When Dan Serig, Ed.D., of Northeastern’s College of Professional Studies (CPS) took the virtual stage for “AI in Action,” a national webinar hosted with workplace-learning partner EdAssist, he opened not with a chart, but with a forest. Beneath the soil, he told his audience, fungal threads link trees together, moving sugar and warning signals from one to the next. And the trees that flourish aren’t the tallest or luckiest, but the ones plugged into the network. AI, he argued, is becoming exactly that kind of network beneath modern work and learning. The job now isn’t to run from it. It’s to plug in.

That reframing set the tone for a session that drew nearly 3,000 live attendees across industries. By its end, more than 300 questions and comments came in demonstrating a volume of engagement that underscores just how hungry today’s workforce is for grounded, practical guidance on AI.

Real numbers, not hype

Serig built his case on current research rather than speculation. Citing Gallup’s Q2 2026 workforce study, he noted that roughly nine in ten large companies now use AI somewhere in their business, and just over half of American workers say they personally use AI on the job, which is more than double the share three years ago. But he pointed to a more revealing split in the data: only 15% of workers use AI daily, meaning most people have “walked through the door” but are “standing just inside it.”

The real dividing line, he told attendees, isn’t who uses AI versus who doesn’t. That gap is closing fast. It’s the difference between people who tried AI once and people who got good at it. Gallup’s research bears that out starkly: workers who use AI for just one or two tasks report a 45% productivity gain, while those using it across seven or more tasks report double that, at 90%.

“It’s the difference between people who tried AI once and people who got good at it.”

Serig grounded the argument in real people, too. From Gene Walinski, a 70-year-old Home Depot electrical associate who taught himself to consult an AI assistant roughly once an hour on the sales floor, to findings from a Stanford/MIT study of 5,000 customer service agents in which the least experienced workers saw productivity gains of 34%, compared to almost none for veteran staff. The pattern, he said, is consistent: AI tends to lift the people who were furthest behind the most. In other words, it’s a “great equalizer,” but only when used thoughtfully.

CPS as the bridge

The session’s turn toward Northeastern came with a direct question to the audience: where does CPS fit into all of this? Serig laid out a college built for exactly this moment, one where more than 70% of courses embed hands-on, real-world experience; where faculty are practitioners shaped by active industry partnerships; and where AI is woven across the curriculum rather than confined to a single degree track, including CPS’s own graduate programs in AI.

He also tied the moment back to one of the day’s more sobering statistics: nationally, employers put roughly $28 billion a year behind education benefits, yet only about 2% of eligible employees use them in a given year. Too often, he noted, it’s simply because they don’t know what their benefit covers. CPS’s stackable credential model, where a certificate earned today counts toward a future degree, was framed as a direct answer to that gap: a lower-friction, compounding path for professionals who want to build AI fluency without starting their education over from scratch.

Good learning means good questions

The scale of audience engagement pointed to real appetite for the topic. Attendees pressed Serig on AI hallucinations, environmental impact, workplace policy gaps, hallucination-checking habits, and how to build genuine skill rather than simply outsourcing judgment to a tool. Several described walking away, in their own words, “from nervous to curious.”

For CPS, the session doubles as a case study in how the college sees its role in the AI moment: not as a distant academic observer, but as an active partner working directly with employers and their learning platforms to translate research into skills people can use the same week they learn them. As Serig put it to close the session: AI didn’t decide anyone’s future. It just made the decision to keep learning matter more.

Dr. Dan Serig, Ed.D., is a faculty member at Northeastern University’s College of Professional Studies. The “AI in Action” webinar was presented in partnership with EdAssist.