Having just returned from the 2025 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference in Nashville, I want to share some insights on the future of campus IT from the higher education technology leaders in attendance. Every year, this conference provides an opportunity for technology providers and higher ed professionals to connect and explore the latest innovations in higher education technology. Two themes emerged as critical priorities:

• The strategic integration of AI and its impact on operational resilience
• The imperative to adapt to an ever-changing technology landscape.

There is clearly a shift underway in how educational institutions approach technology decisions. The focus is no longer on what technology to deploy, but on fostering the collective will and building the individual capabilities needed to use it effectively. Every higher ed IT leader should consider these five critical takeaways when planning for the year ahead.

Operational efficiency requires moving from reactive to proactive

Today’s students are digital natives who expect the same seamless experiences from their university systems that they get from consumer apps. When registration crashes or financial aid portals lag, students aren’t comparing the experience with what other schools offer—they’re comparing it with every other app they use daily. 

To maintain a positive user experience, higher education IT teams are moving from reactive incident response to proactive operations management. Many teams now use data for scenario modeling, forecasting, and prediction to strengthen institutional agility. They’re using AI to anticipate problems before they impact students and faculty. 

AI adoption must balance innovation with safety

Empowering students, faculty, and staff to engage with AI tools critically and safely is now a strategic priority for most universities. While 99.4% of higher ed institutions view AI as instrumental to staying competitive, institutions must also implement knowledge management practices that mitigate AI risks through proper data governance, privacy protections, and ethics programs.

The challenge that higher education institutions face isn’t whether to adopt AI—it’s how to do so responsibly while building the technical literacy that students need for entering the future workforce.

A data-centric culture is required for success

Institutions are embracing a data-centric culture to unlock the full potential of AI. They’re doing this by improving data access and interoperability within their ecosystems, which in turn enables them to leverage the data to better understand spending patterns, enrollment trends, and cost savings opportunities. But analytics tools alone aren’t enough. 

Many universities cite a lack of skills and resources as barriers to AI adoption, underscoring the criticality of talent development. Success with AI adoption will rely on higher education institutions’ ability to professionally develop and empower their decision-makers to interpret and act on insights from these tools. 

Adopting a tool like AI is not enough. Many universities are moving to build robust data infrastructures and onboard talent to manage their data networks. 

Measured technology investments require clear ROI

Making better technology investment decisions—or choosing not to invest—requires clearly assessing costs, ROI, and legacy systems. With average incidents taking nearly three hours to resolve and downtime costing $4,537 per minute, a single outage can result in losses approaching $800,000.

Institutions are taking note, and many are calculating the cost of a reactive approach —staff burnout and overtime expenses—against the time saved by technology investments. 

AI-enabled efficiencies free IT teams to innovate

AI is giving IT teams at universities more of their time back. When agentic AI can intelligently manage complex systems, predict problems before they occur, and automate routine maintenance, staff can focus on mission-critical innovation rather than firefighting. They no longer need to focus on administrative fixes and can instead focus on innovation that provides a better experience for students and faculty alike. 

Looking ahead

Higher education institutions face an ever-changing landscape, but they remain resilient organizations. This is a moment to double down on what makes them great. That resilience comes from making the right connections—between people and technology, between strategic vision and practical implementation, and between institutional will and individual skill building.

The institutions that thrive won’t be those with the most technology, but those that most effectively empower their people to use technology strategically while maintaining operational resilience in the face of constant change.

Ready to transform your institution’s IT operations? Learn more about PagerDuty’s solutions for higher education and discover how we can help you reduce alert noise, improve incident response, and enhance the student experience.