Industry Corner: The AI classroom: Personalized learning, streamlined admin

Key points:

• AI is reshaping education through personalized learning, operational efficiency, and evolving teacher roles across K–12 and higher education.

• Institutions are embedding AI thoughtfully to enhance human judgment, ethics, and critical thinking rather than replacing educators.

• Graduates are increasingly expected to enter the workforce fluent in AI tools, prompt design, and real-world application to stay competitive.

Industry corner is a monthly series on what company leaders believe are the most important best practices in their sector or organization to ensure growth and sustainable success.

February 2026 – Artificial intelligence is building the future of U.S. education — quietly, quickly, and at scale. Learning is becoming increasingly personalized, while administrative work is being reduced, and teacher roles are fundamentally shifting.

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For educators like Pine Crest School President Dana Markham, a future where AI agents and GPT tutors have a prominent role in student learning is not that far away. 

“I imagine classrooms 10 years from now where every student has their own intelligent learning companion, like an AI learning assistant,” Marhkam told Invest:. “AI tutors will adjust lessons in real-time, offer instant feedback, and even spark curiosity with immersive virtual experiences.” 

According to Markham, early versions of these tools are already being used by faculty and staff at Pine Crest’s campuses in Boca Raton and Fort Lauderdale. 

Driving change

For academic organizations, this means delivering fully customized learning paths for every student, as well as adjusting content, pacing, and feedback in real time. Today, however, AI’s applications are extending beyond simple instruction, encompassing both operations and strategy as well. 

According to Isabelle Bajeux-Besnainou, dean of the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, “AI is unquestionably the biggest driver of change” across operations, teaching, and outreach.

At Carnegie Mellon, for instance, AI is being embedded not just in coursework but in how the school operates on a day-to-day basis. 

“We’ve been intentional about using AI tools to improve efficiency so our people can focus on more meaningful tasks,” she told Invest:.

One example is admissions. The Tepper School of Business is deploying generative AI tools to handle repetitive admissions inquiries, freeing staff to focus on deeper engagement with prospective students.

“These are often repeated questions,” Bajeux-Besnainou said. “Using AI to handle them frees up our staff to have deeper, more personalized conversations with candidates.” 

The result, as Bajeux-Benainou explains, is not pure automation, but rather a reallocation of human resources toward higher-value pursuits.

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New demands

At the same time, however, this shift is placing new demands on educators themselves, rapidly redefining traditional roles. For one, teachers are increasingly expected to understand prompt engineering, evaluate coursework through AI, and integrate these tools responsibly into curricula.

As a result, the balance between personalization and standardization is one of the major challenges of academic institutions today. 

In fact, many education leaders believe that over reliance on AI can lead to loss of autonomy, isolation, and creativity fatigue within the profession, per a recent Unesco report. 

In response, Bajeux-Besnainou emphasized that ethics and critical thinking must grow alongside machine capability.

For Carnegie Mellon, the broader goal is not to chase novelty, but to embed AI thoughtfully across disciplines while preserving human judgment.

Yet, with AI becoming more embedded across nearly every profession, the expectation for today’s graduates is changing.

“Any student who graduates today needs to have a thorough understanding of how to utilize AI to be more efficient and to make their work and their outcomes more impactful,” John Nicklow, president of Florida Tech, told Invest:.

He noted that the pace of technological change is becoming so fast that institutions could not afford to graduate students whose skills lag behind the market,” he said.

Workforce of tomorrow

Nicklow also acknowledged that higher education remains under scrutiny across the country, but maintained that its core value proposition remains strong, given the growing demand for AI-skilled talent.   

“We have to stay aligned with where the economy is going … in an AI-driven world,” he said. “Across industries, we see it as both an employer need and an essential student skill.”

“Employers know students use AI, they just want them to use it well,” added Jennifer Roy, department chair and associate professor of business administration at Waynesburg University, in an interview with Invest:.“It’s not a basic search engine; students need to understand how to craft prompts and manage output effectively.” 

Roy added that early exposure to industry through internships and experiential learning is essential to easing student anxiety about AI’s impact on entry-level jobs.

For the workforce of tomorrow, the rise of AI inside the classroom means staying ahead in a rapidly changing economy.  

The implications across industries are clear. A quarter of jobs around the world are expected to change due to AI, with as many as 83 million workers displaced by 2027, according to a 2024 WEF report.

This means AI is being increasingly ingrained in the American economy, all the way down to determining how students learn, how teachers teach, and how academic institutions build future talent.

Want more? Read the Invest: reports.