Recap: UGA’s Path to Becoming an AI-Infused University
Reflections on our steps towards infusing AI throughout research, instruction, and everyday productivity at the University of Georgia.
Looking ahead together
Each August, the senior leaders at the University of Georgia come together for a moment of pause and perspective. It’s a chance for us to step back from the pace of operational leadership and look together toward the horizon: what’s emerging, what’s needed, and what only we can do.
At last year’s retreat, I introduced a simple but critical distinction in our AI planning efforts: everyday AI versus game-changing AI. The first helps us work smarter. The second helps us do what was previously impossible. Both matter, but not in the same way, and not with the same stakes. I encouraged our leadership to be “all in” on supporting the AI-enabled groundbreaking research happening across our colleges, even as we approached enterprise adoption with more caution and discipline.
Strategic investments, shared tools
That distinction is still at the heart of our strategy. Over the past three years, we’ve invested more than $8 million in GPUs and storage to support our faculty’s transformative use of AI, working across domains and disciplines. At the same time, we’ve launched centrally supported platforms like Copilot, Gemini, and NotebookLM, not as silver bullets, but as scaffolds for collaboration. Our communities of practice are learning together, responsibly, and with an eye toward long-term value.
Becoming an AI-infused university
This year, the provost and several of us were asked to organize a presentation titled “Game-changing and Everyday AI at UGA in Research, Teaching, and the Workforce.” The title reflects a key shift in our institutional posture: we’re no longer just planning around AI, we’re beginning to live into it, across disciplines, learning environments, and every stage of the student experience.
To make that vision real, we featured four presentations from faculty and staff who are already building this future:
Dr. Cass Hall and Dr. Alan Dorsey showed how game-changing AI is helping us see farther than ever before, literally. By applying advanced machine learning to massive data sets, their collaboration through the GACRC is accelerating the discovery of exoplanets and reshaping how we explore the cosmos.
Dr. Stephen Balfour and Dr. James Castle demonstrated a powerful use of everyday AI to reimagine online learning design. With just a syllabus, their ChatGPT-based system generates the first 30-40 hours of content creation, shells, templates, and scaffolding, so that faculty can spend more time refining the human-centered aspects of their courses.
Dr. Megan Mittelstadt and Dr. Drew Benson walked us through how everyday AI is already transforming the student learning experience. Dr. Benson’s use of custom ChatGPT chatbots gives students real-time instructional support, study aids, and exam preparation tools tailored to the courses they’re in.
Dr. Kyle Tschepikow closed by grounding our efforts in student outcomes. His data on workforce readiness and career development showed how AI is changing not just how we teach, but how we prepare students for a world where fluency with these tools will be baseline, not bonus.
What comes next
Notably, we didn’t focus this year on the application of AI to improve business processes and administrative efficiency. But that day is coming quickly. Our system-wide Workday Finance and HCM implementation will open up a new frontier of opportunity in this space, and we’ll have more to share in the months ahead.
Being an AI-infused university doesn’t mean being reactive or chasing every trend. It means being strategic and honest about what these tools can do, and what they can’t. It means staying grounded in our mission and being bold where it counts. Above all, it means recognizing that our people, our faculty, our students, and our staff, are the real drivers of innovation. AI is simply one of the tools we give them to unlock what’s next.