6 Roles Every University President Must Play to Lead AI Transformation

AI is already reshaping how your institution teaches, operates and delivers value. For higher ed presidents, the question is no longer ‘if AI’. It’s whether AI will reshape the institution through scattered adoption, or through a planful strategy intentionally tied to mission, value and long-term resilience.

Higher education has entered a period in which long-standing political, demographic, cultural and financial pressures are converging with the accelerating impact of AI. AI is amplifying those pressures and compressing the timeframe leaders have to respond.

As a university president, what must you personally lead in this shift?

Corporate leaders confronting the same disruption offer a useful starting point.

According to Gary Cohn, vice chairman of IBM, in their 2026 global study, “the CEO’s role has always been to lead through disruption. What AI changes is the velocity and consequences of leadership. Successful organizations will treat AI not as a technology, but as a new operating model.”

Christoph Schweizer, CEO of BCG claims that “AI is not confined to IT or innovation teams - it’s reshaping strategy and operations from the top down with CEOs taking a leading role.”

For higher education, that places AI strategy squarely within the president’s sphere. It cannot be delegated to the CIO, confined to a task force or managed as another technology implementation. AI reaches across institutional strategy, academic quality, workforce design, student experience, operating models and brand.

Many university leaders understand the urgency. Inside Higher Ed’s 2026 survey found that 48% of presidents said AI will have the greatest impact on higher education by 2030 – more than enrollment shifts and even slightly more than financial pressures.

To effectively lead your AI transformation, you do not need to become an AI technologist. You do need to set the AI vision, model the learning, build the institution’s capacity for change, and champion the tough changes required to responsibly usher AI into the university culture.

Here are six interconnected AI leadership roles you can embrace:

1. AI Visionary & Storyteller

As the university leader, you are responsible for defining how AI will advance the institution’s mission, strengthen its value and reshape its operations. Your cabinet, faculty and staff should inform the vision, but you must ultimately set it.

Your vision should answer two key questions:

• Why does AI matter for our campus?

• What does AI success look like? 

The answers to these questions clarify what becomes possible for students, faculty, and staff by embracing AI, while being honest about the risks and tradeoffs.

While setting the vision is important, sharing it – continuously – in ways that inspire action is even more critical. The best way to do this is through story.

Story is one of the most powerful ways to shift mindsets and beliefs. Stories help people connect intangible ideas with concrete examples. Your vision stories start with “Imagine when …”, or “Today we ___; tomorrow with AI, we will be able to ___.”

When the president, cabinet members, deans and department leaders share consistent vision stories, the narrative has a compounding effect creating a shared understanding of the purpose, goal and where AI fits.

2. AI Role Model

To credibly ask the institution to experiment, learn and adapt to AI, presidents need to embrace AI themselves.

McKinsey research tells us that organizations are 5.3 times more likely to achieve transformation success when leaders model the behavior changes they expect from others.

While you do not need to be the most advanced user on campus, you do need enough fluency to use it in innovative ways, ask informed questions, challenge assumptions, and recognize both value and risk.

Becoming a credible AI role model requires a regular learning practice and visible curiosity. Talk openly about using it. Share what you learned or didn’t know. Ask others how they are using it and try out their ideas. Write about where it’s improved your thinking, where it fell short and what you changed because of your experience.

That transparency makes experimentation safer for others and signals that AI fluency is a strategic, campus-wide priority.

3. AI Business Liaison

Connecting the institution to employer and community needs is not a new presidential role. AI just raises its importance and focus.

Many businesses are further along than universities in applying AI to operations and workforce design. Employers are redesigning work faster than most curricula can change. The World Economic Forum reports that employers expect 39% of workers’ core skills to change by 2030, with AI and big data among the fastest-growing skill areas.

Regular engagement with business leaders gives you three advantages: lessons learned from organizations further along, a real-time view of changing talent needs, and insight into how human judgment, communication, ethics and leadership are evolving alongside AI.

Bringing business voices to campus – directly or through stories – provides credible proof points for your AI vision and a clearer view to the realities graduates will soon encounter.

4. AI Resilience Champion

Change agility is the next competitive advantage for higher education, with AI as both a cause and an amplifier.

Change agility is the institution’s collective capacity to adapt continuously without losing strategic coherence, trust or energy. AI’s rapid pace of evolution coupled with the pace of regulatory, social and economic shifts means it’s more critical than ever for institutions to evolve, too.  

Higher education’s governance traditions, distributed authority and commitment to deliberation can make rapid change difficult. Which is precisely why change must begin by setting the tone from the top, even in institutions with tenured faculty and strong traditions of shared governance.

Research conducted in 2024 with more than 100 university leaders by the Pullias Center for Higher Education at University of Southern California, reinforces that leadership context is pivotal to institutional transformation. In higher education, this leadership is not simply positional or authority-based; it is the process of creating the conditions for collective change.

You can be the champion for your campus to start adjusting to a new pace of change by naming change agility as a need, intentionally building change skills across your workforce and reinforcing agile behaviors, both at a personal and institutional level.

It’s worth saying that when it comes to AI, agility does not mean dismissing genuine concerns or asking people to move faster than trust can support. Acknowledge the fears beneath the resistance, including questions about job security, academic integrity, professional identity and the human value of education, and create space for people to be heard.

Then remain firm about the destination: the institution must adapt, and that adaptation must advance the mission rather than compromise it. Empathy shapes how you lead people through change; it does not blur the vision or slow the decisions the future requires.

The final two roles are the most consequential because they challenge deeply held assumptions about institutional and workforce identity. They also hold the greatest potential to create durable value from AI.

5. AI Business Model Innovation Enabler

Demographic and financial pressures already demand new thinking about how your institution delivers value. The good news is that AI is a potential ingredient for your response.

But an AI-enabled advantage will not come from layering tools on an operating model that no longer fits. The president’s role is to enable opportunities and the accountability to explore tough questions such as:

• How can AI help us foster more adaptive programs without losing rigor?

• How can AI make student support more proactive and personal without diminishing the value of human connection?

• How can AI create the capacity needed to package our expertise to reach working adults or employers?

• How much administrative capacity can be redirected toward higher-value human interaction with AI safely managing routine work?

In the 2026-27 school year, many universities are building AI skills into their curriculum; Far fewer have translated AI capabilities into meaningful business-model reinvention.

This is not a call for indiscriminate disruption. It is a call for enabling intentional innovation; for presidents to define the strategic boundaries, commission the cross-functional support, find the funding and protect promising innovative ideas long enough to learn whether they work.

6. AI Workforce Redesign Sponsor

If AI is framed only as a faster way to complete existing tasks, institutions will capture limited value and may intensify staff and faculty anxiety in the process.

The more consequential and value-driven work is redesigning processes around the respective strengths of people and technology. AI can generate, synthesize, classify, automate and detect patterns at scale. People bring context, judgment, empathy, accountability and the ability to navigate ambiguity.

The operating question is not, “Which tasks can AI replace?” It is, “How should workflows change with AI so people can contribute at a higher level?”

AI often shifts responsibility rather than removing it. Someone still needs to verify outputs, protect sensitive information, interpret nuance, make consequential decisions and own the results. That means role descriptions and types of roles, decision-making and performance expectations must also evolve.

When workforce redesign happens quietly or reactively, people imagine worst-case scenarios. When it happens transparently and with employee participation, leaders can increase clarity, surface practical insight and reduce avoidable identity threat.

The president’s role is not to prescribe every position. It is to set the expectation that workforce redesign will be intentional, principled, human-centered and tied to the institution’s AI vision.

Leading AI Transformation with Purpose

No president can carry an AI transformation alone. Faculty, staff, students, technology leaders, boards and external partners all have essential roles. But only the president can hold the full institutional picture: mission, market, culture, operating model, workforce and public trust.

The central question is not whether your university will use AI. It already does.

The leadership choice is whether scattered adoption will shape the institution by default, or whether you will shape it with purpose.

Your role starts with an AI story people can believe, behavior they can see and choices that connect innovation to mission. Then it requires the courage to build resilience, rethink the model and redesign work before external pressure makes those decisions for you.