The Professor’s AI Action Plan

Apply Your Institution’s AI Guidelines

The road to supporting students begins with your institution’s AI strategy. 2025 saw some universities move from supporting AI experimentation to adopting formal AI strategies, directly impacting how professors support students. ^{5, 6} (Corp, 2025; The Ohio State University, 2025). For example, if an institution formally adopted closed-system tools where learners are provided an equitable, level-playing field for using AI, you are free to begin coaching learners on what type of information they are allowed to use with the AI tools provided⁷ (Harvard University Information Technology, n.d.).

And, even if your school has adopted a set of AI technologies, you may need to make yourself aware of any AI tools that are deemed as prohibited, so learners don’t use them by mistake⁸ (George Mason University/ITS, n.d.). Like guiding students on using the internet, you cannot protect them from everything, but leveraging the advice from your IT, library, and learning center colleagues can save learners from installing AI tools that may have been banned because they lack security or privacy features⁹ (Youngkin, 2025).

Take Action Now 

Simple actions you can take to move this goal forward:

• Visit your school website, search for “AI policy,” “academic honesty,” or “generative AI.”
• Message someone from your Center for Teaching & Learning: “Do we have any AI guidelines, recommendations, or workshops?”
• Email your librarian and ask: “Does our library offer guidance on ethical or effective AI use for faculty and students?”

Explore AI On Your Own and Identify Real-World Examples Used In Your Field

It would be difficult to guide a student on how to use the internet if you never used it yourself. Take time to use AI tools, explore, and experiment. The fastest way to understand the pros and cons of AI is to build these tools into your workflow. Paid versions are going to be much more capable than free ones (and be wary of the fine print!). For example, paid can dramatically speed up your scholarly work but understand who has rights to your content afterward. This is one reason it helps to team up with your school’s experts first. They have often vetted AI tools in advance and can tell you which ones are officially adopted as a “closed system,” meaning you can usually use them with course content without risking problems from putting proprietary school information into free AI tools that use your inputs to train their models.

You will also want to stay up to date on how AI is reshaping your industry. If you are short on time, consider integrating exploration of real-world AI use into class time with students. This creates more transparency around AI and moves you further away from the idea of trying to “catch” students using it.

In 2026, you will discover that agentic AI will likely become part of the mainstream discussion as this AI tech offers to complete tasks on your behalf¹⁰ (OpenAI, 2025). An agentic browser (e.g., OpenAI’s Atlas, Opera’s Neon, Perplexity’s Comet) can sit right next to a student’s online homework and automatically read the assignment, search the internet for them, and suggest or even complete answers, all without the student switching tabs or doing the research themselves. Take time to consider how students might use agentic browsers and just as important, do your own research on how AI is being used in real workplace practices in your discipline.

Take Action Now 

Simple actions you can take to move this goal forward:

• Subscribe to an AI focused newsletter in your field. When you see a promising use case, run a small experiment to see whether it truly changes practice or is mostly hype.
• Experiment with an agentic browser on low-stakes work so you can anticipate student use (note: be sure to follow your school’s AI policy before proceeding).
• Run a quick in-class “AI audit” of your field. Ask students to find one example of AI being used in your profession, then share and discuss benefits, risks, and ethical questions.

Redesign Written Activities So They Clearly Support Students’ Success

Just as important as staying current on AI capabilities and use cases in your field is keeping up with research on how students actually learn. This year, MIT’s Media Lab released “Your Brain on ChatGPT,” a study that examined how students’ brains respond when writing with and without AI tools. The researchers found that when AI is introduced too early in the learning process, students show lower brain activity and weaker recall, underscoring the need for well-designed authentic assessments that position AI as a collaborator rather than an answer machine¹¹ (Peters, 2025). While this is only one limited study, it is a useful reminder to stay informed about when AI should and should not be used for writing, especially since current tools still frequently hallucinate. The burden on professors will be to interpret the value of AI enhanced learning in relation to the underlying concepts, particularly in written work. If we have learned anything from the past few years of student AI use, it is that reports of discussion boards where “bots are talking to bots” have increased dramatically.

As we reconsider the role of written deliverables, their value will likely remain high throughout 2026, since writing is still one of the clearest ways for learners to show how they are thinking about a topic. Academic research is also firmly rooted in written articles that demonstrate organization of ideas, use of evidence, and logical reasoning. In addition, written communication has long been viewed as a core professional skill, so it is unlikely to disappear anytime soon, even if AI can now produce fluent text. Yet the challenge remains: how do we help learners build AI literacy without allowing AI to do the thinking for them?

Take Action Now 

Simple actions you can take to move this goal forward:

• If students can use AI, ask them to critique the output for weaknesses as part of a transparent writing process. Pair the final written deliverable with a reflection about what AI gave them, what they used/changed and why.
• Leverage new strategies for creating online discussions such as using multimedia, asking for highly contextualized responses, and requiring course-specific evidence¹² (Discussion Boards in an AI World, 2025).
• Test an AI tool on your own written assignments and review what it produces (follow your school’s AI policy). If you cannot distinguish it from student work, redesign the task so students demonstrate the objective in additional ways, such as a short ‘teach the topic’ video in combination with their written submission.