What a College Tour Revealed About the Future of Work: We Are Not Ready for AI
This past weekend, I took my daughter on a series of college tours, an exciting milestone in her journey and a reflective one in mine. These visits were filled with the usual comparisons: campus size, academic offerings, dorm life, and extracurriculars. But the most telling insights came from the questions I asked about how each university is approaching artificial intelligence. As someone focused on the intersection of AI, leadership, and organizational performance, I couldn’t help but view these institutions as microcosms of the future workforce. And what I saw left me deeply concerned.
Across nearly every campus, the response to AI was either vague or unstructured. Some schools had adopted blanket prohibitions, forbidding using tools like ChatGPT in academic work. Others left decisions entirely up to individual faculty members. What was most striking, however, was the overall lack of cohesion or direction. No strategic framework. No institutional vision. No clear acknowledgment of AI as a transformative force that will inevitably shape the careers these students are being prepared for. In most cases, it was clear that administrators and faculty were still operating from a reactive posture and treating AI as either a threat to academic integrity or a passing novelty. This fragmented and inconsistent approach mirrors a broader pattern already evident in the corporate world, and that parallel is where the real danger lies.
Just as universities are failing to equip students with structured, responsible ways to interact with AI, many organizations are similarly unprepared. Some companies still operate without any AI policy at all. Others adopt a laissez-faire approach, where individual teams or departments are free to experiment independently. While these grassroots efforts can yield innovation, they also introduce real risk. Without an overarching strategy, companies face duplication of efforts, tool proliferation, ethical blind spots, and a lack of accountability. Worse still, they lose the opportunity to build AI maturity across the organization in a way that aligns with broader goals, mitigates risk, and improves return on investment.
This is not conjecture, as it has been well documented. While a majority of organizations have begun exploring generative AI use cases, only a small fraction have done so with any level of scale or institutional governance. The result is isolated experimentation that often lacks metrics, strategic alignment, or long-term sustainability. Meanwhile, digital literacy and AI competence have been identified as some of the most essential skillsets for the future of work. Yet, few academic institutions or employers have fully embraced this challenge by developing structured, scalable learning paths to build that capacity. The gap between aspiration and execution continues to widen.
What we are witnessing is a failure to connect the dots. Educational institutions should prepare students to use AI responsibly and lead the integration across industries. Corporations should actively evaluate how AI tools align with their workflows, data governance models, and ethical standards. But instead of a shared playbook or a framework for collaboration, we have isolated silos. Faculty are unsure how to talk about AI in their classrooms. Managers are unsure how to guide their teams. Executives are unsure where to invest. This uncertainty breeds inefficiency, resistance, and, in some cases, reputational and legal risk.
The answer is not to ban AI, nor is it to allow unchecked experimentation. What we urgently need is literacy. Literacy in what AI is and is not. Literacy in how to use it responsibly. Literacy in understanding its limitations, ethical dimensions, and implications for decision-making, productivity, and competitive advantage. This literacy cannot be achieved by assigning it to a single course or department. It must be embedded across disciplines, across roles, and across strategic initiatives. This kind of integration requires planning, investment, and, above all, leadership.
The college tour reminded me that the future does not start at graduation. It starts now. The absence of consistent, informed approaches to AI in universities is not just an academic issue but a workforce issue. If we continue sending graduates into equally unprepared companies, we compound the risk. We increase the likelihood that AI will be used poorly, adopted inconsistently, or governed ineffectively. And we miss the chance to harness its potential in ways that are ethical, inclusive, and impactful.
Organizations and academic institutions alike must stop treating AI as a peripheral concern. It is not an elective. It is a core curriculum for the modern world. We need alignment. We need strategy. And we need a willingness to move past fear and into informed action. Otherwise, we are setting up the next generation not to lead in a world shaped by AI but to struggle through it, one misstep at a time.