ChatGPT’s Education-focused Substack released a series of articles on agents in higher education. This is just as applicable for “lower” ed!
Post 1: “Understanding Workspace Agents in higher education” April 27, 2026
Post 2: “Hello Education. Meet Agents.” April 29, 2026
Post 3: “How to Build Agents for High Education.” April 30, 2026
Each of these focus on ChatGPT’s product(s); but are applicable to Claude and Claude/Gemini to some extent. As of this post, I do assess the Google and Microsoft agentic platform to be weaker than a ChatGPT or Claude with connectors but see groundwork being laid so that they catch up in terms of capability.
A reminder that agents are “designed for that kind of structured, repeatable work.” As the first post says:
A trigger: what starts the work, such as a manual request, a new form submission, or a scheduled run.
A process: the steps the agent should follow.
Tools and context: the approved files, apps, or systems it can use.
Guardrails: what it should check, when it should pause, and when it should ask for human approval.
The third post breaks this down further and provides an example.
The job: what the agent is responsible for
The knowledge: what information it can rely on
The tools: what systems or actions it can use
The workflow: the steps it follows
The guardrails: what keeps it safe and appropriate
The evaluation loop: how you know it is working
Suggested agents are focused on higher education applications but could be adapted for the high or elementary school. You could have agents that support instructional design in line with a particular professional development aspect (maybe that designing is a skill created for the agent). Agents in the front office or for families to have access to could be helpful.
Here the big concerns remain safety and privacy. I don’t like letting agents have delete powers or access to sensitive personal information. I also don’t like outward facing automatic creation – a draft or low-stakes answer is one thing, but professionalism and accuracy are too important for me to trust to an agent for now.
I’d recommend the first post for a good conception of agents and the third for how to build.
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