Five Emerging Priorities

01

Make Judgement a Graduate Outcome

As the cost of information and analysis falls towards zero, judgement becomes the scarcer human contribution. Institutions should teach judgement explicitly within each discipline rather than assuming it emerges indirectly through study.

Five Emerging Priorities

02

Redesign Assessment Around Purpose

Institutions making progress have stopped trying to detect AI use. They start instead by defining what an assessment should demonstrate, then decide how AI should be regulated within it.

Five Emerging Priorities

03

Create Conditions for Experimentation

Faculty innovation needs space to experiment and room to fail. Sandboxes, seed grants, and protected time help educators test new practice, while coalitions of willing innovators generate the evidence that persuades the rest.

Five Emerging Priorities

04

Build Shared Readiness Benchmarks

59% of leaders want structured access to evidence of best practice. A shared maturity model would let institutions locate where they stand and name their next priority, rather than benchmarking against anecdote.

Five Emerging Priorities

05

Make Curriculum Redesign Continuous

Periodic curriculum review cannot keep pace with changes in technology and work. Leaders called for continuous redesign, with faster approval routes and clearer accountability for adapting programmes while they are being delivered.

Higher education across Asia-Pacific has momentum on AI, but little that unifies it.

With 37% of leaders spending most of their time coordinating fragmented initiatives and a third naming momentum without a unifying strategy as their defining challenge, effort is outpacing coherence across the region.

Drawing on the DEC Leadership Summit APAC 2026, where 35 senior leaders from 28 institutions across the Asia-Pacific convened in Singapore, this report names the ten signals shaping higher education's AI agenda. It examines why faculty-led experimentation stalls without the conditions to sustain it, and identifies what separates the institutions building durable capability from those still running isolated pilots.