Pop icon and Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am has added a surprising new title to his resume: college professor. The tech entrepreneur and musician has officially partnered with Arizona State University (ASU) to design and teach a groundbreaking, 15-week course titled “The Agentic Self,” diving deep into the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence.

Appointed as a professor of practice at ASU’s Media Arts and Sciences school, Will.i.am is steering the curriculum away from simple chatbots toward “agentic AI”—systems capable of reasoning, adapting, and executing complex workflows on behalf of their users. Split between a state-of-the-art studio in Los Angeles and ASU’s main campus in Tempe, the class brings together a diverse cohort of students ranging in age from 19 to 60. +1

The course serves as a live testing ground for EDU.FYI, a new educational platform built on NVIDIA technology and developed in collaboration with Will.i.am’s own creative productivity startup, FYI.AI. Through this platform, students learn how to build custom, ethical AI personas designed to act as digital extensions of themselves.

For Will.i.am, the move into academia is a natural extension of his long-standing tech advocacy and philanthropy. He views mastery over AI as a vital tool for economic empowerment and a defense mechanism against automation-driven job displacement. Rather than viewing the technology through a lens of “doom and gloom,” he challenges his students to deploy AI to solve localized, real-world problems—from boosting financial literacy to helping small mom-and-pop shops modernize their businesses.

“You could use AI, or AI could use you,” the musician-turned-professor remarked, emphasizing that the ultimate goal of the course is to ensure the next generation of leaders can build empathetic, ethical systems that keep human imagination at the center of innovation.