Event Recap - Higher Education Benchmarking AI Readiness: Global Policy & Guidance Recap

Thank you to everyone who joined this live event earlier this month. Many higher education leaders face ambiguity, inconsistency, and confusion regarding AI adoption and implementation, and this 45-minute live event was designed to help introduce key resources and examples to cut through the noise and help regain agency and direction.

As a quick recap, we discussed Google’s Policy and Guidance program offerings, including the two-day, interactive AI Policy & Guidance Lab experience. We then explored Google for Education’s AI in Education Readiness Assessment and two global case studies where policies were effectively moving students toward more transformative outcomes. 

• The AI Policy & Guidance Labs are designed to help teams clarify goals, define a North Star for learning, and develop a 12-month action plan. Lab participants gain access to a global alumni network, subject matter experts, resources, and live events upon completion to ensure implementation is as smooth and effective as possible and to foster deeper connections to peers in other contexts.
• The AI in Education Readiness Assessment helps higher education systems self-assess their current realities. The tool assesses six focus areas: governance and procurement, infrastructure and scalability, data and privacy, safety and ethics, educators and agency, and learning and cognition. These are measured on a four-level scale aligned with the ISAR (Inversion, Substitution, Augmentation, Redefinition) Model. This assessment is not a summative test; it’s a formative, diagnostic tool meant to help establish where a team is in its implementation journey so they can create ambitious and feasible road maps to achieve their goals.
• Our policy and guidance examples highlighted places where learning and cognition was an explicit focus.  Ireland and Colombia demonstrate diverse approaches to human-centric AI guidance, and these strategies prioritize critical thinking and foundational learning skills over automation. 
• Ireland’s Generative AI in Higher Education Teaching & Learning: Policy Framework provides a values-driven strategic roadmap that shifts away from reactive or unreliable AI detection tools and toward pedagogical intentionality that upholds what they consider core educational purposes: cultivation of critical thinking, independent reasoning, and intellectual integrity. It acknowledges that traditional assumptions about student work and assessment can no longer be sustained without significant reconsideration or reimagining. One specific set of practices and assumptions needing reimagining is student assessments. The guidance advises moving away from more transactional models of evidence toward approaches that more authentically pursue their core educational purposes, such as oral assessments. 
• Colombia’s Política Nacional de Inteligencia Artificial (“National Artificial Intelligence Policy”) is a whole-of-government approach that establishes a nationwide governance framework connecting national ministries, regional/territorial entities, private industry, academia, and civil society. It places the nation’s entire education system in a much broader context; higher education is positioned not merely as a place for technical AI training, but as an essential filter for ethical, cognitive, and societal safeguards. Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are urged to embed ethical training modules and formal checkpoints throughout technical, technological, undergraduate, and graduate programs related to AI systems. This ensures that future developers, users, and policymakers learn to identify, monitor, control, and mitigate adverse AI outcomes long before deployment.
  

We encourage attendees to download the readiness assessment, explore our examples further, and reach out to their Google point of contact for further information on participating in the labs.