Like the advice about eating an elephant, the best way to approach AI integration is to break it down into manageable pieces and take one step at a time.
Change might indeed be constant, but the breadth of disruption fueled by generative artificial intelligence (AI) and the pace at which those disturbances are happening could make even a seasoned technologist dizzy. In June, EDUCAUSE hosted an innovation summit on AI Adoption Across the Institution: Governance, Practice, and Change Strategies, bringing together higher education and industry leaders to understand and grapple with the upheavals they face. Roughly 150 participants gathered for two days in Minneapolis to discuss eight aspects of AI adoption and create action plans to address them:
- Governance structures
- Data governance
- Policy development
- Faculty and staff engagement
- Equitable access
- Operational support
- Evaluation and monitoring
- Change management
Institutions have distinct goals and are at different levels of maturity across these dimensions, and we sought leaders in each area—practitioners who are actively developing solutions—to provide brief case-study presentations about the work being done on their campuses. Hearing the calls for more opportunities for attendees to engage with each other, we balanced these presentations with small-group discussions and private reflection. Everyone entered the small-group discussions knowing they had something to share and something to learn. During each discussion segment, participants summarized their takeaways, highlighting their biggest challenges, current goals and practices, and unanswered questions.
Impediments to AI Integration
Across the discussions, participants repeatedly pointed to persistent challenges that limit meaningful AI integration:
- Lack of a Coherent Strategy and Governance: Many institutions do not yet have a clear, actionable AI strategy, practical guidance, or defined governance structures to manage AI use responsibly.
- Financial Barriers and Equity Concerns: The cost of adopting AI remains a significant hurdle. As one participant put it, “Equity and access are a problem—we don’t want to build, but we can’t afford to buy.” Despite these budget constraints, there is a strong commitment to ensuring equitable access for students.
- Faculty and Staff Engagement: Efforts to involve faculty and staff often stall due to active resistance to AI initiatives, as well as limited levels of AI literacy and comfort with emerging tools.
- Data Governance Risks: Institutions face multiple data-related challenges, including the following:
- Siloed or fragmented data
- Unclear understanding of data sensitivity
- AI contracts and integrations being signed or developed without sufficient review, introducing risks to privacy and security
- Need for Monitoring and Accountability: Demand is growing for mechanisms to continuously monitor and evaluate AI use, balancing innovation with robust privacy protections.
- Societal and Workforce Questions: Beyond local issues, participants voiced concerns about preparing students for a workforce increasingly reliant on AI skills and addressing the environmental impacts of widespread AI adoption.
These challenges underline the urgent need for thoughtful planning, cross-campus engagement, and sustainable investment to ensure AI serves higher education equitably and responsibly.
Incentives for AI Integration
Alongside the challenges, summit participants also identified promising opportunities to advance their institutions through thoughtful AI integration:
- Operational Efficiency: Many see AI as a powerful tool to streamline institutional operations and reduce time-consuming administrative burdens.
- Teaching, Learning, and Student Support: Participants showed strong interest in evolving pedagogical practices, enhancing student support services, and equipping students with the skills needed to thrive in an AI-integrated world.
- Data-Driven Decision-Making: AI has the potential to unlock deep, actionable insights from institutional data, improving strategic planning and driving better student outcomes.
- Culture of Innovation and Ethical Integration: Participants emphasized the importance of creating spaces for responsible exploration and adoption of AI, aligning AI initiatives with institutional values, and fostering a culture of innovation, experimentation, and ethical practice.
- Equitable Access and Collaboration: A significant growth area lies in democratizing access to AI tools and expanding opportunities for interinstitutional collaboration to share best practices and resources.
Together, these opportunities show how, with thoughtful leadership and shared commitment, higher education can leverage AI to drive meaningful progress across teaching, operations, and the student experience. Jan Day from Amazon Web Services offered practical advice about how institutions can keep moving forward: “Think big, start small.”
Attending to Change Management
Everyone sits somewhere on the AI spectrum, ranging from fanatic to skeptic. Institutions need to develop and revise policies, create processes and protocols, and build and foster cultures that take disparate views into account. Participants reported having a hard time getting buy-in from executives to address AI governance when they face competing priorities such as budget shortfalls and enrollment declines.
Change management is critical for EDUCAUSE in supporting the higher education community’s capacity to navigate complex transitions like AI adoption. EDUCAUSE has an ongoing collaboration with Prosci that brings proven methodologies and expert guidance to institutional leaders working to lead change more intentionally and effectively. At the summit, Tim Creasy, Prosci‘s chief innovation officer, presented a “by me, for me, or with me” framework to consider how AI use intersects with one’s work. Using this model, people list everyday “by me” tasks they will continue to perform without AI, “for me” tasks they will use AI to complete, and “with me” tasks for which they will use AI as a partner or assistant.
Generative AI’s emergence has revealed that at many institutions, the approach to change management in general is ad hoc or nonexistent, leading to a sense of dysfunction when AI adoption is explored. One speaker from the Q&A panel shared this advice: Frame the conversation in terms of what your leader finds most meaningful.
Steps You Can Take
No matter where you are in your AI journey, you can take certain actions right now. As you “think big but start small,” here are some steps you can take to find your people and leverage useful resources.
- Deepen the conversation on your campus with the EDUCAUSE Generative AI Readiness Assessment.
- EDUCAUSE offers an online program on Teaching with AI designed to deepen participants’ understanding of AI and empower them to seamlessly integrate it into their curricula. The course is available every two weeks.
- Join the conversation with the EDUCAUSE AI Community Group.
- Keep up with the latest AI research and publications on the EDUCAUSE Artificial Intelligence (AI) library page.
- Watch for Learning Labs, webinars, and other EDUCAUSE virtual events on AI.
A Different Kind of Summit
In a post-summit reflection, “Not Just Panels and Slides,” speaker and participant Joe Sabado described the experience as an inclusive space for communal learning, echoing many of the positive comments in the event evaluation. The collective emotional message from summit participants painted a picture of institutions grappling with AI from a position of anxiety over rapid, risky, and under-governed change, compounded by frustration at the lack of clear, actionable guidance, stress over financial and equity barriers, a general sense of unpreparedness for the profound shifts ahead, and deep ethical contemplation about AI’s role in education and society. Many of the speakers echoed the common sentiment that “we’re all in this together,” regardless of where each institution sits on the spectrum of AI readiness.
Kathe Pelletier is Senior Director of Community Programs at EDUCAUSE.
Kevin Kelly is a consultant, author, and Interim Executive Director of the CCC Digital Center for Innovation, Transformation and Equity.
© 2025 EDUCAUSE. The content of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License.