Artificial Intelligence

Coursera is acquiring fellow MOOC provider Udemy to create an online education and upskilling giant valued at $2.5 billion, the companies announced Dec. 17. 

The combined company is poised to generate $1.5 billion in annual revenue and eliminate some $115 million in costs, Coursera and Udemy said in a press release. 

In explaining the deal — expected to close in the second half of 2026 — the companies pointed to their complementary consumer-facing and business-to-business offerings, as well as rising demand for artificial intelligence skills training.

Coursera and Udemy featured AI prominently in their merger rationale, saying that their combination would provide skills training for the emerging technology to the global workforce. 

Elaborating, the companies said the combination would enhance “capacity for sustained investment in AI-driven platform innovation, rapid product development, and durable growth initiatives.”

The messaging tracks with each company's emphasis on the technology prior to the merger announcement. 

AI was mentioned over 50 times on an outlook and strategy call with Coursera executives in November. On the call, CEO Greg Hart touted Coursera’s “AI-enabled platform,” which includes an AI tutor called Coursera Coach. 

“We need to continue to accelerate our development cycles to leverage AI and data to improve the learner experience and continuously enhance our capabilities across all areas of the platform,” Hart said.

On the company’s latest earnings call, Hart described generative AI as “the most in-demand skill in Coursera’s history.” On average, 14 users per minute were enrolling in one of the company’s roughly 1,000 generative AI courses, he said. 

Meanwhile, Coursera recently partnered with OpenAI to embed the MOOC provider’s platform directly into ChatGPT, making its videos and information available to the AI platform. 

Likewise, Udemy CEO Hugo Sarrazin emphasized AI’s importance to the company’s business on its latest earnings call in October. 

Framing AI as a demand driver for Udemy’s offerings, he said that “companies are heavily invested in AI transformation” but are “struggling to demonstrate ROI because many haven't developed the core workforce capabilities required to extract value from their investments.” 

At the same time, both companies also acknowledge potential downsides to AI. In Coursera’s latest earnings report with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, its list of risk factors pointed to the novelty of AI and cautioned that the market for AI skills and Coursera’s own AI products may not grow as planned. 

Moreover, the company said, AI could “displace or otherwise adversely impact the demand for online learning solutions, including our offerings.”

That is exactly what has happened to ed tech specialist Chegg, which operates in an adjacent space with online learning tools. The company recently announced it would lay off nearly half its staff after multiple quarters of cratering revenue, which Chegg executives have attributed to loss of traffic — and thus subscribers — with the release of Google’s AI summaries in the search giant’s results. 

For now, Coursera and Udemy are relatively stable financially for tech companies in a dynamic, ever-changing market. Both companies logged over $550 million in revenue for the first nine months of their fiscal years. In both cases, that represented growth from the previous year. 

While Coursera is historically unprofitable, Udemy made $6.1 million in net income for the first three quarters of its fiscal year after a $75.4 million loss for the same period last year. 

Coursera is valued more highly, with a market cap of $1.3 billion to Udemy’s $948.7 million as of Wednesday afternoon. Under the transaction, which requires regulatory and shareholder approvals, Udemy shareholders will receive 0.8 shares of Coursera stock for each of their Udemy shares.

 A long line of students wrapped around Texas A&M University’s academic plaza in early October to receive free training from Google employees on how to use the company’s artificial intelligence tools, such as its chatbot, Gemini, and its research assistant, NotebookLM.  

That same day, about 400 faculty members huddled in a campus building for deeper training from Google on how they could use AI tools to improve teaching and learning in their classrooms and how to effectively and ethically help their students use them as well, said Shonda Gibson, Texas A&M System’s chief transformation officer.

The daylong event was part of Google’s three-year $1 billion initiative to support AI education and job training programs throughout the U.S. The initiative, which launched in August, supports the tech giant’s AI for Education Accelerator that provides higher education students and educators with free access to tools and training and aims to create a community of institutions sharing best practices.

Texas A&M is one of over 200 higher ed institutions that have signed up for Google’s accelerator, according to Lisa Gevelber, founder of Grow with Google, the company’s workforce development campaign.  They include higher ed systems like the University of Texas and University of North Carolina, as well as large institutions like the University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan and University of Virginia. 

“Every student deserves access to the digital tools and the skills and training to set them up for success. And this is our commitment to supporting that,” said Gevelber. 

The initiative comes as colleges race to ensure their students are prepared to enter a workforce that is becoming increasingly shaped by AI. 

“It’s not just about using the tools,” said Gibson. “We really want our students to have the best experience possible so that they’re fully prepared whenever they leave us to go on and do whatever they’re going to do in their future.”

Professors that integrate AI into their lessons should follow guidance on how to use it to further student learning, said Alexa Joubin, director of George Washington University’s Digital Humanities Institute. 

Without that guidance, students risk using AI as a shortcut by having it summarize information for them instead of actually reading the materials presented and experiencing their lessons, said Joubin. 

Meanwhile, recent research suggests AI could be detrimental to students' skills and outcomes.

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study released in June found that using AI tools to write essays can impact critical thinking skills and lead to lower cognitive performance. 

Over four months, study participants who used AI tools to write essays underperformed at “neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels” compared with those who didn’t, raising concerns about the long-term educational implications of relying on the technology, the study found. 

Students are essentially “outsourcing key cognitive tasks to AI,” said Joubin. 

The $1 billion initiative

The Texas A&M System joined Google’s initiative, Gibson said, because officials viewed the tech behemoth as the only company offering assistance and guidance at that level. 

Gibson also pointed out the free access to normally paid versions of Google tools, which will be available over the next two years to students attending the system’s 12 institutions. 

Google’s tools can act as a personal tutor for students to help them work through problems and learn material in a customized way, said Gevelber. 

Gemini, for example, has a guided learning feature that can accommodate their learning needs, said Gevelber. The guided learning tool, for example, asks students probing and open-ended questions to spark discussions and dig deeper into the subjects, and it also introduces images, diagrams, videos and interactive quizzes to help them learn topics. 

And NotebookLM allows students to upload lecture notes or class reading materials so it can create personalized quizzes, study guides, summaries and even AI podcasts that present the information in an engaging way, Gevelbar said.

“I’m really blown away by how much Google has offered support for all this work,” said Gibson. “They’ve had a real concentrated, strategic approach to supporting higher education and K-12.”

Texas A&M system students and faculty can also access Google’s Career Certificates, which offers courses on topics such as AI literacy and AI prompting courses that are operated by Coursera

The Career Certificates program is available for free to all students at institutions participating in Google’s accelerator. That program provides training for entry-level jobs in career fields like data entry, cybersecurity, analytics, information technology support and project management, Gevelber said. Since it launched in 2018, more than 1 million students have received certificates, Gevelber said. 

Using AI with ‘strategic intentionality’

The Google initiative is not the Texas A&M System’s first foray into AI initiatives. System leaders have invested in AI training in recent years, in part because they believe the tools help improve grades and lower course withdrawals, said Gibson. 

The system teaches professors how to effectively incorporate AI into their courses through an intensive faculty training effort with the Association of College and University Educators that launched five years ago, said Gibson. Seven of the system’s universities also provide students with AI training via certificates on Coursera’s learning platform through a separate initiative, part of a two-year trial that the system is paying for, she said. 

The university aims to allow students to test and try things, make mistakes, and know how to use different technologies so they are prepared to enter the workforce, Gibson said. To accomplish that, the system needs to train its faculty and staff how to use generative AI tools so they can be deliberate about how they embed them in courses and academic programs, she said. 

“It is our responsibility to teach students to use it ethically and effectively and we have to do that with a lot of strategic intentionality,” said Gibson. 

Professors shouldn’t try to avoid AI, but they should be purposeful about how they allow students to use the tools, said Joubin, who is also an English professor at George Washington. 

In disciplines that require students to pay particularly close attention to word choices, such as humanities, outsourcing cognitive tasks to AI can be particularly problematic. That’s because the words people use to describe the world around them — such as a piece of art — can affect how others perceive it, said Joubin. 

Joubin uses a custom open source AI program in her classes that draws only from her own lectures, publications and materials, she said. It’s also narrowly tailored — the technology isn’t used to help students write essays but rather to help them think about words or topics more deeply, she said. 

If a student asks it a question, for example, the tool will respond with additional questions. She also asks students to rewrite an idea or a sentence in as many different voices as they can, such as from a lawyer, someone at a corporation or a poet. Then she asks the students to use AI to carry out the same task — giving them even more examples of voices.

“We don’t use AI for any task that requires accuracy, such as information retrieval," Joubin said, adding that they instead use it as a "thinking partner."

In other disciplines, like computer science, students could use AI to write code, said Joubin. AI tools, such as GitHub Copilot, can assist people who are coding. 

But asking AI to write code from scratch is “an utter waste of time,” and not a substitute for students building domain expertise themselves, Joubin said. The quality of the AI-generated code is often lacking — and it may actually take longer and use more resources to create, she said. 

“There are many ways to code something, to execute a task,” said Joubin. “For people who think that STEM needs AI, will just do well with AI without this kind of critical thinking or reflection, they are being deceived.”

Google’s guided learning tools, meanwhile, aim to help people challenge their thinking — giving them different points of view and expanding their thinking about a particular problem, said Gevelber. 

At Texas A&M, professors will adapt their AI policies to different situations — ranging from banning students from using the tools in their classrooms, allowing students to use them cautiously under their guidance, and giving students full access to them after some basic instruction, she said. 

“That is going to differ depending on the type of course, the level of the course, what it is that you're trying to accomplish with your students,” said Gibson. But “Gen AI is something we have to be open and transparent about. How do we want our students to use it?”   

Ed tech specialist Chegg is slashing 388 jobs, or about 45% of its workforce, in a massive restructuring effort expected to save up to $110 million next fiscal year, the public company said in late October. 

The news comes as Chegg announced it will remain a standalone company following an exploration of strategic options that could have involved selling the company to new ownership or going private. 

The company also reshuffled its leadership. Executive Chairman Dan Rosensweig resumed the CEO role on Oct. 27. He replaced Nathan Schultz, who had taken on the chief role from Rosensweig in June 2024 and is remaining as an executive adviser.

Chegg pegged its mass layoffs to a change in how it operates its academic learning products, which include online homework and study help, textbook rental and proofreading services, among others. The company also highlighted its investment in artificial intelligence, which it has integrated into products such as its language-learning tools.

As it restructures, Chegg plans to refocus around its business-to-business skills courses in professional language-learning, workplace readiness and AI, which executives expect to collectively generate $70 million in revenue for fiscal 2025 and to grow in double digits next year. This new focus will set up Chegg for sustainable revenue and earnings growth, the company said.

For now, the company is racing to cut costs as it bleeds subscribers and money. In the second quarter, Chegg’s revenue plummeted by more than a third, to $105.1 million, which came on top of similar declines in Q1.

Chegg has named Google as the source of many of its woes — specifically the search giant’s artificial intelligence summaries, which led to a sharp decrease in Chegg's traffic.

In February, Schultz announced that Chegg filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google and that it was exploring its strategic alternatives to remaining a standalone publicly traded company.

“These two actions are connected, as we would not need to review strategic alternatives if Google hadn’t launched AI Overviews,” Schultz said then. “Unfortunately, traffic is being blocked from ever coming to Chegg because of Google’s AIO and their use of Chegg’s content to keep visitors on their own platform.”

In its complaint against Google, Chegg said it gains most of its subscribers through students searching for answers to their study questions on Google. “Chegg thus depends on referrals from Google’s monopoly search engine for a large portion of the revenue that it devotes to producing original online content,” it said. 

Chegg alleged that Google has leveraged its massive market share in internet searches to “coerce online publishers like Chegg to supply content that Google republishes without permission in AI-generated answers that unfairly compete for the attention of users.”

Google has moved to dismiss the case. The tech giant argued that it has tailored its AI Overview to best serve consumers and learners, and that Chegg’s revenue struggles are its own. 

“Instead of competing more effectively, it seeks to blame Google for its business decline,” Google responded in a May court filing. “Chegg’s grab bag of obscure legal theories in support of this effort not only are not cognizable under the antitrust laws, but run directly afoul of those laws.”

While Chegg looked at possible financial alternatives to going it alone, it ended the process as it began: as a standalone company, for now. 

“After thoughtful consideration of multiple proposals, the Board unanimously determined that remaining an independent public company offers the best opportunity to maximize long-term shareholder value,” the company said on Oct. 27.

COLUMBUS, OHIO — Artificial intelligence-based products and software for college admissions and operations are proliferating in the higher education world. 

How to choose from among them? Well, leaders can start by identifying a problem that is actually in need of an AI solution. 

That is one of the core pieces of advice from a panel on deploying AI technology responsibly in college administration at the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s conference in September.

Jasmine Solomon, senior associate director of systems operations at New York University, described a “flooded marketplace” of AI products advertised for a range of higher ed functions, from tutoring systems to retention analytics to admissions chatbots. 

“Define what your AI use case is, and then find the purpose-built tool for that,” Solomon said. “If you're using a general AI model or AI tool for an unintended purpose, your result is going to be poor.” 

Asking why before you buy

It’s also worth considering whether AI is the right tool. 

“How does AI solve this problem better? Because maybe your team or the tools that you already have can solve this problem,” Solomon said. “Maybe you don't need an AI tool for this.”

Experts on the panel pointed out that administrators also need to think about who will use the tool, the potential privacy pitfalls of it, and its actual quality. 

As Solomon put it, “Those built-in AI features — are they real? Are they on a future-release schedule, or is it here now? And if it’s here now, is it ready for prime time or is it ‘here now, and we’re beta testing.’” 

Other considerations in deploying AI include those related to ethics, compliance and employee contracts.

Institutions need to be mindful of workflows, staff roles, data storage, privacy and AI stipulations in collective bargaining contracts, said Becky Mulholland, director of first-year admission and operations at the University of Rhode Island. 

“For those who are considering this, please, please, please make sure you're familiar with those aspects,” Mulholland said. “We've seen this not go well in some other spaces.”

On top of all that is the environmental impact of AI. One estimate found that AI-based search engines can use as much as 30 times more energy than traditional search. The technology also uses vast amounts of water to cool data centers.

Panelists had few definitive answers for resolving AI’s environmental problems at the institutional level. 

“There's going to be a space for science to find some better solutions,” Mulholland said. “We're not there right now.” 

Solomon pointed to the pervasiveness of AI tools already embedded in much of our digital technology and argued untrained use could worsen the environmental impact. 

“If they're prompting [AI] 10, 20 times just to get the answer they want, they've used far more energy than if they understood prompt engineering,” Solomon said. 

Transparency is also important. At NYU, Solomon said the university was careful to ensure prospective students knew they were talking with AI when interacting with its chatbot — so much so that they named the tool “NYUAdmissionsBot” to make its virtual nature as explicit as possible. 

“We wanted to inform them every step of the way that you were talking to AI when you were using this chatbot,” Solomon said. 

‘You need time to test it’

After all the big questions are asked and answered, and an AI solution chosen, institutions still have the not-so-small task of rolling the technology out in a way that is effective in both the short and long term. 

The rollout of NYU’s chatbot in spring 2024 took “many, many months,” according to Solomon. “If a vendor tells you, ‘We will be up in a week,’ multiply that by like a factor of 10. You need time to test it.” The extra time can ensure a feature is actually ready when it’s unveiled for use. 

The upside to all that time and effort for something like an admissions chatbot, Solomon noted, is that the AI feature can be available around-the-clock to answer inquiries, and it can quickly address the most commonly asked questions that would normally be flooding the inboxes of admissions staff. 

But even after a successful initial rollout of an AI tool or feature, operations staff aren’t done. 

Solomon described a continuous cycle of developing key metrics of success, running controlled experiments with an AI product and carefully examining data from AI use, including by having a human looking over the shoulder of the robots. In NYU’s case, this included looking at responses the chatbot gave to inquiries from prospective students.

“AI is evolving rapidly. So every six months, you really do want to test again, because it will be different,” Solomon said. “We did find that as we moved forward, we could decrease the number of hard-coded responses and rely more on the generative. And that was because the AI got better, but also because our knowledge got better.”

Solomon recommended regular error checks and performance audits and warned against overreliance on AI. 

“AI is not a rotisserie. You don't set it and forget it. It will burn it down,” she said. “It's changing too fast.”

Younger job seekers are more concerned than their older counterparts about AI’s effect on their skill sets and education, according to an Indeed report published April 21. The job site commissioned a Harris Poll survey of 772 U.S. adult workers and job seekers with an associate’s degree or higher for the report.

Businesses show no signs of slowing AI adoption, and already almost half of Gen Z job seekers say the technology's adoption has made their college education irrelevant, compared with about one-third of Millennials. About 1 in 5 Gen Z and baby boomer survey takers say the same of their college education.

The ongoing push to deemphasize college degree requirements in job postings has led half of Gen Z job seekers to view their degrees as a waste of time and money, according to the report.  

The deluge of AI adoption in the workplace has influenced in-demand roles, salary trends and even the C-suite’s purview. The effect is far from over, with younger generations grappling with the potential for additional disruptions ahead.

Every job currently posted on Indeed's job board will likely experience some level of exposure to generative AI and the changes it represents, according to Indeed Senior Talent Strategy Advisor Linsey Fagan.

"For any organization to succeed with AI, every single employee needs to have a basic understanding of AI and how their company uses it," Fagan said in an email to CIO Dive. "Leaders play a crucial role in this shift by assessing their teams, listening to individual needs, and supporting their development."

One way CIOs have responded to the wave of change is by creating upskilling programs. Technology vendors, eager to remove the obstacles toward enterprise adoption, have also deployed training programs open to the general public.

Online learning and training platform O'Reilly found skyrocketing demand for AI-specific training last year, according to a January report. The number of professionals seeking training on AI principles more than quadrupled last year, the firm said.

"To truly unlock the potential of AI, organizations must invest in their people, offering training, hands-on experiences and opportunities to explore new tools in a supportive environment," Fagan said. "Organizations need employees to be motivated to try these tools and want to apply them in their day to day."

Microcredentials are often touted as a way for students and working adults to learn skills and move into new industries without the same time and money commitment required to pursue a college degree. But some college officials are working to pair microcredentials with a traditional four-year education. 

The University of Texas System expanded its partnership with Coursera in late 2024 to provide some 15,000 students across its five health campuses with free access to the online learning platform’s microcredentials. Through the partnership, students, faculty, staff, and alumni have access to Coursera’s Career Academy, which offers some 50 professional certificate programs with companies like Google and Microsoft. 

System officials say they hope the microcredentials help students build upon their college classwork to succeed in the workforce. The results of pairing microcredentials with degree programs have not been fully studied, but higher education experts say they may offer benefits for students. 

The partnership has been active on the UT System’s nine academic campuses since August 2023 following a pilot launched the year before. Together, the campuses collectively enroll some 245,000 students. The partnership has so far cost the UT System about $1.7 million dollars. 

When microcredentials are tied to specific companies, like Google or Microsoft, it could signal information about their skills to employers beyond what they learn from classwork, said Kelvin Bentley, an official at the UT system. That might be especially influential for students at smaller campuses, said Bentley, who is the program manager for the Texas Credentials for the Future, an initiative that focuses on expanding short-term credentials across the system and includes the Coursera partnership. 

“We've just been really excited to be able to provide these microcredential courses to our students with the hope being that the combination of microcredentials from industry partners and the durable skills that they're learning from existing course work will help set them apart in the world of work,” Bentley said. 

What’s next for the program?

UT campuses are exploring how they might award credit to students for professional certificates earned through the Coursera partnership. If campuses award credit, the online courses may be able to stack within degree programs. 

The system is also hoping to find new ways to boost credential completion among participating students. Since the partnership launched at the original nine campuses, more than 14,000 students and alumni have begun a microcredential. However, only about 1,600 have completed one. In total, about 1,960 microcredentials have been completed. 

“Many students, because it's no cost, have signed up,” Bentley said. “What we're doing is just trying to work with our campuses is to find ways for them to connect with their learners to help them actually finish the microcredentials that they've enrolled in.”

Giving credit for microcredentials and integrating them formally into programs could make them more valuable to students, said Naomi Boyer, senior vice president of digital transformation at Education Design Lab. It could also encourage completion. College students may not see the immediate value in completing a credential when they’re already working towards a degree. 

“As long as it’s an extra add-on, it’s those people who have initiative, who already have gumption to find their pathway, who are going to take advantage of the opportunities,” she said.

Will the partnership boost student outcomes? 

It’s an open question whether microcredentials can improve the labor market outcomes of college students. Four-fifths of hiring managers said that alternative credentials could show skills or knowledge areas, according to a 2021 survey of over 1,000 respondents by InsideTrack and UPCEA. More than 70% said employees would be more likely to be promoted if they earned an industry-relevant short-term credential. 

It’s great to offer free courses for the personal enrichment of students, said Shalin Jyotishi, managing director of the Future of Work and Innovation Economy Initiative at think tank New America. But if college leaders want microcredentials to provide more value, they need to understand which courses may carry currency with the employers who are likely to hire their graduates, he said.

“We need to know if these certificates are going to add anything to a student's experience before we recommend them or embed them in programs,” Jyotishi said. “We have to be a little bit intentional about implementation. Otherwise, it might just be a waste of time and money.”

Colleges could use labor market data to see which credentials or skills are mentioned in job advertisements. Institutions could also work with regional employers to learn about which courses or skills they might find useful, Jyotishi said. 

The UT system is hoping to use a longitudinal study to help uncover whether microcredentials help students in the labor market. Using unemployment data, UT can track alumni and their labor market outcomes, which may provide insight into the role of credentials in their job success. 

Though college leaders should be thoughtful about whether they want to recommend microcredentials to their students, Texas is one of the states moving in the right direction on workforce training, Jyotishi said. 

“Higher education institutions are doing a lot of great things to evolve and be more responsive to the labor market,” he said. “Texas is on the forefront of this, without a doubt.” 

Ever since the public release of ChatGPT in November 2022, artificial intelligence has dominated conversations related to higher education and the future of work in the U.S. Now, some colleges are investing significantly in AI-related programs, from specific degrees to integrating AI literacy into other disciplines.   

They are doing so for several reasons. 

Those include responding to predictions that the American workforce will rely on AI much more in the future. For students who would like to work with the development and science of AI, that can mean jobs — some of which are fairly high-paying. For students in other disciplines, that could mean they need to demonstrate AI-related knowledge or competency to land jobs. 

“I don't know how higher ed could not embrace AI literacy as a learning outcome,” said C. Edward Watson, vice president for digital innovation at the American Association of Colleges and Universities. “We can't not lean in to provide students with the skills that we know they're now expected to have when they graduate.”

But institutions may also be responding to student interest in AI. As many institutions deal with enrollment declines, that can be a powerful motivator. 

“There are only a finite number of students and they're going to decide where they're going to go based upon which institutions will best prepare them for life beyond college,” Watson said. 

How are colleges approaching AI?

So far, around 100 universities have launched some sort of credential in AI, said Luke Koslosky, a research analyst with the Center for Security and Emerging Technology. 

And interest appears to be growing around the topic. Conferrals of AI-related undergraduate and master’s degrees — which include computer science and cybersecurity — have increased about 120% since 2011, according to a 2023 report from CSET. In 2021, colleges conferred over 140,000 bachelor’s degrees and roughly 70,000 master’s degrees releated to AI. 

AI credentials typically live within computer science or engineering disciplines. The University of Pennsylvania, for example, offers both bachelor’s and master’s engineering degrees in AI. And some institutions offer AI-related minors. 

Other colleges are taking a different approach — integrating some AI science or AI literacy into other disciplines. 

That’s how the University of Florida is approaching its AI initiative, which aims to integrate AI into every undergraduate major and graduate program. So far, the university has incorporated AI education into a handful of undergraduate programs, including majors in information systems and data science and a minor in bioinformatics. It’s also added AI education to several graduate programs. 

Additionally, University of Florida offers a general AI certificate and discipline-specific AI certificates in hospitality, geography and public health. 

The AAC&U is also embarking on a project to help departments integrate AI into their programs. The higher education association is working with 124 institutions through its Institute on AI, Pedagogy and the Curriculum, launched in September. 

Departments submitted proposals about what they would like to achieve as far as integrating AI literacy into their curricula to receive assistance through virtual events and mentorship. Teams had to involve at least five people on a campus, preferably with one senior leader. 

“It was becoming arguable that maybe in addition to being able to write well and speak well and to be a critical thinker that additional, essential learning that should occur in college may have to do with developing AI literacies,” said Watson, the director of the institute.

The process can be difficult because faculty need to be competent in AI. Then, teams need to decide in which classes they’re going to teach AI literacy, what assignments they are going to give, and whether to focus on AI generally or in a more discipline-specific way. 

Choosing to invest

Despite the growing interest in the emerging technology, investing in AI-related programming is often difficult. For one, depending on the level and focus, it can be expensive. AI curricula can require colleges to hire qualified faculty and staff and pay for significant computing power. 

That’s why many of the institutions that are investing in AI, such as Carnegie Mellon University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are well-resourced with large endowments, Koslosky said. 

Other institutions are pursuing partnerships with industry to make their goals possible. University of Florida, for instance, has a partnership with chipmaker Nvidia, which includes a $50 million gift from the company and one of its cofounders. Arizona State University is partnering with OpenAI, to provide enterprise subscriptions to ChatGPT for approved faculty and staff.

Stony Brook University, part of the State University of New York system, recently expanded an AI institute into a universitywide initiative, which will focus on research and applications in healthcare, infrastructure, education and finance. The university is investing about $15 million, which includes support from Empire AI, a college research consortium focused on AI and heavily funded by the state.

Stony Brook Provost Carl Lejuez said that “$15 million is nothing and a lot of money all at the same time.”

“We’re seeing companies struggle with this immensely because they’re having to make decisions about — are they going to fall behind so far that they’re not going to be able to compete?” Lejuez added. “But in the meantime they’re spending millions and in some cases billions in cases where they’re not generating real revenue yet.”

Whether an investment in AI programming is right for an institution will likely depend on its circumstances, including its resources, faculty, mission and connections to industry.

“If you're a major research university, you're going to be really far behind if you are not investing in this,” Lejuez said. “For research universities, it's an absolute necessity.”

For other institutions though, a big AI investment might be riskier.

“If your school doesn't have a huge computer science department and doesn't have a lot of industry connections to companies using AI or building AI, then you shouldn't drop everything to stand up a brand new AI program right now,” Koslosky said.

Additionally, investments in AI are so far untested. Although many business leaders believe AI is going to change the American workforce, that transformation hasn’t fully come to pass. Although current research predicts the number of AI jobs trending upwards, what those jobs look like might change. That means that trying to integrate AI into other disciplines is the financially safer approach, Koslosky said.

“Schools are struggling with lots of things and balancing competing priorities,” he said. “AI is important and will continue to be, but it's not the only important thing.”