How should higher-ed institutions prepare students for an automated future?

Jeff Phillips,
Professor, Kahlert School of Computing

Calculators didn’t eliminate the need to understand mathematics; they accelerated our ability and accuracy. AI is leading to similar interfaces for generating language and code. The challenge is that it produces answers even with ambiguity or incomplete information, often with over-confidence. So the burden falls on the most fundamental human skills: creativity, ethical introspection, and critical thinking. The human role is to ask the right questions and verify the veracity of the output.

Himanshu Mishra,
Royal L. Garff Endowed Chair in Marketing, Associate Dean of AI, David Eccles School of Business

Five years ago, the question for a business graduate was, “Can you find the answer?” Now it’s, “Can you direct a system that produces a fluent, confident answer and then determine if it’s correct?” What separates an AI-fluent graduate is not knowledge of specific tools, since tools change quickly. It’s judgment: when to use AI, how to guide it, what to trust, and what to retain. Business fundamentals matter more, not less, because AI can produce analysis that sounds convincing even when it’s wrong.

Kenneth Collins,
Assistant Professor, Department of Film & Media Arts

For the first time, students can make films with no ceiling on their ambitions. Distant planets, crowds, creatures, things that once required a big budget and months of post-production are now within reach with only a laptop and some AI credits. But the tools are the easy part; they’ll be obsolete by graduation anyway. The more valuable skills are taste, a sharp eye, strong opinions, and the patience to reject far more outputs than you keep. A point of view is the part students take out into the world.

Elizabeth Callaway,
Associate Professor, Department of English

AI affects education, labor, relationships, creativity, and civic life, so decisions about it can’t be left to technical experts alone. A humanities education prepares students to take part in those conversations—to weigh competing values, learn from history, and imagine alternative futures. It pushes them to ask deeper questions: not just how to make AI safer or more efficient, but what problems it should solve, whose interests it serves, and what kind of human flourishing we want it to support.