With machine learning and deep learning as the core algorithmic support, and relying on big data, high-performance computing power and related engineering technologies, artificial intelligence has driven human society into the AI era, posing new requirements for the development of higher education and talent cultivation. The cultivation of college students’ humanistic quality, as an important part of implementing the fundamental task of fostering virtue and nurturing talent, is an inevitable requirement for cultivating new era talents capable of shouldering the mission of national rejuvenation, a realistic demand for promoting the integrated development of education, science and technology, and talent, an essential need for systematically reshaping the integrated education and cultivation ecosystem in colleges and universities, and an intrinsic pursuit for shaping college students’ comprehensive quality and achieving all-round development. The cultivation of college students’ humanistic quality needs to build an overall framework from four aspects: goal guidance, key support, system composition and content presentation. The goal guidance lies in taking “adapting to the AI era” as the core goal, “reasonable development of oneself” as the fundamental goal, “undertaking the mission of rejuvenation” as the key goal, and “serving human civilization” as the important goal. The key support is the three dimensions of college students’ “growth”, “talent development” and “becoming a person”. The cultivation system is composed of five subsystems of ideological quality, intelligent quality, adaptability quality, aesthetic quality and physical and mental quality, which are interwoven and coordinated. The content presentation specifically includes learning to “be a person”, learning to “think”, learning “AI”, and learning to “live”. In practice, it is necessary to be guided by the core concept of “three teaching transformations”, supported by the efficient integration of “diverse educational resources”, based on the integration of “good, new and excellent” methods, and guaranteed by the overall construction of the “all-round educational ecosystem”.