Panelists at the event, including Kaskaskia College CIO George Kriss, Canyon GBS founder and CEO Joe Licata and Austin Laird, a senior program officer at the Gates Foundation, said generative AI can help colleges and universities meet increasing demands for personalization, timely communication and human-to-human connections throughout an institution, from advising to research to IT support.
AI FOR STUDENT SUPPORT: ADVISING, ADMISSIONS, IT
Generative AI chatbots now give students access to information about the institution at any time of day, freeing up time for advisers to have more student meetings, Licata said.
Other AI tools can help advisers understand which students to prioritize, when to reach out and what to say, he said. Kriss said his school is using AI data analysis in this way, with a focus on reaching former students who need just a few credits to complete their credential. AI can flag those cases for an adviser to review or send outreach directly to the student.
“These connections would probably otherwise go unnoticed in the traditional advising workflow, because you just get lost in the process, and the AI who's working 24/7 will be able to dig in and find that information,” Kriss said.
In addition to assisting staff, this approach frees up time for students. Because AI can search existing data sets for signs of students in need, students don’t need to navigate multiple forms asking for similar information to receive tailored support, Kriss said.
These same advantages of personalization and timely outreach can aid prospective students as well, and many institutions are already using AI for this. In a 2023 survey of 399 education professionals, the research company Intelligent.com found that 50 percent of respondents working in higher education said their school was already using AI for admissions, and another 37 percent planned to.
“We have students that are showing up at Kaskaskia College that have actually learned a whole lot about Kaskaskia. They've already decided they want to go there. There's a specific program they want that takes them on a path to a credential that they want,” Laird said. “How do we get as informed as we can be about that student so we can match them where they are?”
Kriss said the overall goal is to reduce barriers for current and prospective students to engage with the campus community. Laird added that even in simple ways, like through IT workflows, not being able to log into a website can turn some students away from that task forever.
Kriss further recommended AI for detecting and predicting issues before they impact users, as well as responding to simple user issues without delay.
“If you're in the IT world, you spend a lot of time going through logs, and if you spend enough time in logs, you kind of know what's coming up, what's going to happen,” he said. “Having an AI sit on a log and monitor it holds tremendous value for students.”
CUTTING ADMINISTRATIVE TIME IN RESEARCH AND FACULTY WORKFLOWS
AI is also gaining traction in academic research and instructional support. As an example, Laird pointed to a joint project between the University of Washington and the research organization Semantic Scholar that draws from large databases of academic literature to synthesize answers to scientific questions and generate summaries based on trusted sources. Such tools, he said, reduce time spent on information gathering and allow instructors to focus on interpretation and innovation.
This could be helpful for researchers, who, in one survey in 2018, told an association of federal agencies that 44 percent of the time they intended for scholarship was instead going to administrative paperwork or compliance tasks. A 2024 survey by the Dutch analytics company Elsevier further found that 98 percent of corporate researchers would be willing to use AI to generate syntheses of research articles.
Kriss said faculty at his college are also using AI to augment classroom teaching.
“Faculty have brilliant, creative teaching concepts, but taking that idea to reality requires time, which sometimes they just don't have,” he said. “AI can take that great idea, flush out the process and allow the instructor to utilize it without that extensive development time that was previously required.”
He also mentioned classroom technologies that use AI to automate note-taking, recording lectures or transcribing whiteboard content into learning management systems. With these processes automated, he said, faculty can spend less time on technology coordination and more time on instruction.
PRIVACY AND GOVERNANCE
Licata said that while early consumer-grade tools may not have been built to handle student data securely, ed-tech vendors like Canyon GBS today deploy isolated systems for each school and undergo annual audits to ensure compliance with privacy regulations. Panelists seem to agree that selecting vendors with protections like these is an essential step to using AI responsibly and effectively.
“You have to have a good framework and strong governance,” Kriss said. “It doesn't mean saying no to the innovation. It just means asking the right questions so we can say yes with confidence.”
He said governance can be a group of people who communicate across the division or campus to discuss AI, or it can be more official guidelines gathered from communities like EDUCAUSE.
Licata said that in addition to governance, educators need training, including workshops, professional development days and resources such as prompt libraries, to see the opportunities as well as privacy concerns associated with AI tools.
“The ultimate promise of AI is AI-ready capabilities — technology that adapts to humans rather than forcing humans to adapt to technology,” he said.
