NTU Makes AI Literacy Compulsory for Every Undergraduate

Nanyang Technological University is making AI literacy mandatory for every undergraduate from August 2026, regardless of what they study.

NTU plans to integrate artificial intelligence into 40% of its courses by 2030. The university says the aim is not simply for students to use AI, but to understand it well enough to create and work with AI-enabled tools.

The Hive at NTU Singapore. From August 2026, AI literacy lessons will be mandatory for all NTU undergraduates. Image: Supanut Arunoprayote / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.

Every undergraduate will also receive access to a suite of premium Google AI tools and computing credits that can be used to build and deploy AI agents. NTU faculty are already using course-specific AI assistants to support learning in areas including data science, thermodynamics and medicine.

Why this matters for schools

The important signal is that AI literacy is being treated as a baseline graduate capability rather than a specialist skill for computing students.

Schools do not need to copy a university programme. But they do need to consider what students should understand about AI before they reach university or the workplace. That includes knowing when AI is useful, how to question its output and how to use it without replacing their own judgement.

As universities begin making these expectations explicit, the question for schools becomes increasingly practical: what should an AI-literate school leaver actually be able to do?

Read NTU’s overview of its AI plans