Universities Are Building AI Infrastructure Worth Having and Not Publishing the Contract

I went looking at universities this summer to refresh my understanding of where higher education stood with APIs in 2026, but also with AI. I’ve long tuned into, engaged with, and reported upon the state of APIs at the university level, but AI was new for me. API Evangelist spends most of its time profiling companies that sell APIs (and now AI), and the working assumption going in was that higher education would be a story about software procurement — schools signing enterprise agreements, rolling out a vendor’s chatbot, and calling it a strategy.