Less than four years after ChatGPT first burst onto the scene, AI is rewriting the rules of the workplace faster than most predicted, leaving education leaders asking the question: how do we prepare young people for jobs that don’t yet exist?
Last week, hundreds of educators, learning and technology leaders, partners and members of the Instructure community gathered last week in Sydney for CanvasCon ANZ 2026, hosted by Instructure, the maker of Canvas LMS.
Held at ILUMINA under the theme ‘Shaping Readiness, Together’, the two-day event dug into how education institutions are responding to AI, shifting student expectations, skills development and the growing push for lifelong learning, drawing participants from universities, schools and vocational education providers across Australia and New Zealand.
The event coincided with preliminary findings from Instructure research which reveals that while most Australian educators rate lifelong learning support as a priority, confidence in their institution's ability to deliver it lags well behind.
One of the speakers was Dr Toby Walsh, ARC Laureate Fellow, Scientia Professor of AI and Chief Scientist of UNSW.AI, whose session – titled “Outthinking AI: Cognition, Assessment, and the Skills of the Future” – examined how advances in AI are challenging traditional approaches to cognition and assessment, and what skills students will need to succeed in an AI-enabled world.
“While AI changes many things and offers many fantastical tools to help both students and teachers on their journeys, many of the fundamentals remain the same,” Dr Walsh told The Educator.
“We still need to teach communication skills, critical thinking skills, mathematical and digital skills, grit, and many of these require us to do what we’ve always done, such as practice questions, essays, and so on.”
Dr Walsh, who has addressed the United Nations, heads of state and parliamentary bodies on AI, said the one thing that he tells policymakers in those rooms that never seems to filter down to a school staffroom is that the human remains at the centre.
“And no more so, than in education,” he said. “Teachers are one of the safest professions.”
When asked if there is a particular skill Australian schools are still drilling hard that AI has already made pretty much redundant, Dr Walsh said schools aren’t teaching the scepticism and skill needed to decide when the machine is wrong.
As for what schools should keep teaching, Dr Walsh said most of the answers are quite traditional.
“We've always taught critical thinking skills, communication skills — those things that have always been valued are going to be even more valued in an artificially intelligent world,” he said.
“There's plentiful opportunity in social and emotional intelligence. Machines don't have that — they don't have a rich internal life to reflect on. So, there are plentiful jobs there: a politician, a psychiatrist, a salesperson, a doctor.”
Dr Walsh said the scarcity of human-made work will only drive up its worth.
“We are indeed already increasingly valuing things made by human hands, and they will be, as economists will tell us, in short supply — and forever more valuable.”
Looking ahead, Dr Walsh said education must not be thought of as something that finishes when students leave school.
“It's going to happen across the lifecycle — we're going to have to keep on educating ourselves.”