Agentic AI is one of education’s most talked-about technologies, but few school districts and colleges have deployed AI agents in day-to-day operations, according to a GovTech article. Key takeaways:
1) AI agents are being used in some cases for tutoring students and processing enrollment workflows to support staff with administrative tasks.
2) Educators are divided over how much autonomy and access to data they are willing to grant to staff.
3) There is an explicit distinction between AI agents and the chatbots many educators already know.
“Agents is one of the most abused terms in ed tech right now, and everybody seems to have a different definition of it,” says Kris Hagel, CIO of Washington’s Peninsula School District.
A real AI agent makes decisions in service of a specific goal, whereas a chatbot just responds to prompts, explains Joe Siedlecki, chief impact officer at Amira Learning, an ed-tech company. In an educational setting, he says, an AI agent observes student outcomes and adjusts its instructional feedback based on those results.
“It’s making decisions pinned back to a specific goal, and the intent is to observe and change action,” Siedlecki says.
Educators have differing strategies for how they have implemented their agents:
1) Intentionally limiting use of AI agents while monitoring how the technology evolves
2) Monitoring to ensure agents don’t collect data that could go out to the public
3) Using faculty-controlled agents from Gemini Notebook (previously Notebook LM), Google’s AI-powered research assistant, to provide tutoring outside of instructor office hours
4) Integrating AI agents into administrative workflows to help scale enrollment operations amid growth and staffing constraints
5) Using agents to look at student records to move the student through the enrollment cycle from inquiry to completion.
Educators describe AI agents as tools for handling repetitive work while leaving human judgment intact. For example, an AI agent can complete a monthly reporting process, freeing employees to focus on more human tasks like relationship building and curriculum design.
Hagel says his district began piloting AI agents last year and plans to make them available to every adult staffer this fall: “Right now, we’re working on building out the skills that we assign to the agents that users can use.”
Educators say the challenge is no longer adopting AI agents, but preparing institutions, staff and students to use them effectively.
Deploying AI agents is not a “set-it-and-forget-it’” approach. Internal champions who can encourage experimentation and iteration should be identified.
It’s also important to have a culture where you can fail forward and where you are not going to be penalized for trying something and it not working, because it might not work.
At Milwaukee Area Technical College, faculty adoption has been driven less by top-down directives than by instructors sharing successful classroom uses with one another.
“Faculty conversations are probably the most effective in getting the culture, getting everybody going,” says Sadique Isahaku, the Wisconsin college’s vice provost and chief academic officer. “Faculty members who have done [it] or have found innovative ways of augmenting the work they do, they come to showcase it … and how it is impacting students’ success and student learning in the classroom.”
GovTech
