Thinking & Advocacy
Higher education stands on the brink of one of the most rapid and profound technological transformations in decades: the meteoric rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI). At Achieving the Dream, we believe community colleges have a critical opportunity — and responsibility — to lead this transformation in ways that center equity, student success, and institutional readiness. As this technology reshapes everything from how we learn to how we work, our focus must be on helping students and colleges alike to not just keep up but to lead with purpose.
Research tells us that AI is being adopted faster than any other previous transformative technology, including the PC and the internet. We also know that students are adopting AI at a much faster clip than our staff, faculty, and institutions.
Like many organizational leaders in other sectors, college leaders are trying to understand the implications of AI and its ethical implementation for virtually every area of their operations — from outreach and marketing to teaching and learning and from data management and digital transformation to administrative services.
In fact, our Network colleges’ recent responses to our Annual Network Reflection survey show that, compared to last year, institutions in 2024–2025 are demonstrating broader and more structured exploration of AI across academic and operational domains. While AI use in 2023–2024 was largely limited to isolated pilots and exploratory task forces, the current year shows wider experimentation, particularly in instructional design, student services, administrative automation, and institutional research.
Faculty are using AI tools to design rubrics, assessments, and inclusive pedagogical strategies, while AI chatbots are increasingly used to support admissions and advising. Colleges are also beginning to incorporate AI into strategic planning and predictive analytics, and grassroots innovation has grown through faculty-led pilots using tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. However, most institutions are still in early stages of adoption and are working to establish formal governance structures and training programs, marking a shift from curiosity to cautious implementation.
And, while interest in the potential of AI continues to grow across the ATD Network, college respondents expressed a wide range of concerns about the risks, challenges, and ethical implications of its use in higher education. Colleges emphasized the need to approach AI adoption with caution, ensuring that innovation does not outpace institutional readiness, academic standards, or equity commitments.
No doubt, the emergence of AI is forcing us to ask new questions: What will the impact of AI be on various professions, and what does that mean in terms of programs that need to be developed, changed, or even eliminated based on labor market projections? And ultimately, how do our institutions develop the capacities needed to take advantage of the potential of AI for improving student success?
ATD’s recently commissioned AI for All Task Force grappled with these questions as they worked to develop a strategy outline for ATD Network colleges and others to use to systematically address the implications of AI for our institutions. The task force, made up of distinguished ATD Network presidents, AI experts, and national business and industry leaders and chaired by ATD Senior Fellow Gregory Haile, recently released its recommendations.
The report, Creating the AI-Enabled Community College: A Road Map for Using Generative AI To Accelerate Student Success, is based on the core belief that community colleges must engage with AI both strategically and with a sense of urgency. If we don’t “take immediate steps to integrate AI across the institution,” the report asserts, “students without this exposure and educational opportunity are at risk of falling further behind, but at an even faster pace.”
The aim of the report is to help colleges build the capacities needed to help students develop “AI agility,” which it defines as the “capacity to evolve with AI.” [AI agility], the report says, “builds on AI literacy but goes further, equipping learners to continuously adapt their skills, workflows, and decision-making as AI capabilities expand. It enables ongoing engagement with AI tools and active learning that prepares students not only to fill today’s entry-level roles, but also to grow with the technology throughout their careers.” To help position colleges for this work, the report outlines eight action areas of work.
- Demonstrating Strategic Leadership
- Establishing Ethical AI Governance
- Developing Assessments To Measure AI User Impact
- Building Staff Capabilities
- Supporting Professional Learning and Faculty Engagement
- Redesigning the Curriculum
- Leveraging AI for Workforce Alignment
- Investing in Student Success Through AI
Each area includes approaches and actions colleges should consider as they work to adopt AI. It is intended to be a roadmap for strategic planning and a framework for how ATD can deepen our capacity to support colleges in adopting generative AI.
ATD is already threading AI through many of our service areas, and many college teams have participated in our recent AI workshop series on using AI to create more inclusive access to AI and more student-centered practices. We have been particularly focused on providing research and strategies on how colleges can enhance teaching and learning with AI, since this is an area that has been and will continue to be central to student success.
Practicing what we preach, ATD has an internal AI team that is working internally to identify how AI can help us be more efficient and responsive as an organization in implementing AI strategies, including meeting the professional learning needs of our staff and coaches. To help us develop deeper and more targeted AI capacity-building supports for our Network colleges, we plan to invite a cross section of ATD college presidents and leaders to join a focus group that will help identify institutions’ greatest needs in supporting AI agility and implementation on college campus.
As I note in the foreword of the report, “the question cannot be whether or not to adopt AI, but rather how colleges can embrace AI in an ethical and equitable way that strengthens their institutional capacity to help more students and communities thrive.” The pace of change may be accelerating, but with collaboration, clarity, and intentionality, we can ensure that AI becomes a tool for expanding — not narrowing — opportunity. ATD stands ready to walk alongside colleges as they navigate this new frontier, building the strategies, skills, and structures that ensure all students can thrive in an AI-enabled world.