The 17th annual ASU+GSV Summit convened this week in San Diego under the theme “The Power of Fusion” — and the fusion on everyone’s mind was artificial intelligence meeting education.
Arizona State University President Michael Crow set the tone early: AI must be reframed as a tool for individual empowerment, not a threat. “At some point, we have to reverse the logic that the tech bros are talking about with AI as this sort of Death Star image,” Crow told attendees. “In the long run, each person’s going to be individually and personally empowered — if the tools can be designed in a way where they help the individual to learn.”
It’s a compelling vision. The question is whether anyone is building it fast enough — and for whom.
The Equity Gap Is Real — And Growing
Former U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo didn’t mince words about the current state of play: “70-plus percent of Americans are afraid of AI. When they hear AI, they hear, ‘I’m going to lose my job.’”
Her prescription: companies must partner with universities on lifelong learning, and the U.S. needs to lead the global AI competition while addressing that anxiety with “a plan and with action, not just empathy.”
Former NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan went further, arguing that economic incentives need to change: “If there are economic incentives for companies to retrain, redeploy, lean into everything that we’re talking about instead of just hitting the easy button and laying folks off, I think they’ll do it.”
The subtext was clear: right now, the incentives point the other way. Companies like Oracle are laying off tens of thousands to fund AI infrastructure — not retraining them.
The Agentic Self: will.i.am’s Vision
The most striking concept to emerge from the summit came from an unlikely source: musician and tech founder will.i.am, who is also a professor of practice at ASU teaching a course called “The Agentic Self.”
His argument: current AI tools don’t belong to you. “You use ChatGPT, which is a great product, but it’s not yours. Meanwhile, all your personal information is in every company’s data center. These companies know you more than you know yourself.”
His solution — the “agentic self” — is an AI persona that can reason, adapt, and accomplish tasks on behalf of its creator while reflecting that person’s values, voice, and goals. He called it “liberation.”
“This era is giving every single person a torch to illuminate their path through this digital-verse,” will.i.am said. “We need to spend more time human to human.”
It’s an ambitious idea. Whether it becomes reality or remains a summit soundbite depends entirely on implementation — and who gets access.
Lessons from Korea and Kazakhstan
Crow also highlighted two countries that have bet big on education as economic strategy.
Ju-Ho Lee, former acting president of South Korea and longest-serving education minister, described how Korea invested in vocational schools and STEM universities from the 1970s onward — achieving both industrialization and democratization. But he acknowledged the cost: “There is very high competition to enter the best universities, and the cost of private tutoring and the stress and burden of parents and students to enter into the best university is really strong.”
Sayasat Nurbek, Kazakhstan’s minister of science and higher education, described a different model: bringing international universities to establish campuses, creating an academic hub that now hosts 35,000 international students. “We’ve put four key values as our national priorities: education, research, human capital and innovation.”
The contrast with countries that have no national AI education strategy was unmistakable.
The Community College Imperative
Sonya Christian, chancellor of the California Community Colleges system serving 2.3 million students, framed AI access as a moral obligation: “If we don’t show up and find the tools to build that human agency using the agentic self, then what we are doing is part of the problem of widening power gaps, of widening wealth gaps, of widening health gaps.”
Her approach is pragmatic: create demonstration projects with faculty as co-developers before asking for state funding. “When we are co-developing with faculty, that ownership automatically builds the trust and brings it into the classroom.”
It’s a model New Zealand could learn from — especially given the current gap in national AI curriculum and teacher training.
The New Zealand Context
For Aotearoa, the summit’s messages land with particular force. New Zealand currently has:
- No national AI curriculum for schools
- Patchy teacher training on AI tools — largely ad hoc and volunteer-driven
- No binding commitments from government on AI education integration
- Growing concern about equity between schools that can afford AI tools and those that cannot
The ASU+GSV summit showed what’s possible when education leaders take AI integration seriously. Korea’s decades-long investment, Kazakhstan’s international campus model, and California’s community college approach all offer different pathways.
But summits don’t teach students. Lesson plans do. And right now, New Zealand’s teachers are largely on their own.
SOURCES
- ASU News: ASU+GSV Summit brings experts together to discuss AI, education equity
- ASU+GSV Summit 2026 (asugsvsummit.com)
