Learning to be green: EBS contributes to an AI-enhanced multilingual tool for green entrepreneurship

The Erasmus+ project L2BGreen is developing an interactive online course and an AI tutor named "Gaia" that teach green entrepreneurship in six languages. Researchers from the EBS Knowledge Team on Green, Circular Economy and Resources have shaped the sustainability content of the course, and several cohorts of EBS students have already piloted the agent in class.

The green transition is a stated priority of the European Green Deal, yet the competences it requires remain unevenly distributed across sectors, regions, and company sizes. Our own earlier research on Estonian companies (Kekkonen, Pesor & Täks 2023; Pesor, Täks & Kekkonen 2024) indicated that awareness of the green transition is shaped less by environmental conviction than by everyday business conditions: the availability of financing for new business models; the perceived absence of consumer demand for greener products/services; uncertainty about taxation and reporting requirements; and a general shortage of practical knowledge about where to begin. Such findings imply that the green transition is, to a considerable extent, a learning problem, and that scalable education/training instruments are needed alongside financial measures and instruments.

The L2BGreen project, "Learning to be Green: An AI-enhanced multilingual online course for developing a green entrepreneurial mindset", was designed to address exactly this gap. The project is funded by the European Union under the Erasmus+ programme, in the action type Alliances for Education and Enterprises. It brings together nine partners from seven countries, including universities, training institutions for apprentices, and organizations working directly with green entrepreneurs and start-ups. Estonian Business School participates as a partner, and contributes through the Knowledge Team on Green, Circular Economy and Resources.

What the project develops

L2BGreen pursues three interlocking outputs:

• introductory learning materials that explain what green/sustainable entrepreneurship means and how it applies across a wide variety of sectors and job types, delivered as an interactive online course combining text, video, and quizzes;
• a conversational agent with which learners can discuss real-world case studies and develop plans for green entrepreneurial action within their own sphere of influence; and
• a community that connects matching users to each other for continued discussion, complemented by face-to-face events at which the learning materials, the agent, and other interested citizens can be encountered.

Because Europe is a multilingual continent, the learning materials and the conversational agent are being made available in several languages, with Dutch, English, Estonian, German, Greek, and Slovenian planned. For Estonian trainers/educators and entrepreneurs, this means that an internationally developed course on green entrepreneurship will be usable in Estonian without further adaptation.

The EBS contribution

Our contribution has concentrated on the sustainability substance of the course and on testing it with real learners. Aleksandra Kekkonen, Associate Professor and Head of the Knowledge Team on Green, Circular Economy and Resources, provided feedback on the case studies developed by the consortium and contributed the sustainability-related angle to the learning content, ensuring that the cases reflect the conditions under which small and medium-sized enterprises and micro-enterprises actually operate, rather than an idealized version of the green transition.

Aside from content development, EBS has served as a testing ground for the agent. Several cohorts of EBS students have worked with Gaia in English during Aleksandra Kekkonen's lectures in the Impactful Entrepreneurship sustainability stream, which allowed the consortium to observe interaction with the tool in an authentic classroom setting and to collect feedback on both the pedagogical design and the usability of the system.

"Gaia": a conversational tutor with a pedagogical architecture

The conversational agent developed in L2BGreen is not a general-purpose chatbot. Gaia is designed as a multi-agent tutor whose pedagogical design combines case-based learning, Bloom's taxonomy, Socratic scaffolding, and AI-supported feedback. The system is structured as an "Interaction Engine" in which separate agents are responsible for specific pedagogical functions, such as presenting case scenarios, scaffolding knowledge, supporting application, and providing feedback on argumentation. The guiding principle of the consortium is that artificial intelligence in education should not function as a shortcut, but as a deliberately designed support system that helps learners reason through complex real-world challenges.

The approach has already produced its first scientific output. The paper "Learning to Be Green: A Pilot Study of the Gaia Multi-agent Tutor", authored by Ahsen Çini, Pantelis M. Papadopoulos, Stergios Tegos, and Apostolos Mavridis, was accepted for presentation at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED). The pilot study reported there involved 25 undergraduate students who interacted with Gaia over three weeks across three online case studies addressing money impact, greenwashing, and design thinking. Engagement was consistently high: students spent on average more than 45 minutes per case and sent more than 25 messages per week to the tutor, and the number of student messages increased significantly from the first to the third case. Interestingly, students with a lower initial orientation toward green entrepreneurship tended to hold longer discussions with Gaia. This implies that a structured conversational tutor may be particularly valuable precisely for those learners who need the most support in building an understanding of sustainability in business, which is a relevant consideration for any programme seeking to reach beyond an already convinced audience.

Learner feedback has also been informative in a critical direction. Students valued the ability of the agent to clarify misunderstandings, rephrase questions, and support their reasoning, while some participants found the text-based format tiring and suggested shorter, more focused dialogues. Thus, it appears that the next development steps concern interaction design and multimodality as much as content.

Estonia as a case

The case of Estonia is instructive for a project of this kind. The country combines a strong digital infrastructure and a well-developed start-up ecosystem with an economy dominated by small and micro-enterprises for which sustainability expertise is rarely an in-house function. Digital and green transitions therefore have to be addressed simultaneously rather than sequentially, which is the practical content of the "twin transition" as it applies at company level. An AI-enhanced, multilingual, openly available course is one instrument that fits these conditions, since it is scalable, low-cost for the end user, and available in Estonian.

These findings further imply three things. For learners and students, the project demonstrates that green entrepreneurship can be approached through concrete cases and structured dialogue rather than through abstract policy vocabulary. For companies and their trainers, it offers ready-made material for internal upskilling on greenwashing, circular business models, and the business case for sustainability. For educators and the wider education system, it provides an evidence-based example of how conversational AI can be integrated into teaching in a pedagogically grounded way.

Public deliverables are openly available

In line with the transparency and open-access principles of the Erasmus+ programme, the consortium publishes its public deliverables for download at www.l2bgreen.com/project-deliverables. Seven documents are currently available: the Interactive Online Course Instructional Design; the Ethics Requirements Document; the Evaluation Toolkit; the Learning Materials; the Conversational Agent Design; the Multilingualism Support document; and the Stakeholder Engagement Plan. Together, these documents provide insight into the methodology, the instructional design decisions, and the evaluation approach of the project, and several of them are directly reusable by educators/trainers outside the consortium.

What comes next

The project is entering its final phase. In the coming months, L2BGreen will run competitions in all participating countries as well as an international competition, in which participants will apply the learning materials and the conversational agent to green entrepreneurial ideas of their own. Recent activities have included the presentation and testing of Gaia with participants at the Europe Tech Hackathon and a consortium meeting in Bern devoted to the further development of the agent. Details of the abovementioned national and international competitions will be announced on the project website and its LinkedIn channel.

Get involved

There are three ways to follow or join the work:

1. Stay updated. Follow the L2BGreen LinkedIn page for news, updates, and announcements of the upcoming competitions and events: linkedin.com/company/l2bgreen.
2. Use Gaia in your teaching. Educators, trainers, and company training managers who would like to use the conversational agent or the learning materials with their own groups are welcome to contact the EBS team.
3. Take part in the events and competitions. Prospective students, entrepreneurs, and trainers interested in participating in the national or international competitions can register their interest through the same contact address.