In the AI Era, the Competitive Advantage Is Still Human

IDEO published a piece this week that cuts through a lot of the noise around AI adoption. The argument is simple and worth sitting with: the organizations that succeed in the AI era won't be defined by how quickly they deploy new tools — they'll be defined by how well they've invested in the human capabilities that make those tools meaningful. Creativity. Human insight. A growth mindset. Psychological safety. And a culture of change.

That framing maps almost exactly to the philosophy driving ET's AI work at UT Austin. We've spent the last two years building infrastructure — enterprise AI environments, governance frameworks, training programs. But infrastructure is never the point. The point is whether the people using it can actually think critically, adapt confidently, and shape how AI gets used rather than just reacting to it.

Doubling down on people in a moment that rewards the opposite

The pressure in higher education right now is to move fast. Every week brings a new tool, a new capability, a new headline about what AI can now do. Institutions that aren't experimenting feel like they're falling behind. That pressure is real — but IDEO's research names the trap clearly: organizations that prioritize technical progress while neglecting workforce readiness create a gap between capability and capacity. You can have the best tools on the market and still fail if your people don't know how to use them well, question them honestly, or push back when they get it wrong.

At ET, our answer to that pressure has been to invest in people in parallel with technology, not after it. UT Spark and Anthropic Claude Enterprise are available to the campus community — but equally important are the training series, the responsible use guidance, and the ET Faculty Fellows program, which funds faculty to do real research on what AI in teaching and learning actually looks like in practice. Those investments don't generate headlines. But they're what makes the tool investments sustainable.

The fifth imperative: culture of change is everyone's job

IDEO identifies five human strengths that separate organizations that adapt from those that don't. The first four — creativity, human insight, growth mindset, and psychological safety — are necessary. But it's the fifth one that we think carries the most urgency for a university like UT Austin, and the most direct implication for how each of us has to show up.

IDEO calls this a culture of change, and they're precise about what it requires: change literacy — the ability to understand, interpret, and actively shape change — has to be distributed across teams rather than concentrated in leadership or managed by a dedicated function. In other words, navigating change can't be someone else's job. It has to be a shared habit.

For a university with 50,000 students, thousands of faculty and staff, and an enterprise technology team responsible for the systems that support all of it, that's not a small ask. It means faculty members who aren't just consumers of AI policy but active participants in shaping it. Staff who aren't waiting for guidance to experiment with a new tool but are building the judgment to evaluate it themselves. It means teams across ET who treat every deployment not as a completed project but as a live question we keep asking.

IDEO's case study for this principle is Intercorp, a Peruvian conglomerate that spent a decade building distributed change capacity across its enterprises — creating empowered teams that test ideas and treat adaptation as a shared habit rather than a top-down mandate. The timescale matters. This kind of culture doesn't get installed in a quarter. It gets built by consistently sending the signal that experimentation is expected, that uncertainty is something to name out loud, and that every person in the organization has a role in navigating what comes next.

What this looks like at ET right now

We're early in this work, and we're honest about that. But the direction is clear. The Faculty Fellows program is designed exactly on this principle — it's not ET telling faculty what AI means for teaching; it's ET funding faculty to investigate that question themselves and bring those findings back to the community. The Responsible AI for Education convening on April 21 is built around the same logic: a full day of community conversation, not a set of announcements.

The training series running through spring and summer isn't just tool onboarding. It's change literacy at scale — helping the UT community build the judgment to evaluate AI critically, use it responsibly, and know when it doesn't belong in the room. Those are skills that outlast any particular product.

What IDEO's research confirms is that this is the right bet. The institutions that will be best positioned in five years won't necessarily have adopted the most tools. They'll have built communities that know how to adapt continuously — because they invested in the human foundation underneath the technology, and they distributed the work of change broadly enough that no single policy document or leadership directive could make or break it.

That's the work. And it belongs to all of us.