Artificial Intelligence poses an existential threat to Australian universities and the way it is used across the sector needs to be managed carefully, according to HE union and employer representatives speaking yesterday.
Speaking together at the Future Campus People & Performance 2026 conference, National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) General Secretary Damien Cahill and Australian Higher Education Industrial Association (AHEIA) Executive Director Craig Laughton made it clear that while disagreements on some key issues remain, the sector needed to unite to address a number of key challenges.
In a wide-ranging exchange that followed Monday’s call by Universities Australia chief Luke Sheehy for the sector to unite against over regulation and under funding, Mr Cahill and Mr Laughton made it clear that while a range of differences remain between the NTEU and AHEIA, there was also much common ground where they intended to work together for better outcomes.
“AI is an existential threat to the value proposition of universities,” Mr Cahill said.
AI was already capable of performing large parts of the academic labour process, albeit imperfectly, including curriculum design, marking and class preparation, and its low cost would make it dangerously attractive to cash-strapped institutions, he said.
"The logical endpoint is a course being delivered by artificial intelligence," he said. "If that's the case, why would students come to unis?” Mr Cahill said.
Agreeing that AI threatened to undermine the reasons that students would choose a university education, he said that while adoption of AI was inevitable, implementation of ethical, human-centric approaches would be critical to ensure staff would remain at the heart of the university experience.
“The answer to the value proposition of universities is always going to be its staff,” he said
He described AI as the most significant workplace issue facing the sector and said the union was pushing for safeguards built around co-design and consultation with staff.
Mr Cahill also criticised the federal government's broader approach, arguing it had "caved too much to big tech," and said it had been left to employers to safeguard workers.
Mr Laughton agreed people were central to the university experience and urged the sector to lead in its approach to implementation of AI, warning of social consequences if automation displaced large numbers of staff. "If you have 20 to 30% of your population out of a job, what do they do?" he said. “Create a lot of trouble is the answer.”
"We need to create a moral compass (as leaders in AI implementation)," he said.
The two leaders diverged on regulation, with Mr Laughton saying universities had been buried by what he called "a Sara Lee cheesecake of regulation" cascading down over the past two and a half years, leaving institutions struggling to meet compliance demands "let alone building a governance culture." While people were occupied with meeting every new compliance demand, they were being taken away from the work of building an improved governance culture, Mr Laughton said.
While accepting that governance needed to be improved in many institutions, the inundation of regulation was constraining change, he said.
He warned of "a race for regulation" and said the skilled people needed to fix governance were "drowning and leaving the sector in droves."
In contrast, Mr Cahill said the union had campaigned for governance and funding reform for 15 to 20 years and had only recently gained traction. "The ease with which we have been able to uncover issues at ANU and Wollongong suggests it is widespread," he said, adding that some employers remained in denial about the problem.
He agreed that compliance was an issue, but said action on governance was essential, “(NTEU) Members say the increasing regulatory burden is one of the biggest issues for them,” he said.
With change to governance underway, the NTEU and AHEIA agreed improved funding was critical for sector sustainability.