Artificial Intelligence and the Value Co-Creation Process in Higher Education Institutions

Abstract

The transformative capacity of artificial intelligence (AI) in different sectors is rapidly progressing. One of the sectors in which there has been an increase in these developments is the education sector, particularly higher education (HE). Although some studies have begun to consider the advances in AI to incorporate solutions at various stages of the university educational process, the role of students as possible co-creators of these developments has not yet been considered. From a perspective of value co-creation and service-dominant logic (SDL), this study seeks to identify the typologies of value perceived by university students with respect to different AI solutions applied to the learning process in the framework of a value network composed of themselves and other actors in the network. Using a qualitative, phenomenological research approach, four workshop sessions were developed with a total sample of 93 students from three Colombian universities. The results indicate that students mostly respond in agreement with the co-creation of value based on the concepts of AI functions in the future scenario of HE. These AI functions include the machine teacher and the Smart Tutoring App. The chatbot is among the functions associated with value co-destruction, which is one of the most widespread developments in the area of user experiences in business. Finally, we discuss these findings and offer implications for guiding public policy and strategic decisions by university boards in this highly relevant area.