This university built an AI curriculum before ChatGPT. Now it wants to help other schools do the same

Malachowsky Hall, named after University of Florida alumnus and co-founder of Nvidia Corp. Chris Malachowsky, at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida, on February 20, 2024. (Credit: Michelle Bruzzese/Bloomberg/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

Ethan Pecora has a team of 15 specialized artificial intelligence agents assisting him with his work. That includes helping to manage his calendar and various tasks related to the mental wellness app he’s building.

Also, his schoolwork.

Pecora’s setup may sound like that of a tech startup. But he’s actually a senior at the University of Florida, studying business and communications.

“Some people call it a second brain,” he told CNN about his swarm of AI agents, but he said he doesn’t like that term because “it seems a little dystopian.”

The University of Florida has been incorporating AI into its curriculum since 2022, before ChatGPT’s arrival, thanks in part to investments from chipmaking giant Nvidia.

The university said it aims to teach students how to apply the tech across all disciplines professionally and in their coursework, not just technical ones. Students have used AI to train chatbots to assist them on exams and catalogue dance moves to help the dancers protect their intellectual property.

The school now offers more than 200 AI courses, such as on AI basics and ethics, for any student or faculty member regardless of their technical knowledge. It also has AI certificates for specific disciplines, like hospitality and public health.

“We don’t think it’s appropriate or useful to relegate (AI education) to the computer science department or the College of Engineering,” said Joseph Glover, provost of the University of Florida. “Because then whenever you want to do something (with AI), you have to have an engineer sitting next to you.”

There is a nuanced and polarizing debate over AI’s impact on education and early-stage careers. Students and faculty grapple with a world in which jobs could look fundamentally different because of a rapidly evolving technology. Those concerns exist at the University of Florida, too, where some students have pushed back on the technology despite the school’s AI-forward approach, and reports of academic misconduct involving AI are starting to emerge.

One way the school hopes to address those concerns is through an international summit, where it hosts panels about AI’s role in education and shares its blueprint with other schools. Nearly 500 people from 10 countries and 40 U.S. states attended the conference in 2026.

“Pretty soon AI is going to become such as the internet. It’s just a technology,” said Andrea Ramirez Salgado, a professor in the department of engineering who helped develop the university’s AI curriculum. “But if you really want to lead and drive that innovation, you need to be able to understand what is under the hood.”

A boost from the world’s most valuable company

The University of Florida had an early advantage: its close ties to Chris Malachowsky, cofounder of Nvidia, the US$5 trillion juggernaut that’s been at the center of the AI boom.

Malachowsky graduated from the university in 1980 and sits on its Foundation Board, which supports the school through various investment and advocacy efforts.

Back in 2018, he told the University of Florida’s Board of Trustees that the school should start building a strategy around AI. Then in 2019, a meeting between Malachowsky and Glover set the stage for the program’s founding.

The school wanted Malachowsky to invest in a new engineering program. But the Nvidia cofounder had another idea: He asked the provost what the school would do with an AI supercomputer – a high-performance computer often used for research purposes.

“And his response, and I’m telling you with almost no hesitation was, ‘I don’t know, I think I’ll teach AI across the curriculum,’” Malachowsky told CNN.

In addition to the supercomputer, called the HiPerGator, the school hired 100 new faculty members to help incorporate AI across all of its 16 colleges. A total of US$95 million was invested to start the program from Nvidia, Malachowsky, the University of Florida and the state.

Employers are increasingly looking for AI experience. More than one third of entry-level jobs listed AI skills as a requirement, the National Association of Colleges and Employers said in a spring 2026 report. That’s up almost three-fold compared to last year.

Even if they didn’t widely incorporate AI into their curriculum, academic institutions have long paid attention to the technology. Carnegie Mellon University started offering an AI undergraduate degree in 2018. And the Milwaukee School of Engineering announced a new academic centre aimed at boosting AI education in 2017.

Unlike the University of Florida, “there are more institutions that are just trying to educate their faculty about, ‘What is AI?’ and how to use it,” said Kelvin Bentley, director of community practice on micro credentials at the National Association of Higher Education Systems.

‘Easier to get a ‘C,’ harder to get an AI’

Emma MacKie, an assistant professor in the University of Florida’s department of geological sciences, was one of the faculty members hired to jumpstart its efforts.

She and her students use AI and other tools to simulate a landscape by crunching huge amounts of data and physical models. This past year, they mapped the topography beneath sheets of ice in Antarctica.

One challenge is keeping up with tech that is always evolving. In one instance, a lab activity MacKie prepared was dysfunctional by the time she taught it in class, she said.

“It was definitely an ‘oh crap’ moment,” she said. “I’m in front of my class, and my code doesn’t work.”

Pecora also said not all classes are as useful as they could be. A class about AI in business that he took in 2024 taught students how to automate some tasks by writing code. But he said it felt more like a crash course on the coding language Python than how to apply AI.

AI can also change how assignments are evaluated. MacKie allows her students to use AI freely but now grades term papers based on factors like originality and “the maturity of the ideas.”

“It’s easier to get a ‘C’ on that assignment, but more difficult to get an ‘A,’” she said.

Student worries about AI

Early concerns about AI in education mostly focused on how it could be used for cheating. But more existential worries have since surfaced, such as whether students are being adequately prepared and the tech’s impact on career opportunities.

Graduates at the University of Arizona and University of Central Florida booed mentions of AI during commencement speeches last spring. Forty per cent of the more than 1,000 students from 203 institutions surveyed by education news website Inside Higher Education in May said they were worried that AI is reducing their ability to think independently.

Only seven per cent of students said they were “all in” and “genuinely excited” about AI’s potential.

“I think there are a lot of students who… they feel very unsettled by AI,” said MacKie. “They don’t like what it’s doing to their career prospects and have very little faith in the outputs, which I think is healthy.”

Even at the University of Florida, there are concerns. One professor stopped assigning homework altogether and based grades solely on in-class exams to prevent AI usage, said Tristan Robbins, a rising senior studying sports management, statistics and economics at the University of Florida.

Academic misconduct reports mentioning AI increased from zero in fall 2021 to 66 as of April 2025, according to public records reported by The Independent Florida Alligator this year. (A spokesperson for the university said that it promotes the responsible use of AI and that students must “strictly comply with the instructions of their course instructor, faculty advisor or other academic supervisor” when using AI for academic purposes).

Additionally, Salgado said students are worried about AI’s environmental impact and say they feel less ownership over their work.

Nvidia’s Malachowsky acknowledged that these questions are difficult to solve. But turning away from the technology, he said, is a bigger mistake.

“I can’t promise that AI literacy and adopting this broadly is the answer,” he said. “But I do feel really strongly that doing nothing, or ignoring it, or trying to put it back in the can, is a kiss of death. There is no positive outcome that comes from that.”