At the recently held fourth Universities South Africa Higher Education Conference, higher education minister Buti Manamela called on universities to “prepare students for an increasingly artificial intelligence (AI) driven world, while ensuring that SA develops the skills and research capacity needed to shape the technology” ("Universities challenged to prepare graduates for AI-driven future," SA News, October 8 2026).
As reported, the minister’s address did not refer directly to postgraduate supervision, which is what I address here. While I fully agree with his insights, I would extend what he said to include postgraduate students, and in particular, supervisors.
In postgraduate research, supervisors are the people who teach the very skills the minister was referring to.
Also, they help shape knowledge production and build the intellectual and technical capacity for the future. If the credibility of postgraduate knowledge production is questioned, due to AI misuse that went undetected, then not only is the result damage to an institution’s reputation, but it also damages the wider society that trusts and depends on that knowledge.
My experience in academia, when I was a supervisor, was that it mostly concerned chasing timelines and being compliant with institutional processes and policies.
With AI now being part of the equation, supervision capacity and skill needs to level up.
The need for mandatory supervisor training in verifying AI-assisted work, and to guide candidates in the ethical use of AI throughout the research process, is becoming essential. A recent study by Nkosi (2026), based on interviews with ten supervisors, proposed specialised training in AI literacy and evaluation skills. The question is whether universities will be willing to invest in this training, especially since supervisor training and support for emerging supervisors has not been up to par (Puleng Motshoane, South African universities need to better support doctoral supervisors, The Conversation, September 30 2022).
If this is not done, then institutions will not only have their reputations to worry about.
The credibility of knowledge itself produced at these institutions will be questioned, something that no institution of higher learning in South Africa can afford.Prof Theodore Petrus, founder and CEO, Theodore Petrus Foundation and Theodore Petrus Academy, Gqeberha
