EDUCAUSE '26: Reflecting on AI in Higher Ed, 4 Years Into ChatGPT - GovTech

Today, higher education is doing a better job of putting AI into a broader context, he said, asking how to use the technology to solve specific problems.

“I think we're definitely seeing a change,” he said. “For those first few years, it was all about AI, AI, AI, and now it's AI in procurement, or AI for student retention.”

These AI conversations are part of an overall reflection of how higher education manages change, he said. After quickly switching to online modalities in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, O’Brien said educators learned they could make changes more quickly than they had in the past.

Higher education may have to apply that agility to changing workforce expectations, as more and more employers look for graduates with AI skills. In the next few years, O’Brien said he expects to see higher education more broadly adopt the workforce attitudes he has long seen at career and technical institutions.

“We talked about workforce all the time,” he said. “Especially in technical programs, we had program committees that brought in people from industry to advise us on is this — is the curriculum relevant?”

Every conference nowadays seems more and more like an AI conference, and if you just look at the subject matter of the titles, it's clearly captured everybody's attention.

The energy has shifted from, if we're talking generative AI, like from November of 2022 when generative AI is released, sort of the years after that, the energy was all hype.

And I think that's still going — "It's going to solve every problem, create no new ones” — and then we sort of work our way down the trough of disillusionment.

Those who are questioning, "What does this mean for workforce?" are right to do so.

I mean, this is the first, well, maybe it was last year, but like one of the first years where the unemployment rate for recent college graduates was higher by a couple percent than the general population.

What we're hearing lately from employers is the need for students to have some awareness of AI.

The one that got my attention was like some high percentage of business leaders who would rather hire someone with AI experience than someone who was more expert in the subject matter.

So, there are things that employers are saying that absolutely should be listened to.

Curriculum is going to change over the next few years, and I think that's probably just a natural occurrence due to the change in the whole AI adventure that we're on.

I think one of the things that several institutions have gotten right is not to see AI as the thing. Campuses that focus their AI initiatives on their campus values got it right.

I always give the example of Elizabethtown College, they're a college that really values sustainability. They actually have a little camera by where students dump their food and they use that to analyze and reduce food waste.

The story has changed, I think, from being AI is a thing that we all need to get excited about and worry about and get hyped about, but it's now, "How can we use AI sort of in a way that's going to actually make a difference?"

AI is a technology. It is one that is transformational clearly, but it's not the only thing.