AI is no longer testing whether institutions can move fast. It’s revealing whether their systems, data, and decisions are trustworthy at scale. As students verify claims across platforms and AI exposes internal fragmentation, trust has become a design constraint higher education can’t ignore.

Most higher ed buying happens long before anyone is “in market.” Buyer personas are meant to shape how buyers see you during that early stretch when trust forms, opinions settle, and shortlists take shape. The question is whether yours are built to do that work.

Discovery no longer begins with your website, your message, or even your market. In 2025, AI pushed the first interpretation of your work upstream into spaces you don’t control. This article unpacks the four upstream shifts that defined the year and offers three predictions for leaders entering 2026.

If you sell into education, you already know the cycle is slow, political, and unforgiving. What you may not realize is how much of your growth is stalled by trust forming too late. This piece shows why executives fund certainty, and how to make your GTM operation deliver it.

The most revealing AI user I met this year wasn’t a CIO or a data scientist, it was a third grader who instinctively manages hallucinations, boundaries, and verification. Her perspective should reshape how leaders plan for what’s next.

When Netflix buys Warner Bros for $82.7B, it’s a case study in how incumbents lose when they treat innovation like a feature upgrade. Warner didn’t fall behind because of bad content; it fell behind because it ignored the structural shifts reshaping its market. Edtech and agency leaders are standing in the same place now, facing signals that look small… until they don’t.

Students are asking AI to recommend programs, compare costs, and judge your institution before they ever click your site. The institutions winning visibility right now aren’t writing more content, they’re restructuring it, fast.

AI can now resize your videos, rewrite your headlines and optimize every frame of your campaign before you’ve had a chance to brief your team. If the machine is steering the creative in real time, what exactly is the job of a brand team?

Leaders want AI-level outcomes without modernizing the systems that make those outcomes possible. When trust breaks and governance lags, workarounds take over. The question is whether your organization is ready to lead through that reality.