Accelerating the value of AI in education

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Educational institutions often take a field-of-dreams approach to AI, the assumption that if you build the right foundation and provide access to AI solutions, your students, faculty, and administrators will find ways to use it and become efficient in their respective roles.

We find that this undirected, technology-first application of AI is very often the root cause for not realizing value from AI projects. Rather than starting with AI’s incredible capabilities and then searching for applications, the key is to start with a critical business objective and work backward to identify opportunities for AI to drive better, faster outcomes.

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Modernizing government: it’s not just about embracing new technologies—it’s an organizational shift in processes, priorities and culture. How do governments modernize? By revolutionizing the way they serve their constituents and their colleagues. This video gives an overview of the KPMG Modern Government campaign, providing insights into our work to drive government agencies forward.

Keys to generating value from AI

Identify opportunities for value creation across the entire student journey.
Start with strategic objectives such as attracting the most desirable students, then working backward from that objective, begin by pinpointing the key moments in the student journey that matter most to improve success.

Leverage AI capabilities in your existing enterprise platforms.
Instead of broad AI strategies, start with narrow, high-impact use cases that address a few key pain points identified in lifecycle assessments.

Implement AI-specific point solutions.
Easy-to-implement, off-the-shelf tools now embed AI models to help address process-specific challenges.

Consider managed services or shared-services consortiums.
A shared-services model implemented through a consortium of institutions can help distribute the costs of large-scale AI deployments across multiple entities.

While AI is revolutionizing how organizations are achieving their mission (including our own teams here at KPMG), its implementation and application follow the same principles as any other capability; it’s simply another technology tool in the transformation toolbox. If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the last two decades, it’s that ROI doesn’t come from deploying technology, no matter how revolutionary or powerful it is. It comes from coordinated organizational transformations bridging people, process, policy, and data, enabled by that technology, to advance the organization’s goals more effectively or efficiently.

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Accelerating the value of AI in education

AI value starts with a clear strategic vision, not a "field-of-dreams" approach.

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