Panel discussion at the Year of AI Live. Great conversation by members of the Good Systems team. Chelsea McGullough, Matthew Lease, Daniel Culotta, and Jungfeng Jiao. Moderated by, Luis Sentis, not seen.
September 2024 Updates from the Office of the CIO
As we continue to innovate and improve our services at the University of Texas, I am thrilled to share some of the significant accomplishments and updates from our recent initiatives. These efforts reflect our commitment to enhancing the student experience, optimizing our operations, and staying at the forefront of technology.
New Q-drop Form Launch We are excited to announce the launch of a new Q-drop form and workflow on September 12. This new system standardizes the process for students to withdraw from classes after the census date, making it more efficient and user-friendly.
Fall 2025 Undergraduate Applications For Fall 2025, standardized test scores will once again be required for applications. Additionally, we have introduced Early Action, reduced the number of short answer questions, and implemented a new waitlist process to streamline the application experience.
Data Center Migration We are pleased to welcome UTMB as a new regional customer in our data center. This migration will help reduce operating costs and free up budget for other important projects.
UT Directory Modernization The UT Directory is undergoing a significant upgrade from a Perl interface to a Python framework. This modernization effort will improve maintainability and performance, ensuring a better experience for all users.
ID Card Modernization Our ID Card Center is also being modernized to enhance efficiency, reduce wait times, and transition functionality off the Mainframe. These improvements will benefit students, faculty, and staff alike.
Digital Accessibility Center We are establishing a Digital Accessibility Center to address accessibility issues, expand captioning services, and comply with new ADA regulations by April 2026. This initiative underscores our commitment to inclusivity and accessibility for all members of our community.
AWS Connect Implementation University Health Services has successfully implemented the first AWS Connect queue, with plans to expand further. This implementation will save costs and increase our internal expertise in cloud-based solutions.
These accomplishments would not have been possible without the hard work and dedication of our ET team and all of our partners. Thank you for your continued support and collaboration.
AI Platforms, Products, and Features
Bear with me, I am going to just do some outloud thinking. I want to make sure I get my thoughts down on leveling the vocabulary around the AI explosions happening around us. What are the differences between AI platforms, AI products, and AI features and why each has a critical role in our strategy.
I believe in an enterprise as large and diverse as ours, an AI platform will provide the foundation. In my mind, platforms are flexible, scalable, and built for creating custom solutions. They give us the ability to develop, integrate, and innovate on top of a common framework. I believe that investing in a campus-wide AI platform that serves as the bedrock for much of what we’re doing across research, teaching, and operations is the right thing to do. It’s the engine that drives AI innovation and allows the community to participate at scale to create solutions tailored to unique needs.
Then there are AI products like M365 Copilot. Copilot enhances collaboration, improves workflow, and helps us get more out of the underlying Microsoft 365 platform we’ve already embraced. An AI product is standalone, one that fits into a larger AI strategy. It exists above or adjacent to our platform, enhancing daily operations while complementing the custom AI solutions we’re building.
Finally, there are AI features like Apple Intelligence, which come baked into devices like your iPhone. These are the quiet, background AI capabilities that make your user experience more intuitive and personalized. But by themselves, they’re limited in scope—enhancing specific tasks rather than transforming entire workflows.
The strategy that I am envisioning begins with a platform approach. It gives us the power to drive true innovation and adoption by the community. Providing a common platform does not preclude us from also investing in AI products like M365 Copilot, bringing in vertical solutions that can serve parts of the university. The platform is our foundation for building and adapting AI to meet the diverse needs of our students, faculty, and staff. By leveraging one platform at this level, it allows us the greatest chance to innovate, grow our internal expertise, and control our long-term success.
More AI at UT Thoughts
At UT Austin, we see the AI revolution as a pivotal opportunity – not just to advance research, but to apply AI in ways that directly support our core values: People, Place, Experience, and Education. We’re committed to making AI an integral part of how we achieve our strategic goals across the entire University.
To that end, we have been partnering with KUNGFU.AI – an alumni owned and operated AI management and engineering firm – to help develop an ecosystem where we put the right tools, data, and capabilities in the hands of the incredible people across the Longhorn Nation.
Our approach should be built on ensuring scalability, security, and affordability. By consolidating our AI practice into a unified platform, we’ll have the opportunity to make it accessible to all, from undergraduates to faculty, without burdening departments with commercial-level costs. This ensures we’re providing the right resources to help close the digital divide and foster equitable innovation across campus.
Thinking about all of this at scale, we must also be mindful of affordability. At a place like UT Austin, with over 50,000 undergraduates and nearly 15,000 graduate students, let alone the over 10,000 faculty and staff, paying $20-$30 a month per license for AI tools gets expensive. By providing a consolidated AI platform, my vision is to ensure that everyone has access to these tools.
As a university, we have a huge number of advantages including our multi disciplinarity and federated structure. Our approach to AI innovation cannot be directive, but one that enables and supports. We want to ensure people have the resources they need, know where and how to ask the right questions, and get to the right use cases for AI. A distributed governance body responsible for enabling AI tool development while offering guidance on boundaries and parameters to ensure AI is used safely and responsibly will complement our platform approach and empower AI at UT. All the while encouraging and seeding innovation across campus.
I am incredibly optimistic and excited about the work that lies ahead. I know we can build an AI ecosystem that will continue our strength and reputation as a world-class institution.
Advancing the AI Revolution: What’s Next?
For the last several years, I have tried not to be in the business of chasing trends. My early days leading ed tech organizations, I was always looking to adopt the next digital promise — the use of the internet, the new world that Web 2.0 gave us, mobility, tablets, blah. I’ve done a lot of thinking about the impact of all that evangelism and much of it isn’t immediately measurable. Disruptive technology is often an investment in future returns, but it requires playing a longer game. With AI, I’m not sure if that holds true — the returns may be much more immediate.
To me, that nudges me toward thinking more about the diffusion of AI to as diverse of a population as possible across campus. In today’s world, I can’t think of another digital investment one could make to immediately advance human potential holistically. Can you?
Three principles emerge in my mind: shrinking the digital divide, scaling AI expertise, and building strategic partnerships that fuel innovation.
- Shrinking the Digital Divide: AI has the potential to change everything, but only if we make it accessible. Providing AI tools to all members of the community will foster creativity at scale, from every possible perspective.
- Scaling AI Expertise: We are a community that’s engaged, curious, and ready to make change. Our advantage is that community. We should be scaling the expertise that’s already here and providing thought leadership across campus.
- Building Strategic AI Partnerships: I know that what we plan to do will require partnerships and that is how I am approaching these opportunities. I believe as the ways that we operate will only improve by leveraging this moment to modernize operations and infrastructure.
Here we are back to the start of something new. We get to build it from the ground up. That’s pretty exciting.