Ex-Microsoft Exec and AI Expert Says Colleges Need This New Curriculum

https://www.businessinsider.com/ex-microsoft-exec-ai-expert-says-colleges-need-new-curriculum-2026-2

Publish Date: 2026-02-04 06:53:00

Ex-Microsoft exec Craig Mundie has heard this question again and again — parents asking him a version of the same worry: Their kids are heading toward college, artificial intelligence is advancing fast, and jobs feel uncertain. What, exactly, should their kids be studying?

That question — what education will matter most in five years — reflects a deeper uncertainty about the future.

Mundie, who spent 22 years at Microsoft helping steer the company’s vision toward AI and retired as the company’s chief research and strategy officer in 2014, says that parents are simply asking the wrong question.

It’s not only the students who have to change to fit the new AI era — it’s the education system itself, said Mundie, who now advises other executives on AI and public policy.

Rather than chasing down the right job, Mundie urges families to prepare kids for a world where learning itself becomes continuous, personalized, and done in partnership with intelligent machines.

AI is altering the human experience

During an interview with Business Insider’s Reem Makhoul in June, Mundie said artificial intelligence and robotics are poised to reshape work more deeply than past technologies. See the edited cut of his interview below:

That shift, Mundie said, forces a bigger question than which job skills will survive. It challenges how societies define human value. This is something Mundie’s been pondering for over a decade.

In his 2015 book “Genesis,” Mundie, with co-authors Eric Schmidt and Henry Kissinger, examined how AI could alter the human experience. “What we say is we have to think differently about how we value ourselves and what we do.”

For much of history, he said, dignity has been tied to work because people had to work to survive. AI could loosen that link by automating more tasks across both physical and intellectual labor.

Meanwhile, humans will need to learn how to work alongside…

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