Oh my! GenAI (generative AI) and LLMs rest heavily on our minds at Strategic Initiatives again this month. Especially now that 1) China has released DeepSeek, 2) many in the industry claim that we are close to the moment when “Agentic” AI will think for itself, and 3) we see growing predictions of devastating career loss due to GenAI in our news feeds. Lions and tigers and bears. Our heads are spinning with implications as we wait for higher education to catch up and answer the call. Who will be the first to call for academic community members to implement a framework of GenAI competencies across the curricula and for institutional planners and innovators to foster adoption across budgets and strategic plans?
Colleagues here make a convincing case that a new Collaborative Intelligence (CI) will evolve between humans and AI, new industries will emerge, higher education (HE) has the talent and capacity to respond, and CI will transform work at all levels and diverse industries. Meanwhile, we’re hearing new layoff rumblings regarding coding, finance, accounting, graphic design, and marketing, and the list continues to grow as we see increasing sophistication, learning, and rollout of applied GenAI. Buckle your seatbelts; there’s a bumpy road ahead.
A Call for Change in Higher Education
Here at SI, we’re asking hard questions about higher education’s preparation for this transformation of knowledge, planning, teaching, and work, but we fear that our industry prides itself on having lasted for hundreds (and hundreds) of years without the need to change, and now, despite society’s new challenges and demands, HE still struggles to change course.
As my colleague Don Norris has pointed out in a series of recent blogs, institutions can (must) respond to society’s rising call to adapt and respond to rapid change. He offers a framework for institutional planners to transform their institutions by adopting a collaborative intelligence culture in institutional planning and decision-making. A key part of this transformation is to expand decision-making to include more diverse voices (including GenAI) at the planning table in a democratization and diversification of decision-making.
This democratization is particularly powerful because it’s not just access to GenAI’s capacity for information-gathering but embraces a collective, collated, and shared understanding. GenAI’s adoption can create an ongoing, dynamic sifting of knowledge and provide scaffolded thinking, strategizing, and rapid, collective planning.
Reinventing Learning
Thanks to technology, what it means to be smart has changed, while teaching has not. We now store much of our brains in our mobile devices, in Google, in our apps, and in our favorite help sites. Smart people seldom memorize; overnight, GenAI has accelerated this new way of knowing and learning. In an age when so much of society feels higher education has failed them, GenAI could revolutionize teaching and restore faith in ROI (financial and transformational experience) via the personalized learning of adaptive vetting, scaffolding, delineating, and building connections between concepts - approaches that previously required expensive one-on-one human instruction. GenAI could change these views if the Academy can step up.
We were especially intrigued by a recent NPR think piece that suggested teaching AI could provide skills that would revitalize the middle class with “...good jobs for people who have been left behind over the last few decades.” Saving the middle class? Should this possibility alone not provide the impetus for HE to step up?
Wanted: leaders, innovators, planners, teachers, researchers, and designers willing to leap into a constantly shifting way of thinking and knowing. Society is asking us to do what we are uniquely trained to do: figure it out, create new knowledge, and share it with eager students and the world.
If not now, when?
Additional Resources
Greg Rosalsky, “What if AI Could Rebuild the Middle Class?” NPR, May 9, 2023.
Bernard Marr, “Why Agentic AI Will Soon Make ChatGPT Look Like a Simple Calculator,” NPR, Jan 20,2025.
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