<p>The application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in online education is becoming increasingly ubiquitous and helpful for delivering knowledge, providing instant feedback, and assessing skills for students. However, there is a lack of investigation into how to promote interaction between AI educators and students to enhance their social connections, which is crucial for the sustainable development of AI education. We conducted a questionnaire-based survey with a sample of 588 college students from China to explore how the contingency design of AI educators promotes students’ acceptance intention under the framework of parasocial presence. Focusing on the initial encounter in the pre-adoption stage, our study evaluates students’ anticipated parasocial presence across four dimensions: anticipated intimacy, anticipated understanding, anticipated enjoyability, and anticipated involvement. The results of the structural equation modeling (SEM) indicated that anticipated parasocial presence fully mediated the positive effect of contingency design on usage intention as a holistic second-order construct. This study not only provides new theoretical insights into the extant knowledge of AI in higher education, the contingency design of AI, and the intermediary role of anticipated parasocial presence, but also offers practical guidance for the sustainable development of AI application design in higher education. </p>