AI Exchange @ UVA [2026.11]
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It’s 10 PM and an AI Just Did My Students’ Homework
This is the first commentary I’ve written for this Substack. I hadn’t actually planned on writing one at all. Tonight, I felt I had to.
I’ve been in higher education long enough to know the difference between something that sounds disruptive and something that actually is.
Here are some screenshots of an app on companion.ai called Einstein. Einstein is an AI agent that:
logs into Canvas,
watches your recorded lectures,
reads your assigned articles, completes the quizzes,
writes your papers,
posts to your discussion boards,
and submits everything for you. Automatically.
Not a chatbot. An AI actor. Inside our learning system. Doing the work a student would do.
And here’s the honest truth: I wasn’t angry. I was shaken… but not in the way you might expect.
This is not the threat. This is a wake up call for higher ed.
Higher ed has been coasting on a flawed assumption for a long time… if a student turns in work, something called learning has happened. Einstein didn’t break that model. It's like ChatGPT did three years ago, just made it available to everyone.
When an AI agent is your student, we have to ask the question we should have been asking all along: What is learning actually for?
And here’s where I get hopeful and maybe even excited.
Because when you take away everything an AI can do, what’s left is genuinely profound.
Judgment. Wonder. The ability to sit with ambiguity and feel ok. The wisdom to know the data is wrong. The courage to disagree with the expert(s).
These are not skills you build by consuming content, especially not AI content. They’re built through struggle, reflection, and dialogue. Some might say learning…
Another thing struck me as I sat there staring at this agent completing my assignments. The answer to this may be a rigorous liberal arts education. And you know what makes a liberal arts education more relevant than it’s been in decades?
What do we actually do?
I don’t think the answer is better plagiarism detection - I’m actually really against that approach. I don’t think it’s banning AI tools - though I see the beauty of that in many classes. Heck, I used Grammarly AI to help me edit and write this post.
I think the answer is a learning revolution, and it starts with three things:
First, we have to get honest about what we’re actually trying to develop in students. Critical thinking isn’t a box you check. It’s a practice. We need to build courses, assignments, and assessments that make it visible.
Second, we need AI literacy woven into the curriculum, right Dean Leo Lo? Not as a workshop or an elective, but as a coherent thread across disciplines.
Third… and this is the part that might surprise you from a business professor. I think the liberal arts are the key that unlocks all of this. Not in spite of the AI moment. Because of it. Liberal Arts are the foundation of judgment, of wonder.
A student asked me last semester: “Why do I need to learn this if AI can do it?”
That’s the wrong question. The right question is: What kind of person do you want to be in a world where AI can do most of it?
That’s not a technical question. It’s a philosophical one.
It poses the most significant question that higher education has ever faced. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform higher education. And, like I said, so very exciting.
The Einstein app didn’t scare me into writing this tonight - Well, maybe a little. It did a great job of inspiring me.
The learning revolution isn’t coming. It’s here. I hope.
Let’s not waste it.
Ryan Wright is a professor at UVA's McIntire School of Commerce and Co-Director of AI Research at UVA. This is his first Substack commentary.