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More than two decades ago, I advocated enabling students to follow the evolving developments and topics in the classes I taught through news blogs. I called the concept “semester without end.”

The new year may bring a host of virtual assistants and administrative staff to higher education. They will begin as assistants to humans, then over time they will evolve into autonomous AI staff members.

A number of factors are converging to create a huge storm. Generative AI advances, massive federal policy shifts, broad societal and economic changes, and the demographic cliff combine to create uncertainty today and change tomorrow.

Anthropic last month took the lead in providing early access to basic AI agents for the masses. This is a huge leap forward from the chat bots that have dominated early generative AI.

We may be just months away from an influx of embodied AI robots. Those are, in many cases, humanoid bots powered by autonomous AI.

The app initiates personalized conversations and offers responses without a prompt. This signals a shift toward agentic AI, where models act more like colleagues.

The state of the art of generative artificial intelligence is changing at lightning speed. Advances come by the hour, not just by the day. How might this play out in higher ed?

Generative AI has enormous potential to advance, enhance and expand higher education in the future. Few realize how AI already is improving what we do today in myriad ways.