An AI study companion is being sold to your senior team as the answer to widening attainment gaps and falling tutorial capacity. As Pro Vice-Chancellor (Education) at the University of Pennine, you have six turns to decide how — and whether — to bring it in.
Pennine is a fictional mid-tier English university with 22,000 students, a strong widening participation record, and a £14m structural deficit. The vendor — LearnLoop AI — is a Series B US startup with charming UK leadership and aggressive sector growth. There is no single right way to navigate this. Caution, ambition, partnership and refusal each have legitimate strategic logics. This scenario tests the trade-offs between pedagogical integrity, institutional risk, and the cost of standing still.