Which is not at all the same as saying everyone should just relax.
The impacts of AI are already being felt across industries, with the World Economic Forum predicting that AI will replace 85 million jobs globally by 2025. Universities are knowledge factories producing knowledge workers for a global knowledge economy. Well, the knowledge economy is going through a radical reinvention, which means our graduates will soon need (“soon” as in now) different skills in different areas of work, and universities will have to rapidly remake themselves for that new reality.
Borrowing from my old friend Clay Christensen, the famous innovation scholar, and using his sustaining and disruptive innovation framework, there are three bodies of work that universities need to undertake. The first two are in areas of sustaining innovation – that is, using innovation to largely operate as they have in the past; playing by the same general rules of the game, if you will, but using AI to A) improve quality or B) improve efficiency and find cost savings.
In terms of improving quality, universities must look hard at their majors, determine how AI will impact graduates in various disciplines, make sure the curriculum keeps up with rapid changes in the professions (never a hallmark of higher education, I’m afraid), and that students master the AI tools they need to be competitive. Some majors will likely shrink or go away altogether, and others will come into being. For example, aspiring accountants may want to think about data science instead (and universities will have to make significant staffing shifts, never an easy task). AI also promises to provide better learning support, wellness supports, and much better insights into student performance through data.
In terms of efficiency and cost savings, there will be enormous opportunities to increase productivity and find savings by using AI for a wide variety of administrative functions. Expect areas such as Finance, the Registrar, Financial Aid, Information Technology, and a host of customer and student service functions to be dramatically impacted by AI. Point solutions, designed for these various functions, are already proliferating.
Across the administrative landscape, universities will be able to do more for less while improving the quality of the work. They will need to think about what happens with those staff currently doing functions that will soon be automated. If Human Resources departments are not now planning for those changes, there will be backlash, resistance, and rebellion on campuses.
Sustaining innovations such as those just described will be hard enough. There will be some institutions willing to do an even harder thing, which is to invest in and find safe space to not just improve quality or efficiency while playing by the same rules of the game, but to radically reimagine those rules. That is, to create new disruptive models that rethink the university in fundamental ways and to play the game in a wholly new way. This will happen, because AI poses existential questions for all of us.
They will need to think about what happens with those staff currently doing functions that will soon be automated
What is the work and role of humans in a knowledge economy when we are no longer the most powerful knowledge workers available? What kind of work and what kind of jobs will be left for us to do?
In my 2022 book Broken: How Our Social Systems are Failing Us and How We Can Fix Them, I argue that we have ample need for distinctly human jobs that AI can assist in, but not do. We need to flood our schools with amazing teachers, staff, and coaches. We need to rebuild a decimated mental health care system with well-trained clinicians and social workers. We need to create a system of compassionate geriatric care for an ageing society.
But these are distinctly human jobs we for which we do not like to pay or provide support, and they carry little status. But as AI displaces workers from a knowledge economy, perhaps they can find refuge and greater reward in a newly revitalised caring economy that builds communities and supports human flourishing.
Borrowing from the work of Carlotta Perez, we are in the Frenzy phase of AI and soon entering the Synergy phase, during which we will have to navigate massive social upheaval and a reordering of the economy and society. Buckle in. On the other side lies what she calls the Maturity phase and the possibility that universities can be reinvented for a new age, one in which human empathy, wisdom, judgement, care, creativity, and community become more important than the soul deadening jobs of the information economy. To get there, we will need:
- thoughtful guardrails and regulation (we see the terrible price we paid for letting social media explode without sensible regulation);
- international treaties on the uses of AI; and
- the careful guidance of philosophers and ethicists.
My guess is that wholly new universities will emerge, perhaps spawned from existing institutions, but more likely created from whole cloth. They are more likely to be designed around ontological than epistemological questions, more focused on students than faculty, and more accessible to all.
In short…everything will have changed.
