Artificial intelligence in education has become a tangible reality, not just a fantasy. The success of the educational process is largely dependent on the ability to apply digital tools in practice, both for students and faculty.

At the morning opening session of the conference, Nikita Lavrenov, a scientific journalist and Skoltech employee, held a master class on using the Perplexity chatbot. For example, it can be used to quickly process photos of slides from a conference to get a text summary of the most important information. Professor Ivan Tyukin from the Skoltech AI Center and head of the laboratory in the field of trustworthy artificial intelligence, spoke about how AI is evolving and how it is changing education and the labor market. Associate Professor Olga Alkanova from the Department of Marketing and Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence in Business Education at St. Petersburg State University shared the results of an experiment on digitizing herself, its difficulties, and feedback from students. Professor Anna Kachkaeva from the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences and Professor Svetlana Shomova from the Higher School of Economics, disclosed the results of a large-scale survey of teachers, students, and creative workers on the spread and adoption of AI.

At the plenary session, the speakers discussed the challenges and prospects of integrating artificial intelligence into the higher education system.

Valeria Vorobyeva, General Director of the Alliance for Artificial Intelligence, expressed the opinion that AI tools will help better unlock the potential of students: “Artificial intelligence will take on routine tasks and help us reach out to everyone — highlight the student's trajectory, free up time for a conversation.”

“We underestimate the role of personal communication in education. Getting rid of routine with the help of AI will help create a more relaxed and informal atmosphere in which students will be motivated to study the subject,” added Maria Tikhonova, the head of the department at SberAI and associate professor at the Higher School of Economics.

Oksana Oracheva, General Director of the Vladimir Potanin Foundation, shared how the participants in the competitive selections use artificial intelligence: “Interestingly, those who use AI equally come from technical and humanitarian backgrounds. Artificial intelligence is most often used to edit ready-made texts, build their logic, check information for compliance with the requirements of the competition, summarize data, and compose cover letters.”

Igor Remorenko, Rector of Moscow City Pedagogical University, and Ivan Stelmakh, Professor at the New Economic School and Product Director at Central University, also contributed to the session and shared their experience of working with AI tools.

Skoltech President Alexander Kuleshov summarized the opinions of experts and pointed out that the future of artificial intelligence cannot be predicted: “We now live in a world of fantasies and illusions about the possibilities of artificial intelligence. We live in complete uncertainty — what is allowed and what is not. It’s completely pointless to predict anything.” The president used AlphaGeometry as an example, saying that it can solve tasks in international mathematical competitions just as well as their gold medalists.

The second part of the conference was practical and interactive. Participants were invited to four special sections, where they could master different tools:

• Associate Dean of Education Olga Ushakova from Skoltech conducted a class for those who wanted to learn how to use AI services from scratch

• Vyacheslav Goiko, who heads the Laboratory of Applied Big Data Analysis at Tomsk State University, presented AI tools to help methodologists design educational programs

• Alexey Zaitsev, who heads the Skoltech–Sberbank Laboratory of Applied Research, shared what types of instructions can be given to neural networks, in what situations they should be used, and how to train large language models for your own tasks.

• A team from the ITMO Center for Scientific Communication demonstrated how to design programs in which AI can be harmoniously integrated into work with students, as well as why it is useless to avoid AI, especially in education.

In the evening sections, the conference participants were given guided tours of Skoltech and introduced to the world-class research infrastructure. Representatives of the St. Petersburg State University Center for Teaching Excellence in Business Education gave a master class on the use of artificial intelligence to review literature in research. The participants gained knowledge of AI assistants that aid in finding links and summarizing the material.