Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday stood atop Google’s waterfront offices in San Francisco beside higher-education officials and technology-industry leaders to announce a new partnership to embed cutting-edge artificial intelligence products into the California State University and California Community College systems.
“This is the center of the universe when it comes to artificial intelligence,” Newsom said, with the Bay Bridge behind him. “The world in many ways we invented is now competing against us and we’ve got to step up our game.”
Under non-binding, voluntary memoranda of understanding, the Mountain View search and digital-advertising giant Google and San Jose software titan Adobe, along with IBM and Microsoft, are to provide AI for use by students and faculty.
While the announcement focused on higher education, the agreement for Adobe says the company can “enable state-wide (grade) 9-12 access to age-appropriate, cutting-edge Al software (subject to any applicable fees, license terms and conditions) to both teachers and students to support educational and research initiatives.” The agreement with IBM says the firm can “Collaborate with community colleges, high schools, and technical schools to integrate AI and Machine Learning modules and training … into existing curricula.” Google’s agreement says it can provide its Generative AI for Educators course “to all California educators.”
Adobe’s senior director of education strategy and operations, Alan Bronowicz, claimed that “bringing AI to the classroom can boost engagement, enhance creativity, and drive academic outcomes,” and that Adobe is committed to “ensuring that both students and educators in California are prepared to use classroom-ready AI tools like Adobe Express and Adobe Firefly.”
Cal State system chancellor Mildred García said the agreement would “harness the power of AI for our students, faculty, staff, the state and quite frankly, the nation.”
But to Martha Lincoln, an anthropology professor at San Francisco State University who watched the announcement, the enthusiasm for speeding AI into higher education fell flat.
“This is all really familiar AI industry rhetoric,” Lincoln said. “The fact is we just don’t have research to support the efficacy of AI use in classrooms. I really have met so few educators at Cal State and elsewhere who see a need for these kinds of initiatives — what people need is resources to do the work that they already do.”
The agreement comes amid massive hype and significant concerns over the generative AI technology delivered to the masses by San Francisco’s OpenAI, that can produce text, video, sound and computer code in response to prompts from users. While touted by industry as a transformative technology that will turbocharge human productivity and creativity, the technology has raised alarms among educators whose students use it to cheat on assignments, and take shortcuts in the learning process.
Newsom, asked at the announcement about such worries, said the agreement “specifically lays out best practices in teaching and inquiry.” Use of the technology in higher education is “not about the answer, it’s about the process of getting to that answer,” Newsom said. “This is what we’ve been dreaming of, having private tutors.”
In a press release, the Governor’s office said that under the deal, Adobe will expand access to its generative AI products and to AI-literacy material. Google will increase students’ access to its course on AI prompting, and offer its Generative AI for Educators course, both for free. IBM will help integrate AI into career-education programs in community colleges, and broaden access to industry-recognized credentials through its SkillsBuild program — which it already announced as a free program in February. Microsoft will support AI literacy, cybersecurity training, and hands-on training for its Copilot chatbot.
Glenn Kleiman, a senior advisor for the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, applauded the collaboration between Newsom, the higher-education systems and the companies.
“AI is moving so quickly that education needs industry support to address the pace of change in what students need to learn, to update the education workforce, to revise teaching and learning processes, and to quickly scale new programs to reach all students and educators,” Kleiman said.
However, Kleiman added, “it is important that education leads and that industry follows in support of the initiatives, so students are kept at the center of the efforts. We need to make sure that the risks to students’ health — both mental and physical — social development, human relationships, privacy, and security are carefully addressed.”
The announcement followed other developments at the intersection of AI and education.
On Wednesday, Google said it was making its “most advanced AI tools” available free to college students. Included is a year’s access for students 18 and over to the firm’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, a chatbot Google said “provides quick homework and writing help,” and can produce “custom research reports.”
Last month, San Francisco-based OpenAI, which kicked off the generative AI frenzy in late 2022 with release of its ChatGPT bot, said it would contribute $10 million in funding and in-kind resources as the founding partner with the American Federation of Teachers for the National Academy for AI Instruction.
In February, the 23-school, 460,000-student California State University system, while facing an estimated budget shortfall of $428 million to $1 billion next year because of state-level cuts and deferments, announced a partnership with major technology companies including OpenAI, Google and Microsoft to bring their artificial intelligence products into higher education. The deal included paying OpenAI $16.9 million over 18 months for an education-specific version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, called “ChatGPT Edu,” for all staff, faculty and students.
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