Students across Australian campuses are already using AI to explore ideas, build assistants, and move concepts to prototypes, and new survey data shows how much further they expect universities to go. The Pureprofile study, commissioned by OpenAI, polled 1,018 Australian university students aged 18 and over from 3–7 August 2026. It found 81% use AI several times a week, 33% use it multiple times a day, and 28% have already built an AI agent or assistant to manage studies, work, or personal life. Four in five (79%) want their university to offer more opportunities to use advanced AI tools on real-world projects, with the same share interested in applying AI to health, climate, science, or cyber security. Career expectations are equally strong: 61% believe AI skills will be essential in their chosen career, 65% say AI skills will give Australian graduates an advantage in the global workforce, and 69% think AI literacy will become as fundamental as digital literacy, writing, or numeracy. Entrepreneurial interest is high too—76% are interested in starting a company or working for themselves, and 68% believe AI will make it easier to start a business.

Australian universities are responding by building institution-wide OpenAI collaborations. UNSW Sydney is bringing ChatGPT Edu to more than 80,000 students and staff, expanding access in stages, and plans to integrate generative AI foundations and Codex into courses, with hands-on use through hackathons, industry projects, internships, graduate roles, and startup networks. The University of Sydney will provide supported ChatGPT Edu access with training and guidance, starting with a trial and aiming for all students by Semester 1, 2027; it is also establishing a $1 million AI Sustainability Research and Innovation Fund. La Trobe University already gives all 3,500 staff access to ChatGPT Edu and plans universal access for 45,000 students and staff in Q1 2027. La Trobe is adding Australia’s first Bachelor of AI Engineering (Honours), with its first cohort in 2027, and Australia’s first AI MBA, and it appointed Phil Laufenberg as Australia’s first Pro Vice-Chancellor AI and Chief AI Officer. Adelaide University, newly created through a merger, is building on existing OpenAI API use and is one of the first higher-education institutions to adopt OpenAI Daybreak Blue for authorised defensive security work, including vulnerability discovery, secure code review, malware analysis, incident response, and patch validation.

The partnerships are already changing teaching practice. At La Trobe, paramedicine head Cameron Anderson uses ChatGPT to generate practice activities in the learning management system, where students interpret ECGs, assess possible heart attacks, or triage patients after mass casualty incidents. In the School of Education, Professor Therese Keane uses a social robot called Fletch—powered by OpenAI large language models hosted through Microsoft Azure—to help trainee teachers practise giving feedback to parents, including confrontational conversations developed from interviews with experienced educators. La Trobe has made OpenAI’s Codex and ChatGPT Work available across the institution, with new handbook entries for Vibe Coding for Startups and Agentic AI Software Engineering from 2027. Its AI Business Studio plans to give more than 1,000 students experience as consultants and forward deployed engineers helping small and medium enterprises adopt AI by 2028. The university reports dozens of live use cases, hundreds of people trained, and 10% month-on-month growth in active users. “ChatGPT and Codex have helped shorten early systems development and innovation from months to weeks, and importantly, enabled embedded co-design by staff and students,” Laufenberg said.

Universities are also defining when AI is appropriate in learning and assessment. UNSW has introduced a Can, Can’t, Must framework, letting educators mark AI as permitted, prohibited, or required for a given task, so students practise using AI while still demonstrating field knowledge. The University of Sydney is pairing its rollout with a responsible AI framework and an assessment approach that asks students to show their own capability in supervised settings and then apply AI effectively in open assessments. La Trobe’s library has developed free Responsible and Safe AI learning modules, and AI skills development is being integrated into 50 priority first-year subjects for Semester 1, 2027, with tailored modules for Education, Law, and Health. The overall aim is to give graduates practical AI experience alongside the subject knowledge and judgment to use it appropriately as they enter the workforce.