed for authentic learning. As a result, one of the casualties of digitalization has been traditional reading.

Some argue that skimming digital content is reading, but is it? First, while digital-based reading is unavoidable in daily life, studies have shown that paper-based reading is better as it entails different forms of processing and is thus more conducive for comprehension and memorization with or without time pressure. Also, reading improves cognitive skills such as concentration, vocabulary building, and memory.

The introduction of digital tools, Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses new challenges. For example, students ask for summaries of long texts. While this seems like a logical and mature use of AI, it is problematic. The student who has not read the article has no way of knowing if the summary is accurate. Further, if this practice continues with all articles used for submitting papers, what is the student actually contributing? The students would write essays or analyses based on summaries of articles they have never read and whose accuracy has not been verified. Which competence will they develop during their studies?

This has led us to our current research project. What is the role of reading in the age of digitalization and AI? In this project, we identify the challenges of encouraging and reintroducing the basics of reading in HEIs. We will gather information from faculty members and students in business management education courses to strike the ideal balance between academic rigor and digital speed. In the end, we will propose a new, slower framework for learning that combines the elements of traditional education and innovative technology.

Keywords: Digitalization, business education, reading skills, higher education institutions.