Toward Self-Driving Universities: Can Universities Drive Themselves with Agentic AI?

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of agentic AI to automate and transform university operations, proposing a staged autonomy model to create self-driving universities that improve efficiency and decision-making.

Contribution

It introduces a novel autonomy-level framework for higher education automation using agentic AI, extending beyond traditional AI applications in learning support.

Findings

Pilot deployments show reduced task times

AI enables previously infeasible capabilities

Framework guides systematic automation transition

Abstract

The rapid evolution of Agentic AI and large language models (LLMs) presents transformative opportunities for higher education institutions. This chapter introduces the concept of self-driving universities, a vision in which AI-enabled systems progressively automate administrative, academic, and quality-assurance processes through a staged autonomy model inspired by self-driving systems. We examine the current challenges facing traditional universities, including bureaucratic overload, fragmented information systems, and the disproportionate amount of time faculty spend on clerical tasks, which diverts effort away from timely feedback, curricular improvement, student mentorship, and research productivity. While prior AI-in-education research has focused primarily on learning support, tutoring, and analytics, there remains a lack of system-level frameworks for automating institutional quality assurance and accreditation workflows using agentic AI. We address this gap by presenting a framework for progressive automation, detailing how agentic AI can transform course design, assessment alignment, accreditation documentation, and institutional reporting. Through case studies of pilot deployments, we demonstrate that AI-assisted workflows can substantially reduce task completion times while enabling capabilities previously considered infeasible. The chapter's originality lies in introducing an autonomy-level framework for higher education operations grounded in agentic AI architectures rather than prompt-based LLM assistance. Finally, we discuss the critical infrastructure requirements, ethical considerations, and a strategic roadmap for universities to transition toward higher levels of academic autonomy.