Chapter 10
The Intelligent University: Reinventing Higher Education in the Age of AI
1.
For the past few weeks, I've been thinking about what it would mean for the university library to move beyond teaching AI literacy and focus on developing AI fluency, or even mastery. What if the university library and academic librarians became the trusted guides in the age of AI, helping our university navigate this transformative and disruptive era as the intelligence age unfolds? What would happen if we created in-depth newsletters and provided interactive workshops rather than creating LibGuides that need to be updated all the time?
After much reflection, I realized that while the concept of an “intelligent library” and the larger vision for providing equitable access to advanced AI systems through an AI lab—and teaching increasingly advanced, effective, and ethical AI fluency and mastery skills—should direct university libraries on what to do, a larger question looms: What if the university itself fully embraced AI systems and reinvented its approach to education and student preparation?
Observing the rapid progress of frontier AI labs, remarkable news stories, and increasingly intelligent and agentic research tools and task automation systems that emerge on a weekly basis, it's evident that the future we're heading towards is different from our current reality.
If AI development is likely to take off rapidly, which already may be happening, contrary to previous expectations of gradual change, then universities must treat seriously the possibility of experiencing rapid and exponential progress seriously. We must consider what it would mean to create the intelligent university of the future today and explore how to disrupt ourselves now.
This way, other AI-powered universities, technology startups, and ed-tech companies won't shape the future of education before us, potentially attracting all our students, putting us out of business, and rendering our current methods obsolete within the next five to ten years. So how might universities meet the moment and reinvent themselves in the intelligence age?
2.
To fully embrace the intelligence age, universities must partner with major AI providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or Perplexity, or they should figure out how to leverage the latest open-source models that are available from the likes of Meta and other independent labs.
Long before the university is prepared and the committees have been formed, they should offer these tools directly to students, staff, and faculty. But this is where the real work begins. Access to a single AI service isn't enough. Each department will need AI tools and services tailored to its specific needs, which means budgeting for customized AI stacks.
These stacks could include elements like voice dictation, AI-powered document and presentation design, research search engines and assistants, data analysis and visualization, and computer programming and software development agents, among others. Eventually, each department will likely need its own AI lab with this technology stack installed so students can use it, too.
Moreover, universities should establish an AI lab in the library where everyone can access the most advanced AI systems and agents the budget can afford. This accessibility lets anyone use the latest Pro models and agent tools to conduct in-depth research and automate tasks in ways most users don’t realize are already possible today.
During this transition, as the university integrates advanced models and agentic systems into every office—and moves from teaching mere AI literacy and fluency to mastering collaboration and execution alongside agents—it must reconsider current educational approaches. This includes rethinking classroom structures, assignment design, and the essence of learning in higher education as AI progresses exponentially and frontier models begin to meet and exceed students’ cognitive abilities in most fields.
Embracing these transformative forces rather than resisting them will fundamentally reinvent higher education. Ultimately, creating the intelligent university of the future will require dismantling the barriers that separate departments and programs and keep faculty and students largely confined to their chosen academic fields. It’ll soon become crucial to make the entire university more interdisciplinary and collaborative, because the future we’re moving toward isn’t pure utopia or dystopia. It’s a world full of unanswered questions, wicked problems, and unintended consequences.
Designing assignments for this AI-powered, reshaped world requires shifting from trying to make them AI-proof to making them AI-ready, or AI-inevitable. Since students will inevitably use AI tools anyway, assignments must be adaptable to this evolving landscape.
3.
Many college students stay in their local communities after graduation, and local industries and businesses need more than just routine workers. They need an AI-powered workforce and AI-driven leaders who can integrate AI and innovate, deploy advanced AI systems and autonomous agents, and disrupt and automate current operations, driving rapid economic and community development and growth in an AI-driven economy.
To be very clear, all industries and businesses must start figuring out how to do this now and fast. Competitors across the country, or around the world, will soon try to develop and deploy an agentic system that crashes and disrupts their current business model. Any industry, company, or job that relies on computers and the web to manage its business and projects could be completely automated.
Unfortunately, current talent pools often lack these skills, so businesses must train existing and new employees in AI until universities can ensure graduates possess these abilities. But the intelligent university’s end goal shouldn’t be simply producing more competent workers. It must strive to cultivate diverse educators, entrepreneurs, innovators, and leaders who can address unsolved problems and unanswered questions in their fields by mastering AI tools.
Such students can create new industries, businesses, nonprofits, and ultimately jobs that previously didn't exist in their area. To achieve this goal, learning experiences must address broader societal questions and practical community issues.
Universities must collaborate with local industries, businesses, schools, and non-profits to propose projects that students can tackle through AI-driven, cross-disciplinary capstone projects. These projects can help solve real challenges and answer larger questions while demonstrating AI's transformative potential to communities, helping students further develop and apply their AI fluency and helping local organizations envision future roles for these graduates.
If universities want to integrate and innovate with AI in their existing systems and embrace today’s exponential progress, they must accelerate toward the future themselves rather than wait for advanced intelligence and automation systems to become standard.
In this context, the technology accelerator and incubator model offers an interesting perspective on the intelligent university concept. It helps us better understand the vast implications of providing powerful AI systems to everyone, empowering them to develop AI mastery and propose ideas to lead the university into the future.
The incubator and technology accelerator aptly describe the direction universities must pursue. The intelligence age will soon be known as the acceleration age, as progress rapidly advances. To keep up with the ongoing AI race, universities must take the initiative, positioning themselves as AI leaders in education rather than followers. How might they do this? Once they choose an AI provider, they must empower teams to pursue AI-powered initiatives, projects, products, and experiments, acknowledging that many might fail.
The goal is to develop an accelerator-and-incubator mindset, creating an environment where hundreds of AI efforts can start. Maybe a few dozen will show real promise and succeed. Still, their lessons will pave the way into the intelligence age with confidence and competence, rather than stumbling and delaying innovation or disruption. Waiting to see what other institutions do and how the AI space evolves over the next couple of years leads to stagnation and contemplation instead of progress.
4.
Ultimately, every university worldwide is already racing to create AI-powered education, trying to enroll students who once chose local campuses.
Many AI-powered online education platforms will soon emerge, delivering AI-focused degrees and certificates from anywhere. These services will attract students who want to build AI skills to advance their careers, rather than choose a degree from a limited menu and hope their local university keeps pace with AI.
Additionally, many tech companies, existing ed-tech providers, and disruptive upstarts will strive to conceptualize the intelligent university, creating online platforms that introduce students to this future, where AI assistants and agents are integrated throughout the entire technology stack, not merely as a single website or app. They will use advanced marketing agents to target students on social media who formerly entered campuses at graduation age. Lastly, a flood of AI certificate training programs will promise to equip students with essential workforce skills, drawing their time, money, and energy into programs universities could have offered if they had acted swiftly and engaged students with their own AI offerings.
It’s crucial to understand that the intelligence age isn't merely about the rapid advancement of AI tools or the agentic automation of workflows. It will usher in a period of intense, decisive creative destruction, reinventing and disrupting every traditional industry and business that exists today while rapidly empowering new ones to take their place.
Universities must not limit their thinking and imagination to purchasing an enterprise-level AI tool subscription and offering a few AI literacy classes. That won't be enough. They must rethink their classrooms and assignments. They must engage with communities and reinvent each other. In the intelligence age, they must foster students who aren't just future employees—but future AI-powered entrepreneurs, innovators, executives, elected leaders, and people in roles we haven’t imagined yet—with a few AI tricks and prompts up their sleeves.
If you step back from the university campus and the academic library and consider the real potential of this revolutionary moment and how embracing AI could impact the communities we serve, you can start to imagine what they could become with an AI-powered workforce and a new class of AI-minded entrepreneurs and leaders who could rapidly drive economic and community development, leading to the creation of new industries and opportunities for future students. You begin to see more than just the “intelligent university” of the future and start to understand that we’re talking about developing entirely intelligent economies.
The intelligent university’s bold mission should be to spark an entrepreneurship revolution and creative renaissance like the next Silicon Valley, Austin, or Research Triangle. It must envision a new kind of city with an AI workforce, driven by AI's exponential growth. This workforce will learn to navigate this age of acceleration, propelling communities toward an economic revival instead of succumbing to economic decline and destruction, powered by AI-based organizations, powerful agentic systems, and AI-fluent workers thriving elsewhere.
It’s time for universities to take leaders like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis seriously. Even if artificial general intelligence (AGI) isn't developed for another five or ten years, we now live in a world where increasingly intelligent, highly competent, and autonomously capable machines emerge on a monthly, sometimes even weekly basis and will continue to do so every year until one, or many of them, crack AGI or unlock superintelligence.
Instead of waiting to see what others decide to do with these advanced AI systems and tools, we must determine their potential ourselves and begin creating the future. We must determine how to build an "intelligent university" for the intelligence age, embracing a rapid pace of innovation and execution. This proactive approach will not only help universities envision the future of higher education but also pave the way for the reinvention of our communities and the creation of the AI workforce that will make all of this possible.