ray's space
online site to share items
online site to share items
Ray's EduAI Advisor ChatGPT:
https://chatgpt.com/g/g-pLDOh2PHk-ray-s-eduai-advisor
bit.ly/Rays-EduAI-Advisor
UPCEA Professional, Continuing and Online Education Update https://continuingedupdate.blogspot.com/
UPCEA Alternative Credentials in Higher Ed https://altcred.blogspot.com/
UPCEA Artificial Intelligence in Higher Ed https://ai-in-highered.blogspot.com/
UPCEA Ray's Curation https://rayscuration.blogspot.com/
Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/rayschroeder
https://sites.google.com/view/austinccai
https://sites.google.com/view/microcredai
The Rise of the Agentic AI University in 2026
We are experiencing the continuous, rapid development of the Generative AI of 2023 and concurrently, the movement to the emerging Agentic AI of 2026. Agentic AI is no longer merely an interactive tool we talk to; it is a colleague that acts for us.
In a very active and highly competitive environment, AI has grown at breakneck speed. As with so many technologies, business and industry have moved far faster than academe to embrace the cost-savings, capability-expanding, and wholly innovative aspects of AI. Fraught with our own industry-specific challenges such as enrollment downturns, sharp drops in perceived value, the striking “math cliff” in higher ed, and a rapidly changing regulatory policy shift in state and federal administration, our field has been cast into a sea of pressing priorities for changes. This year is likely to be the one where we begin to implement AI-powered solutions to help us move forward with agility and effectiveness in adapting to the changing environment.
Yet, where these changes will take place within the field, how these changes will impact our higher education workforce, and whether we can change in time to meet our market demand by producing knowledgeable and skilled employees for the economy at large remains in question. For those of us in early and mid-career positions, pressing questions arise. “Will I still have a job? How will my position description change? What should I do now to ensure I remain a valuable asset to my university?” It is my purpose in this brief column to identify some of the areas in which changes seem most likely to take place in this new year.
To date, we have made significant progress in developing chatbot-hosted transactional generative AI in which the user inputs questions and answers to the bot. One of the myriad of high-quality examples is the Khan Academy’s Khanmigo. These have been effective in hosting tutors, study apps, curricular design, and much more. The use of generative AI continues to expand in new ways. Meanwhile, the development of AI agents is driving the expansion and efficiency of AI. In the Agentic AI models, we have tools that are capable of reasoned assessment of what is needed accomplish a goal, aligning a series of stacked tasks in an efficient way, completing those tasks, much like a human assistant would perform a series of tasks to achieve desired outcomes. For example, this often includes data collection, analysis of the data, and identifying and implementing ways in which to accomplish the goals. This opens the possibility that portions of individual position descriptions can be offloaded from humans and combined into Agentic AI duties. This results in fewer overall employees; lower indirect costs such as insurance, vacation, and sick leave; and a much more cost-efficient operation. Beginning now, institutions are moving from scattered pilots to governed, agentic workflows that will define the next decade of student success and operational efficiency.
Online: Trending Now: https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/blogs/online-trending-now
Link to Unanticipated presentation: https://sites.google.com/view/unanticipated/home/
Link to Ray's EduAI Advisor: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-pLDOh2PHk-ray-s-eduai-advisor
Link to Ray Schroeder Brief CV https://bit.ly/44ZHlu9