Artificial intelligence (AI) can transform the world through a significant impact on the lives of the people. This technological advancement has touched all the fields, including higher education. This paper examines the research in the domain of AI and higher education by adopting a bibliometric approach. The paper uses the VOSviewer software for creating the bibliometric networks. Using the Scopus database, this study traces the growth in the publications related to AI and higher education. This paper analyses the important journals, top authors, top cited articles, and leading countries in the research related to AI and higher education. The study finds that an exponential growth in this literature has taken place in the last years, especially after 2020. ‘Education and Information Technologies’ journal has published the most articles related to AI and higher education, whereas ‘International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education’ ranks at the top in terms of total citations and citations per document. With respect to the countries, China has generated the highest research publications. However, the U.S. ranks at the top in terms of total citations and Germany occupies the first position in terms of citations per document. The keywords analysis highlights that some keywords such as ‘medical students’, ‘plagiarism’, ‘learning experiences’, ‘academic writing’ occur with less frequency.