The agentic university: redesigning higher education from the inside out

University of East London Docklands Campus

From automation to value creation

Universities are not simply education providers. They are part of Britain’s economic and social infrastructure. Yet public debate remains trapped between celebrating a world-class national asset and diagnosing a sector in perpetual crisis. The better question is not simply how universities will survive, but how they become more productive while creating substantially more value.

Most debate about AI in higher education focuses on teaching and learning. The overlooked question is how agentic AI could change the institution itself, co-ordinating multi-step activity across systems and learning from outcomes.

The operating model beneath higher education’s academic mission is not simply administrative overhead. It is how students access opportunities, employers reach talent, and universities respond to economic need. It encompasses applications, enrolment, support, and compliance – but also employer engagement, careers, research translation, and decision making.

Too many of these functions remain fragmented and administratively intensive. Skilled people transfer information between systems and reconcile data. Students repeatedly provide information the institution already holds. Employers struggle to identify the capabilities they need, while learners’ evidence is scattered across qualifications, work, projects, and digital platforms.

The immediate opportunity is to remove friction. Agentic systems could co-ordinate processes, anticipate where support is needed, and give staff a coherent view of each student’s journey. That would release human expertise for the work in which judgement, empathy, creativity, and personal connection matter most.

But this only works where the data underneath is trusted, governance is clear, and people remain accountable for decisions that affect students.

A skills system that moves at the speed of work

Remove that friction, and the same infrastructure starts working for everyone at once: staff freed for judgement, students moving faster toward opportunity, employers seeing clearer signals of talent. That is value creation, not a side effect of it. It also gives universities something harder to build than efficiency alone – the capacity, data, and connections to respond to change at the pace it now happens.

Generative AI is reshaping work faster than conventional qualification, recruitment, and curriculum cycles can respond. Britain’s skills system is trying to understand a moving picture through a series of still frames. By the time a gap is identified, the job may already have changed.

Universities are uniquely positioned to close that gap. They sit at the intersection of knowledge, talent, industry, and place. With the right infrastructure, they could become much more responsive talent and innovation networks – detecting changing demand, translating it into actionable skills signals, and connecting employers with diverse, verified talent at far greater speed and scale.

In an agentic university, services and data that currently sit apart would form a continuous value-creation loop. Employers would gain earlier access to evidenced capabilities, rather than relying on qualifications and networks as proxies for potential. Students would see clearer routes to opportunity. Universities would know which interventions work. And government would gain better, appropriately governed insight into the country’s developing skills base and its alignment with industrial strategy.

This is not about reducing education to the needs of a single employer or moment in the labour market. It is about enabling people to keep learning, adapting and demonstrating their value throughout longer and less linear working lives

Proof that redesign can change outcomes

There are already signs of what happens when a university reorganises itself around clear priorities and outcomes.

At the University of East London, our own transformation has given us confidence that established models can be redesigned around student success, careers, and measurable impact. UEL has delivered the largest and fastest improvement in graduate outcomes in England, placing us 24th in the UK, jointly with Oxford and Cambridge. We have also demonstrated the fastest growth – now ranked 2nd nationally – for active graduate start-ups, with one of the country’s largest numbers of people employed by those enterprises. UEL is also first in England for graduating students’ overall positivity in the 2026 National Student Survey and is a top 10 UK provider for apprenticeship achievement.

That belief in redesign is reflected in Hexaware’s experience too. A campus systems upgrade for a 40,000-student Australian university, for example, was delivered 50 per cent faster than planned, with full end-to-end integration connecting every critical system and custom modules that extended the platform’s capabilities without compromise. The result was a modernised campus experience for students and faculty alike, reflected in a 100 per cent customer satisfaction index.

These results did not come from doing more of the same. They followed a deliberate decision to organise the university around the outcomes that matter most. That philosophy now underpins a UEL-Hexaware partnership developing agentic transformation services designed with a university, for higher education, and adaptable across institutions and countries.

Our working concept is a ‘University in a Box’. Its purpose is not to standardise universities, but to standardise the infrastructure that does not make them distinctive, so they can invest more in what does: students, staff, teaching, research, partnerships, place, and mission. The principle is simple: shared infrastructure, distinctive institutions.

The same logic is shaping CareerVerse, our AI-enabled careers, skills, and employer ecosystem built around a portable Career Passport. It is not another job board, but a trusted network through which people can bring together verified evidence and make their capabilities visible to employers. One learner, one passport, one lifelong journey.

At scale, this could help employers recruit for evidenced skills, workers navigate change, and government understand the capabilities developing across the country. It could connect education more directly to industrial strategy while preserving the breadth and long-term value of university education.

A challenge to government – and the sector

Models like these will only have sector-wide value if they can be tested, evaluated, and scaled beyond individual institutions. The UK therefore needs the conditions for responsible innovation to thrive at scale.

We therefore believe there is a case for a competitive, time-limited University Evolution Challenge Fund: supporting consortia to unlock the opportunity of disruptive technology and commit to delivering measurable gains in productivity and value creation.

Rather than an unrestricted subsidy or another collection of disconnected pilots, public funding could be matched by institutional and commercial investment and released against delivery milestones. It should fund institutional redesign, common standards, and responsible implementation – not software licences alone. Successful standards and reusable approaches should be shared.

The result could deliver three national dividends: a more productive higher education sector; a stronger pipeline of skills, research, and enterprise for the industrial strategy; and a new UK export capability in responsibly governed, digitally enabled education.

The next chapter of higher education will still be written in classrooms, laboratories, studios, and communities. But whether those places flourish will increasingly depend on the systems connecting them to one another – and to the country they serve.

We intend to help build that future in the UK, with the sector, for the world.

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