HE FEST 2025 Workshop
AI, Strategy, and the New Student Journey
The world your students are preparing for is rapidly being upended. Is your marketing keeping pace?
AI isn’t coming - it’s already here. And it’s rapidly transforming how education is delivered, consumed, and valued. For university marketing leaders, this means rethinking everything. What does it mean for student recruitment? For the value proposition of a degree? For the entire marketing function, including how we structure our teams, engage prospects, differentiate our offering, utilise third partners?
But with so much hype, and so little clarity, many are left wondering where to start, and can be tempted to wait until there’s clarity before making the right decision.
You’re not alone if your team is feeling stuck.
Too many university teams are stuck in reactive mode - watching AI evolve from the sidelines, unsure how to respond. As student expectations shift, employer demands evolve, and academic delivery models adapt, the role of marketing is being fundamentally reshaped. If your team doesn’t have a clear AI strategy yet, you’re already falling behind.
While the headlines scream innovation, your inbox is full of uncertainty. How will employer expectations shift your messaging? What role will marketing play as new forms of credentialing and hybrid delivery emerge? And just how fast will academic delivery change?
Meanwhile, other institutions are already making moves - experimenting, adapting, and building AI capability at speed. Without a clear strategy and pragmatic approach to deliver meaningful change, the risk isn’t just falling behind. It’s being left out of the conversation altogether.
Join us for a pragmatic, future-focused workshop designed for higher ed marketing leaders.
It’s clear that nobody knows all the answers, and that we are all learning from the experts a few steps ahead of us! And spending time comparing notes with leaders and colleagues, and challenging our own thinking is valuable.
Led by Michael Burgess - former Chief Student Experience Officer at Western Sydney University and ex-head of strategy at NRMA - and Ray Fleming - former global higher education industry lead at Google Cloud and Microsoft ANZ, and cohost of the AI in Education podcast since 2019. This 3-hour workshop will blend lifting your knowledge of what’s happening in an AI-disrupted world with real-world case studies, forward-looking insights, and facilitated discussions to help you:
Understand where AI is already reshaping higher ed - from classrooms to campaign teams
Explore how marketing can drive value in a redefined student experience
Build the components of a roadmap to guide your team’s development over the next two years
You’ll leave with a sharper sense of what’s possible, what’s urgent, and what’s next - for you, your team, and your university.