Who will reinvent education for the AI age?

For generations, parents have offered their children some simple advice for a secure future: Study hard, obtain a good degree and land a well-paying job. The formula has survived technological revolutions, recessions and the rise and fall of industries. But with the emergence of artificial intelligence, the question that has arisen is whether this formula will suffice in an AI-driven economy.

Nobody, not even AI, can say with confidence which occupations will shrink, flourish or emerge over the next decade. However, schools and universities cannot afford to wait until the picture becomes clear before asking themselves whether they are preparing young men and women for the real world that lies outside lecture halls and ivory towers.

The World Economic Forum’s 2025 employer survey estimated that 39 percent of workers’ existing skills would change or become outdated by 2030. For the Middle East and North Africa, the figure was 46 percent. Although these numbers are not a precise forecast of AI’s impact, they nevertheless deserve attention.

Prince Turki Al-Faisal, the former Saudi diplomat and intelligence chief, recently highlighted the dilemma facing Gulf economies: They will increasingly need AI and robotics to compensate for aging populations and future labor shortages, yet the same technologies could reduce opportunities for young graduates. Speaking at an event in Bahrain on Nov. 1, he called for closer links between technology, education and employment policies, alongside joint programs to retrain workers and prepare young people for future jobs.

For many institutions, the temptation may be to introduce an impressive-sounding AI course, purchase subscriptions to popular apps and declare themselves ready for the future. But as they know very well, simply adding a new subject to an old timetable is not enough to come up with answers to questions about what children should learn, how they should learn it and what a qualification should certify.

At primary school, educational experts say, the priorities should remain reading, writing, mathematics and the ability to get along with others. Children also need to understand at a suitable age that a computer can sound authoritative yet prove incorrect. Learning to ask questions and cross-check answers needs to become part of their intellectual upbringing.

Universities must equip graduates with entrepreneurship skills so that they can create new kinds of jobs suited for the AI economy.
Arnab Neil Sengupta

Egypt offers one example of how secondary schools are rethinking what students need to learn. “We have already begun teaching coding and artificial intelligence to this generation, especially first-year secondary students,” Mohammed Abdel Latif, Egypt’s minister of education and technical education, was quoted as telling a parliamentary committee earlier this year. In September, he reported that the ministry had completed work on 11 subjects for the second year of secondary school under the Egyptian Baccalaureate, including programming and AI.

However, a pressing challenge for secondary schools is determining whether homework still reveals what a pupil knows. A perfect essay produced overnight may owe more to the software a pupil uses at home than to what they learned in class. In one high school math experiment cited by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s 2026 review of digital education, students who had used a general purpose chatbot did better in practice but scored lower than their peers on a test taken without it.

For universities, the task in hand is much broader in scope. Subject knowledge needs to be supplemented by the student’s ability to recognize opportunities, assess risks, work with people and turn ideas into useful products or services. In the future, a graduate engineer who also understands customers and costs or a business graduate capable of questioning an AI-generated analysis will have more options at their disposal.

For Saudi Arabia and its Gulf Cooperation Council neighbors, what this means is giving the education system a new purpose and ambition. Universities must equip graduates with entrepreneurship skills so that they can build and lead organizations and create new kinds of jobs suited for the AI economy. And the ambition should extend beyond helping young people compete for vacancies that already exist.

Fortunately, there is no shortage of institutions from which to learn. Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology supports entrepreneurs through its Venture Studio and TAQADAM accelerator, connecting ideas with mentorship, business planning and funding. Such experience would be beneficial for entrepreneurship teaching across a wider range of universities and disciplines.

In the UAE, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence has introduced undergraduate education combining AI with business, entrepreneurship and industry experience. Speaking in Abu Dhabi last month, Abdulrahman Al-Awar, the UAE’s acting minister of higher education and scientific research, explained the ministry’s university evaluation framework. “New technologies, including artificial intelligence, are creating new opportunities and changing the skills that the market needs,” he was quoted as saying.

Beyond the Arab region, Singapore is integrating AI literacy across the education journey, while Sal Khan’s Khan Academy has already launched its AI tutor, Khanmigo, and is testing ways to improve it. Both offer useful starting points for educators worldwide who are willing to test new methods and examine what students can subsequently do for themselves.

The hope is that the worst-case scenarios about the new economy are just that. The International Labour Organization estimates that one in four workers holds an occupation with some exposure to generative AI, but it considers changes to how people do their jobs more likely than outright job replacement. At one software company, an AI tool suggested replies to customer queries and support staff were given the leeway to use, edit or ignore them. A 2025 study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford found that agents with access to the tool resolved 15 percent more queries per hour on average, with the biggest gains among less experienced staff.

In any case, entrepreneurship should not become another fashionable topic like climate change, the assumption being that every graduate with the right education can establish a successful business or company. Societies will continue to need capable employees, teachers, nurses, technicians and public servants. Vocational institutions and adult education will have to go on preparing people to use new tools within their specific trades and occupations.

Going forward, before a school spends money on an AI tool, it should ideally ask the same question a parent would ask: Will it help my child learn? Give teachers some training and time to try it in a few classrooms. Then see whether pupils can explain an idea in their own words or solve a problem on their own. Whatever the results, there should still be plenty of time in the school day to read a novel, argue about history or discuss why a scientific experiment went wrong.

The advice parents across the world have passed down for generations is still relevant: Study hard, obtain a good degree and land a well-paying job. But now educational policymakers have to provide the infrastructure that will help young people adapt to a changing job market, learn new skills throughout their lives and, where possible, create opportunities for themselves and others. Regardless of what the AI age brings, these abilities will give the coming generations a better chance of achieving the secure future their parents have always wanted for them.