Much of modern education was built to help students get ready for existing systems of work. But those systems are changing fast. Studies⁠(opens in a new window) predict nearly 40% of the core skills workers rely on will change, largely because of AI. To thrive in this Intelligence Age, students need to build agency: the ability to learn continuously, solve hard problems, and create new economic opportunities for themselves with AI.

Agency does not emerge from basic AI use alone. Students must progress from simple tasks to deeper applications such as studying, building, creating, coding, and managing agents. But among college-age users, we see a widening global “capability overhang,” defined as the gap between what AI tools can do and how people actually use them. Even advanced student users still operate roughly 90% to 99% below how power users of ChatGPT are engaging with our tools.

Educational institutions play a central role in closing that gap. Faculty and educators can help students harness AI’s full potential by embedding authentic AI use cases into coursework—assignments that use AI and mirror real professional work, such as analyzing a market, designing a product concept, evaluating a policy trade-off, or building a simple agent workflow. The institutions that help students move from basic use to this real capability can help drive broad distribution of the benefits of AI across learners. Supporting a wide range of institutions with the necessary tools to meet this moment is a core focus of our work in education.

One in three college-aged young adults⁠ in the U.S. use ChatGPT regularly, but few are using it to its full potential. Understanding how students move from basic use toward deeper capability development is a central focus of our learning research.⁠