Every counselor has felt it this year: AI is everywhere, and the promises are getting louder. Some say it will transform counseling. Others worry it will replace it. After working with students, schools and universities, and building software for all three, I’ve come to a simpler view. AI won’t replace counselors. But it will change what a great counselor’s week looks like.
The real bottleneck is attention
The scarcest resource in counseling isn’t information. Students can find rankings, requirements and program pages in seconds. What they can’t find is someone who knows them well enough to help them decide.
That’s where AI earns its place. A school counselor responsible for 200 students can’t read 200 profiles every week. AI can. It can surface which students need attention now, organize what’s known about them, and prepare the counselor for each conversation. The value isn’t doing tasks faster. It’s putting the counselor’s time where it matters most.
The hype begins when AI is presented as the advisor itself. A student torn between medicine and design isn’t missing data. They’re missing clarity, and clarity comes from a conversation with someone they trust.
Advising for an economy that’s still moving
If AI changes how we counsel, it changes even more what we counsel for. Four shifts should shape every conversation about degrees and careers.
AI eats tasks, not jobs. A radiologist reads scans, reassures patients, handles hard cases and signs the final call. AI may master the scans and leave the rest. The useful question isn’t “will AI take this job?” but “which tasks inside it can a machine learn, and what’s left for a human?”
The first job is the new hurdle. Entry-level roles are shrinking fastest, even in fields once considered safe. Students increasingly need proof of work, such as projects, internships and portfolios, not just a transcript.
Replacement keeps failing. Klarna replaced hundreds of support agents with AI, then brought humans back when quality slipped. Across industries, augmentation keeps beating replacement. Students are unlikely to lose jobs to AI. They may lose them to someone who uses it better.
Geography now matters. Countries building AI experience it very differently from those simply buying it. In the UAE, job postings asking for AI skills jumped around 48% in a single year. Where a student aims their career can matter as much as what they study.
The conclusion is uncomfortable but important: there’s no safe major anymore, only resilient choices. Before any commitment, one question cuts through:
If this exact job disappeared, what would these skills let you do next?
Using AI responsibly, for students and counselors alike
AI gives confident answers, and confidence isn’t accuracy. Every output should be treated as a first draft until verified. Deadlines, entry requirements, test policies, costs, scholarships and visa rules should always be checked at the source, along with whether a program actually exists as described.
Bias is subtler. AI tends to over-represent famous US and UK universities and English-language sources. For students from around the world, many of the best options are in Europe, the Gulf or Asia. Part of the counselor’s job is widening the lens, and good tools should stay impartial, pointing students toward fit rather than any particular university.
For students, I recommend four habits:
- Use AI to ask better questions, not to get final answers.
- Verify everything on the university’s own website.
- Keep your own voice. AI can critique structure; the story and the words must be yours.
- Never share personal data without knowing where it goes.
AI can be a research assistant and a sparring partner. Never a ghostwriter.
What stays human
Trust and accountability. AI can flag that a student’s profile is split between two fields. It can’t see which one makes them light up, or notice that the other is the one their parents want. It can’t sit with a student after a rejection, or make a judgment call with incomplete information and own it.
AI prepares. The counselor delivers.
The tools reshaping counseling
Counselors today have strong tools to choose from, and they serve different parts of the job.
On the application side, PaveTheWay and Zyra are excellent. They help counselors manage the day-to-day of applications: deadlines, documents, tasks and student progress, all in one place. For any counselor juggling dozens of files each season, they make a real difference in time and peace of mind.
Orientation is a different challenge. Before a student can apply well, they need to know what to pursue and why. That’s the problem we set out to address with the Zen Test, an adaptive assessment that maps a student’s interests, strengths and work style to careers and degrees.
The part I find most useful is on the counselor’s side. Results feed into a dashboard showing each student and the whole cohort, and an AI assistant suggests which students to talk to first and what to discuss. We’re now adding university matching as a hybrid: the tool suggests programs, and the counselor refines them with what they know about the student. The machine brings breadth; the counselor brings judgment.
When one school ran it before term started, counselors could see their incoming cohort within days. They spent the first weeks guiding students rather than discovering them. That’s where AI helps most: giving counselors back the time to be counselors.
Where to start tomorrow
For counselors just beginning, start small. Pick one task you already do well, like a parent update or a program brief, and do it with AI. Compare the result to your own. Because you know what good looks like, you’ll quickly see where it helps and where it slips. Save what works and build from there.
And one rule worth keeping: never send AI output to a student or family without reading it as if you wrote it yourself. In their eyes, you did.
The counselors who thrive in the next few years won’t be the ones who resist AI, or the ones who hand it the wheel. They’ll be the ones who use it to do more of what only they can do.
By Serge Nader, Founder and CEO, Zenith Education
