Rethinking Education in the Age of AI

The public release of generative AI tools has prompted urgent questions about their role in academic writing, where concerns about academic integrity and the displacement of student thinking remain unresolved. We present ABE (AI for Brainstorming and Editing), a scaffolded AI writing coach that positions generative AI as a critical reader rather than a writer. Integrated with Google Docs and designed for instructor-guided use, ABE engages students in structured activities targeting argumentation, perspective-taking, and iterative revision. A pilot evaluation with undergraduate students at the University of Southern California (N = 31) combined UTAUT measures with thematic analysis of open-ended survey responses. Perception ratings were consistently positive across four constructs. Thematic analysis surfaced three themes: Critical Perspective Engagement, Writing Process Support, and Pedagogical Approach. The most frequent code across ABE’s strength and areas of improvement was Tailored and Actionable Feedback. Students particularly valued the Counterarguments activity for expanding argumentative scope and surfacing perspectives they had not independently considered. An equal distribution of Interaction Modality Preference across strengths and improvements revealed a foundational tension between structured instructor-guided activities and open conversational interaction. We discuss implications for cognitive offloading, AI transparency, and the scaffolding–agency tradeoff. Based on this, we argue that process-oriented pedagogy offers most promising direction for AI writing coach design: integrating both structured and open-ended interaction over time across the development of a writing product.