I run an organization that provides Spanish language and study abroad experiences in Argentina and Uruguay to students from around the world. This is the kind of organization that is very far down the food chain, but delivers critical local logistical and academic services to a high standard. We work through agents or directly with study abroad offices in North American and European universities. Naturally, we have been asking ourselves what the impact of AI will be on our organization and specifically on the experience students and universities seek when they plan to study abroad in our region. Let me share some of my ideas on the matter with you. I try to be analytical, but in some parts I cannot help being a little normative.
A growing body of articles enthusiastically documents how artificial intelligence is reshaping study abroad. We are told that AI streamlines recruitment, personalizes advising, predicts student fit, automates application workflows, and delivers instant answers across time zones. In many ways, this is true—and welcome. Administrative efficiency matters. Access matters. Information equity matters.
As education professionals, we must ask a deeper question: beyond recruitment and logistics, what role should AI play in the actual experience of studying abroad? Can it partly replace the role of studying abroad? Will students eventually abandon the major effort of learning a new foreign language? Will they stop travelling abroad because AI can help them simulate similar experiences at home? Will it make their lives abroad easier in ways that reduce the very challenges that make the experience transformative? Many of these questions are largely absent from the current discourse, but the answers to them could help us refocus on why we run study abroad programs in the first place.
Study abroad has never been merely an information problem to solve. It has been, at its core, a developmental and transformative experience. Students go abroad not simply to acquire knowledge, but to encounter difference—linguistic, political, social, and cultural—and to reflect on their own identities in relation to it. AI may enhance access and preparation, but it should not replace—or unintentionally dilute—the productive friction through which personal transformation occurs. While AI can certainly influence this encounter, it will have a hard time replicating the very tension that makes study abroad meaningful.
One of our core competencies at Academia Buenos Aires and Academia Uruguay is facilitating Spanish language acquisition. AI translation tools now allow students to navigate daily life with remarkable ease. A phone can instantly translate menus, conversations, even live speech. On the surface, this reduces anxiety and increases access. But immersion has always depended on productive struggle. The awkward pause when you cannot find the right word, the mispronunciation that leads to laughter, the slow process of listening more carefully because you must. When AI removes that struggle, it may also remove the cognitive and emotional labor that leads to deeper learning. Students can function in a foreign language environment without ever fully inhabiting the language, and translation becomes transactional rather than transformative. Language learning abroad is not only about comprehension; it is about vulnerability, inhabiting uncertainty long enough to grow and establishing unforeseeable social contacts. AI, if overused, risks insulating students from that uncertainty.
This brings us back to one of the earlier questions: will students eventually abandon the effort of learning a new language because technology makes it unnecessary? It seems unlikely that AI will eliminate the need or the desire for language learning altogether. What it may do, however, is tempt students to settle for functional navigation rather than deeper linguistic inhabitation. The greater risk is not total replacement, but gradual dilution.
Many of our students come not only to learn the language, but also to learn how to assimilate culturally. They (and we) see culture and language as intertwined. For our students in Argentina and Uruguay, AI can now explain local customs, summarize historical tensions, interpret gestures, and even suggest “appropriate” responses in social situations. While this can reduce misunderstandings, it can also subtly shift the locus of meaning-making away from the student. Traditionally, students abroad must interpret ambiguity on their own. Why did that conversation feel tense? Why does public space function differently here? Why is humor expressed this way? In wrestling with these questions, students become more reflective about their own cultural assumptions. If students turn immediately to AI for explanations, they may bypass that reflective pause. The interpretation becomes algorithmic rather than personal. Instead of asking, “What does this reveal about my own cultural lens?” they may ask, “What does the AI say this means?” Study abroad has always been about developing intercultural humility. That humility emerges not from instant clarity but from confusion, missteps, and gradual insight.
Many of the U.S. institutions we work with articulate ambitious learning goals for study abroad: understanding another country’s economy, witnessing political processes, observing social movements, engaging with the arts. AI can summarize these themes, provide background on a protest in Montevideo, explain an election in Buenos Aires, and outline economic policy for Mercosur. We should encourage its use in preparation for these objectives. Yet summary is not the same as situated experience. Standing on Plaza de Mayo during a demonstration, hearing chants by union members you only partially understand, sensing tension in the air—this is embodied knowledge. Visiting a local theater performance at Teatro Solís and feeling out of place is different from reading an AI-generated cultural analysis of the arts scene. AI can provide context. It cannot (yet) replicate atmosphere. It cannot generate the ethical discomfort that prompts students to ask, “Where do I stand in relation to this?” Nor can it replace conversations with our host families, professors, activists, or artists whose perspectives complicate easy narratives. The danger is not that AI will misinform students. The danger is that it will make experiences too neatly packaged—too easily digestible.
This also returns us to another earlier question: will your students and ours stop travelling because AI can simulate experiences at home? AI may provide information, images, and even virtual encounters. But it cannot substitute for physical presence, unpredictability, and the social density of lived environments. It cannot reproduce the minor inconveniences, the sensory overload, or the subtle social negotiations that accompany being elsewhere. What it might do, if overintegrated, is soften those edges and thereby reduce the developmental intensity of being abroad.
At its best, study abroad creates space for reflection. Journaling, facilitated discussions, independent exploration—these are moments where students process what they are seeing and connect it to their own identities and values. AI can assist with reflection prompts. It can help students articulate thoughts, and it can even generate comparative cultural analyses. But reflection is developmental precisely because it is slow. It requires students to sit with ambiguity, contradiction, and occasional discomfort. If AI begins to generate insights for students too quickly, reflection risks becoming performance rather than transformation. There is a difference between helping students think and thinking for them.
AI may meaningfully enhance study abroad in several areas: improving accessibility for students with disabilities, providing pre-departure scaffolding to build cultural awareness, supporting risk management and crisis response, offering language support in early immersion stages. Used intentionally, AI can widen participation and reduce barriers. Yet we should be clear: the greater risk is not that AI will fully replace study abroad, but that it will gradually dilute the human, relational, and embodied core of the experience.
As education professionals, we face a strategic choice. We can allow AI to seep uncritically into every aspect of study abroad, prioritizing convenience and efficiency, or we can articulate clear pedagogical boundaries. Study abroad is not merely about helping students navigate another country. It is about helping them confront themselves—through language, culture, politics, and art. While AI excels at delivering information, study abroad is about transformation. If we are not careful, the very tools designed to make the experience easier may dilute the developmental intensity that has long justified its place in higher education. The question is not whether AI will shape study abroad. It already is. The question is whether we will shape AI’s role in ways that preserve the friction, vulnerability, and human encounter at the heart of global learning.
