Higher‑education leaders face a two‑front challenge: operational adoption of AI across campus functions and the impact of AI on how prospective students find and evaluate colleges. Institutional guides identify three core barriers to AI/ML adoption—AI talent shortages, data governance hurdles, and integration across legacy systems—which impede campus readiness for large‑scale deployments. Concurrently, AI‑driven search engines and Google’s AI Overviews are reshaping college recruitment. Reports show institutions losing visibility unless their content is optimized to be cited as authoritative in AI summaries. Enrollment leaders must now treat AI literacy, content sourcing, and digital provenance as recruitment priorities while navigating the governance and privacy tasks that come with campus AI projects.