Category Archives: Thoughts

Copilot Reflection: First 90 Days

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Even in the middle of summer, I’m continually reminded of the energy that pulses through our campus. It’s an energy fueled by curiosity, by a relentless drive to learn, and by a community that believes deeply in the power of innovation. Over the past several months, that energy has found a new outlet through our Microsoft Copilot Initiative—a key pillar in our broader UT.AI strategy.

When we launched the Copilot Initiative, our goal was simple but ambitious: to transform the way we work, collaborate, and solve problems across UT Austin. By integrating Microsoft 365 Copilot tools into our workflows, we set out to empower our staff to reclaim time, enhance productivity, and build the digital fluency that will define the next era of higher education.

The results so far have been impressive, with more to come. More than 1,200 staff members have participated in workshops, webinars, and hands-on labs. One in three participants now reports saving 1–2 hours per day—time they’re reinvesting in creative, strategic work that moves our university forward. Over 90% of our colleagues rated these learning experiences as exceptional or above average. These numbers are impressive, but what excites me most are the stories behind them: staff using Copilot to draft emails, summarize complex documents, organize workflows, and transcribing meetings to more quickly arrive at impactful descion-making. We’re not just adopting new tools—we’re reimagining what’s possible.

Of course, transformation isn’t always easy. We’ve encountered challenges around license allocation, data governance, and the quirks of moving from Box to SharePoint. But these are exactly the kinds of problems that signal real change is underway. They push us to ask better questions, to iterate, and to build solutions together.

What stands out from our interviews and feedback is a hunger for more: more cohort-based learning, more job-specific scenarios, more opportunities to experiment and grow. This is the heart of what makes UT Austin special. We are, at our core, a community of perpetual learners.

Looking ahead, I’m excited for what’s next. Later this month, we’ll gather for our AI Summit Week to share use cases and deepen our engagement. We’re rolling out expanded webinars and train-the-trainer workshops, building the internal capacity we need for sustained, campus-wide adoption. And as we do, we’ll continue to listen, to adapt, and to celebrate the creativity and resilience of our staff.

The Copilot Initiative is just one part of our larger UT.AI vision—a vision where technology is not just a tool, but a catalyst for lifelong learning and a culture of innovation. My hope is that we keep pushing the boundaries, keep asking what’s possible, and keep learning together. Because at UT Austin, the future isn’t something we can wait for. It’s something we build, one experiment, one workshop, one bold idea at a time. Here’s to always learning.

Here is a little summary of what we are experiencing from our post training workshop feedback:

AreaKey Findings
Training Reach1,200+ staff trained across UT Austin
Time Savings33% saved 1–2 hours/day; 56% saved 1–2 hours/week; 11% saved 1–2 hours/month
Satisfaction90%+ rated sessions as exceptional or above average
ProductivityCopilot used for drafting emails, summarizing documents, organizing workflows, project planning
AdoptionHigh demand for continued learning; strong interest in cohort-based and job-specific training
ChallengesLicense allocation, data governance, platform inconsistencies (Box vs. SharePoint)
Cultural ImpactStaff appreciated transparency and the university’s commitment to digital transformation

Agent Agency

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Last week was an eye-opening one on a few levels. I spent time with CIO colleagues from various schools around the Country and State at the Dell Higher Education Advisory Board meeting. The first thing I will say is that spending time with people I know and respect in our field is always a powerful opportunity to learn and measure how we are approaching our common problems of practice. The other thing I will say is that it is becoming even more clear that people outside of higher education don’t seem to fully understand what the role of a CIO or IT in general looks like in our context. It isn’t that our corporate partners don’t have a sense of what we think about, but there is a whole other side to what we do that seems to be hidden from them.

As a CIO of an R1 university, I do think about teaching and learning quite a bit, but it isn’t what the job is fully about. We spend a lot of our time working toward making every single aspect of campus life more effective, delightful, and efficient. That means, that while teaching, learning, and research are core areas of focus, we also spend a great deal of time working across various businesses to drive impact and outcomes. Universities are small cities with everything from power generation, police forces, critical systems, and everything in between to be concerned about. What we need as higher education CIOs are stories and examples of how our multi-national corporate colleagues run their lines of businesses that we can translate.

The Dell team talked a lot about the rise and potential of agentic AI. While many of the examples were focused on the educational sphere — curriculum creation, assessment, study partners, etc — things got much more interesting when a few of us pulled our colleagues aside and told them we were just as interested in how they and their clients are using them across local and state government, corporate sectors, retail, finance, construction, and others. Once they started to show us real life examples of how they are applying these types of strategies in those contexts, my mind was racing with ideas of how we could alter their corporate solutions and apply it to the higher education landscape.

Agentic AI, refers to AI systems capable of autonomous decision-making and actions, can be a game-changer in various aspects of university operations. Imagine AI-driven systems that can self-manage administrative tasks, optimize resource allocation, and even create automated decision support systems. Agents can analyze vast amounts of data to identify patterns and make informed decisions, freeing up human resources to focus on more strategic and creative endeavors.

I personally believe that one of the most promising applications of agentic AI in universities is in the realm of administrative efficiency. AI can streamline university communications, fund-raising, energy management, construction, housing and dining, and financial management. For instance, AI-driven systems can autonomously manage and optimize campus-wide energy usage, significantly reducing costs and improving sustainability. Similarly, AI can automate and enhance the efficiency of student housing allocation, ensuring that space is utilized optimally, and students’ preferences are considered. I firmly believe that once we make the move into this arena, we will be applying agentic AI in ways that can reduce the personal load associated with many of the ongoing administrative challenges we deal with every single day. In your ongoing learning with AI, what are you seeing as the primary opportunities to bring agentic AI into our own operations?

That Escalated Quickly

Thoughts, UTET,

As I reach the end of my first year here at the University of Texas, I am filled with gratitude and pride for the incredible progress we’ve made together. When I first stepped into this role, I was immediately struck by the talent, dedication, and innovative spirit that defines our university community. It has been a privilege to work alongside so many of you who are committed to supporting UT’s mission of excellence in education, research, and service.

Over the course of the past year, I have had the pleasure of meeting people from all over the 40 acres. I came here with that as a goal, to better understand the people I am in service to and the context I am doing that in. We collectively have so much going on and deal with new things each day. This year has seen leadership changes, strategic alignment, great conversations, progress on key initiatives, and a whole lot of really hard work. It has truly escalated quickly.

I arrived with what appeared to be a simple set of priorities. I never expected it to be easy; UT is way too big and complicated for anything to be done quickly and easily. However, the things that have been hard are also the things that seem to matter the most — focusing on our finances, focusing on our organizational alignment, focusing on our services, and focusing on our customers — all required some degree of change and adjustment on lots of peoples’ part. Did I accomplish everything I hoped I would in the first year? No.

Should I be disappointed in that? I am going to also answer that with a no. I am not one to set goals and fail, but the work we have done in the foundational areas of our organization are the ones that ultimately really matter going forward. In my organizational roadmap, I wanted to establish a new leadership team, ensure the financial health of the organization, launch a new digital presence, review our service portfolio, and finalize a new organizational structure that brings the three new units together into a single portfolio under the office of the CIO. We did amazing work in getting nearly all of that done in the last year. Wow.

I also wanted to raise awareness of our overall IT modernization needs campus-wide. I expressed pathways to do that over five distinct areas — student experience, infrastructure and systems, enterprise platforms, customer experience, and teaching and learning. We’ve invested new effort in each of these areas, with many of them paying dividends. We created the Student Experience Council that brings together business leaders across the student experience to identify what are the best-in-class digital approaches we should be using to delight students. We’ve continued to enhance our network and modernize portions of it in a systematic and impactful way. We are assisting Dell Medical in the implementation of Workday Finance and Epic, with plans forming to invest in new ERP capabilities for campus as well. We have launched an AI program that will directly impact customer experience, efficiency, teaching, learning, and research. We even hosted the SEC CIO group to help get a sense of where we stand relative to peers. All while making sure the core services campus relies on are resilient and robust.

The place where I need to focus more energy on is in the advancement of several common good services that support the whole community. We have done a lot of planning with various units and the ITLC. This coming year, we will leverage our investment in our own foundation to help make an even bigger impact across campus and in the larger IT community.

We have so much planned for the next few years and it is exciting as ever to be a Longhorn. I am thrilled to be here and to have made so many good friends along the way. Friends that I know are also committed to the long-term success of this great university. Thank you all for making my first year better than I hoped.

Living the Digital Transformation We Preach

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As the IT leaders at UT Austin, we spend a lot of time talking about digital transformation. We encourage campus to embrace modern tools, work smarter, and take advantage of the technology investments we’ve made. But here’s the real question, are we practicing what we preach? If we want to lead the university into a more digital, connected, and efficient future, we need to start with ourselves. We need to live in the environment we’re asking others to adopt, not dismiss it, not just support it, but fully commit to it.

Right now, we’re operating in a fragmented digital world. Some teams use Slack, others use Teams. Files are scattered across OneDrive, SharePoint, Box, Wikis, and more. Some meetings are on Zoom, others on Teams. We are juggling platforms when we could be harnessing the power of our enterprise-supported ecosystem and putting Copilot to work for us.

When groups on campus reach out for help improving their digital workflows, we should be the experts they turn to. But how can we do that if we aren’t fully invested ourselves? If we don’t know Teams inside and out, how can we teach others to maximize it? If we’re not using OneDrive and SharePoint to store our work, how can we expect others to move away from Box? This isn’t just about efficiency, it’s about leadership. The best way to drive change across campus is to lean into the change. And imagine the stories we can share with the community as we do!

Here’s our challenge, we need to standardize our own workflows before we can credibly push others to do the same.

  • Teams over Slack. All our internal communications should happen on Teams—chats, channels, file sharing, and collaboration. We can’t ask campus to make the switch if we haven’t fully embraced it.
  • OneDrive & SharePoint over Box. Moving documents to a single, integrated storage platform makes collaboration easier and security more resilient. I am not talking about engineering new workflows that support campus operations, I am primarily concerned with our internal workflows.
  • Teams Meetings over Zoom. We already have a robust, enterprise-supported meeting platform in Teams. It integrates with our calendars, our files, and our workflows. Let’s stop defaulting to Zoom when Teams can do the job. I completely understand that incoming meetings are often up to the organizer, but once we can start to show value in the automation that Copilot in Teams meetings provide, we have a reason for other groups on campus to make the change.
  • Microsoft Forms over Qualtrics. I am honestly tired of responding to basic questions using our most powerful enterprise survey tool. MS Forms should be used for all lightweight data collection.
  • AI & Automation with Copilot. Microsoft Copilot is already here, and it should be changing the way we work. But we won’t understand its full impact unless we actively use it. How can AI streamline our daily tasks? What reports, emails, and meetings can we automate? The only way to know is to test, learn, and apply. The SLT has decided that we are providing M365 Copilot to the entire organization.

I want to be clear, every time we use tools outside our enterprise systems, we create more work, more risk, and more fragmentation. We make it harder to secure data, harder to collaborate, and harder to support the very systems we advocate for. If we want campus to streamline their tech stack, we have to start with our own teams. That means cutting out redundant tools and fully investing in M365, not just because we’re told to, but because it makes our work more effective.

Digital transformation isn’t just about technology, it’s a cultural shift. It’s about building habits that make work easier, faster, and more connected. But culture change starts with us. I am asking us to set the example.

I want us to create a comprehensive plan for making this the new normal within Enterprise Technology. I know who some of the people are who can help lead this, but I am actively looking for people who can help and will take some responsibility in leading this.

OpenAI generated image showing people working together in a UT themed room.

Image created by OpenAI.

Change for Progress.

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The history of IT here at UT is something I am still learning. Great decisions we made at the time often look foolish by today’s metrics. At the time we made a specific decision, we were certainly looking into the future and often betting that the legacy approach would work out or the shiny new thing that is replacing legacy is the best move.

When we invested in Box as a cloud storage solution the rest of the world was playing catch up to the ideas of what a cloud storage solution would even mean to them. We were ahead of the curve. But did we choose the right pony in that race? At the time of the decision, yes! Now, with the rise of Microsoft’s integrated approach to collaboration, the idea of a disconnected storage solution seems almost quaint by comparison, a more modern mechanical Turk of the file cabinet age. We now live in a world where the promise of AI and modern collaboration approaches have started to take root, our decision looks like it was shortsighted — even though at the time it put us in front of many.

So, what should we do? How do we convince the community that this is the right time to make the shift? How do we depreciate something that has existed as a stable practice for so many years? Even if we forget the whole community for a moment, convincing our own teams to make the move is complex.

Illustration of moving data from one box to another.

I think there are compelling reasons for us to attack this. The first is simple — we must model the right behavior. The transition from Box to SharePoint for organizational data storage is not just a technical upgrade; it’s a strategic move that can significantly enhance our operational efficiency. The primary driver behind this shift is the greater adoption of M365 Copilot across campus, which promises to advance the way we work by leveraging the full potential of the integrated suite of tools.

One of the most compelling reasons to make this move is the seamless integration that SharePoint offers with the rest of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Unlike Box, which operates as a standalone solution, SharePoint is designed to work in harmony with tools like Teams, Outlook, and OneDrive. This integration means that our data is not siloed in separate applications but is instead part of a cohesive, interconnected environment. This interconnectedness is where M365 Copilot truly shines, as it can access and analyze data across all these platforms to provide insights and automate tasks that would otherwise require manual effort.

For people, this means less time spent switching between applications and more time focused on meaningful work. Imagine a scenario where you need to prepare a report for a meeting. With Box, you might have to manually gather data from various sources, but with SharePoint and M365 Copilot, the data is already at your fingertips, ready to be synthesized and presented. This not only saves time but also reduces the risk of errors and ensures that everyone is working with the most up-to-date information.

For entire workgroups, the benefits are even more pronounced. SharePoint’s collaboration features allow teams to work together more effectively, regardless of their physical location — a key for us. Documents can be co-authored in real-time, feedback can be provided instantly, and version control ensures that everyone is always on the same page. M365 Copilot enhances this collaboration by providing intelligent suggestions and automating routine tasks, freeing up team members to focus on strategic initiatives.

Moreover, SharePoint’s advanced security features provide peace of mind that our data is protected. With built-in compliance tools and the ability to set granular permissions, we can ensure that sensitive information is only accessible to those who need it. This level of security is crucial in today’s environment, where data breaches can have severe consequences snd ther atack vectors are at an all time high.

The move to SharePoint is not just about adopting new technology; it’s about embracing a new way of working that prioritizes efficiency, collaboration, and security. By making this transition, we position ourselves to take full advantage of M365 Copilot’s capabilities, driving operational efficiency and enabling us to achieve our organizational goals more effectively. Let’s lead this transformation and leverage the power of our investments to propel our organization forward.

Moving forward together on this transition to SharePoint will require a collective effort and a commitment to learning and growth. To ensure a smooth and successful migration, we will offer comprehensive training and guidance to all our teams. This will include hands-on workshops, detailed tutorials, and ongoing support to help everyone get comfortable with the new system. This added layer of growth will allow our team to fully leverage the capabilities of SharePoint and M365 Copilot, ensuring that they feel confident and supported throughout the transition. Together, we can embrace this change and unlock new levels of productivity and collaboration within our organization. Let’s take this journey together and make the most of the opportunities that lie ahead and in the process, we will lead campus into this future.