Agentic AI in Education: Opportunities, Challenges, and Future Research Agenda

Abstract

Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a new generation of intelligent systems capable of reasoning, planning, decision-making, and autonomous action. In the field of education, these capabilities can enable personalized learning, intelligent tutoring, adaptive feedback, educational analytics, collaborative learning, and teacher support. Concurrently, the greater autonomy of AI raises issues of transparency, accountability, privacy, bias, pedagogical shift, learning process, infrastructure, job loss, academic dishonesty, and sustainability. This editorial examines the opportunities and challenges associated with Agentic AI in education and highlights areas in which existing educational practices and governance arrangements may need to evolve. The paper outlines a future research agenda for autonomy and transparency, ethics and governance, pedagogy and instruction, learner development, infrastructure and accessibility, human–AI collaboration and role transformation, academic integrity and misuse, scalability and sustainability, and cross-cultural and institutional contexts based on these challenges. The agenda focuses on the importance of empirical, comparative, interdisciplinary and longitudinal research to inform the understanding of the potential of autonomous AI to improve learning outcomes while maintaining human oversight, academic values, equity, and responsible use. The proposed agenda is designed to be used as a reference for researchers, educators and institutions to design effective, inclusive, trustable and sustainable educational ecosystems with Agentic AI.