The days of learning a skill once and coasting on it for life are over. The new reality, according to AI Campus founder and chancellor Tade Oyerinde, looks a lot like a New York City gym before summer.
Speaking on the first day of the 25th annual Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen on Monday, Oyerinde posited that AIโs rapid pace of improvement has permanently changed the calculus of educationโno matter where you are in your career. All that scrambling to deploy AI that companies and executives are doing right now? Thatโs not a one-time project that will suddenly reach a final resolution once and for all, said Oyerinde.
โIโm sorry if youโre exhausted,โ Oyerinde told the audience. โYouโre going to have to do that every year for the rest of your careers, ad infinitum.โย
He predicts organizations will soon staff permanent โcontinuous learning, continuous development, continuous evaluationโ departments, as standard as operations or finance. And with AI models now approaching recursive self-improvementโwhere each version helps build the nextโthe curve will only get steeper.
โThe era of learn once and then youโre done for life is over,โ Oyerinde said. โWeโre going to have this exponential takeoff.โ
Which brings us to the gym, another place where consistency matters. Just like โeveryone in New York wants to be hot and fit for the summer,โ and puts in two or three hours a week to get there, Oyerinde said, staying competitive at work will demand the same dedication and focus.ย
โIf you want to be the equivalent of hot and fit in your career, youโre going to have to spend two or three hours a week learning how to use the most recent advances in AI.โ
A faster, smarter way to learn
The reframing of continuous education as maintenance rather than a single milestone also applies to the traditional thinking around the way schools and curriculums are designed and built. Colleges and universities often take the same approach for vastly diverse student bodies. Instead, AI can map each studentโs knowledge at an โatomic levelโ and route them through custom pathways, letting strong students skip ahead while others work on other gaps, explained Oyerinde.
The result, he claims, is teaching people โabout five times faster.โ That was the rationale behind Campusโs 2025 acquisition of Sizzle AI, a learning startup founded by Metaโs former AI chief Jerome Pesenti.ย ย
Hadi Partovi, who founded Code.org 13 years ago, recently renamed it to CodeAI to reflect the evolution in coding. The organization has focused on helping students learn the basics of computer science and the technology remaking their world. Now that mission has fully embraced coding and AI.ย
Every student, said Partovi, needs to grasp how AI actually works, then learn to build with it, and to use it responsibly.ย
โThis is the most powerful technology that mankind has ever created, and anybody has access to that power,โ he said.
Partovi described himself as a โcautious optimist,โ but suggests not treating AI as โthis magic thing thatโs been created from above.โ Instead, itโs something humans have developed, and everyone should help shape it. That applies to curriculum and learning to code, too.ย
However, just because AI can read, write, and do math, doesnโt mean schools will stop teaching these skills, noted Partovi. But the rote parts of coding, he said, like memorizing where semicolons and brackets go, no longer matter. What will continue to be important is computational thinking, logic, planning, and problem-solving.
โI also think we need to start questioning what students should learn,โ said Partovi. โMy guess is nobody here in this room uses calculus day to day, and no employer or almost no employer except maybe SpaceX or a few other places, but mostly nobody is hiring the calculus experts. But every student is struggling and thinking they need to get really good at it for almost no purpose whatsoever.โ
And as education is pushed to evolve, given the way AI is reshaping learning and job opportunities, thereโs a need for faster evolution in the way learning takes place.
โThe gap between whatโs relevant and what schools are teaching is growing as fast as the AI models are changing,โ said Oyerinde.
And as students and companies adapt to the need for continuous new knowledge about AI, the thinking applies to those who are well beyond school or prime executive age. Karin Klein, founding partner at venture firm Bloomberg Beta, said AI can benefit all rather than a few. Klein participates in โtalking circlesโ with icon Gloria Steinem, who is a lifelong learner.
โAt 92, Gloriaโs still learning,โ said Klein. โI taught her how to use AI about a year and a half ago, so we all have no excuses, right?โ
Written by Amanda Gerut for Fortune as โYour career needs a โgym membershipโ to keep up with continuous AI advancements, says Campus founder Tade Oyerindeโ and republished with permission.
