The impact of recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) on higher education (HE), like other fields, is causing profound transformations that affect the entire organization of academia. A recent systematic review covering scientific papers published between 2016 and 2022, hence only partially covering the ChatGPT phenomenon, highlighted how the use of AI in higher education has grown significantly over the period 2018–2022, with publications increasing two to three times in 2021–2022 compared to previous years. Moreover, research on AI in education have explored how these technologies effectively affect the higher educational context, proving a beneficial impact both in teachers’ and students’ everyday practice. This impact extends beyond the STEM fields, including also courses in humanities. This shift highlights the need for a comprehensive reevaluation of how we approach education in the age of AI, considering both its strengths and limitations across various academic fields. In this paper, we present the results of exploratory research on how the introduction of generative AI (GenAI) in Italian higher education contexts has affected university teaching; results are based on two case studies based on courses in two completely different fields. The first case study concerns the introduction of GenAI in the first-year course of ‘Educational Technologies’ in the program of a Master's Degree in Primary Teacher Education at the LUMSA University; the second case study refers to a third-year ‘Open Data Management’ course in the Computer Science Bachelor’s program at the University of Palermo.