ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how adult educators make sense of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in the higher education, training, and adult learning sectors, using the lens of institutional logics. Analysing qualitative data from an international survey, it shows how educators interpret AI usage through overlapping and often conflicting state, market, and professional logics in a rapidly digitalising environment. While AI is frequently promoted as a tool for innovation and efficiency, educators navigate its integration through ethical boundaries, pedagogical discretion, and institutional constraints. The chapter argues that AI adoption is shaped less by technological capacity and capability than by systemic misalignments across policy, practice, and professional identity. Its contribution lies in showing how educators actively interpret and negotiate these pressures in practice, producing patterns of bounded pragmatism, pragmatic integration, and contested practices.
