Data Protection
Siloed data stacks that lack the proper governance and management, risk exposure by AI of non-public information.
AI ASSESSMENT AND STRATEGY
Leverage AI to Your Advantage
A Chief AI Officer provides your institution with AI leadership, governance, policies, responsible use, a roadmap for success and implementation, and risk management that sets you up to plan and execute the AI strategy that best supports your students, faculty, and staff.
CHALLENGE
Readying Your Institution for AI Initiatives
AI initiatives are here to stay and rapidly expanding across higher education. AI represents a sea change in the way faculty teach and students learn, bringing many challenges, opportunities, and risks. It also represents a unique inflection point for institutions to leverage AI for automation, business process optimization, and efficiencies that are critical to higher education right now. Often, it feels overwhelming for institutional leadership to determine where to start, which initiatives to prioritize, and how they will leverage AI.
When it comes to AI many institutions struggle with
Skills Gap
Competition for AI experts is intense, with talent out of reach for many small and mid-sized institutions.
Lack of Clarity
Feeling overwhelmed and unsure where to start with AI initiatives, compounded by the idea that they're too costly and challenging to implement with unknown ROI.
Student Alignment
Not currently meeting the students where they are, with many students being more advanced AI users than the institution.
Legacy Platforms
Need to automate business processes that are often manual or tied up in siloed legacy systems.
AI Expectations
Student, faculty, and staff expectations that systems will get more AI-automated and easier to access and use.
SOLUTIONS FEATURES
AI Strategy through Execution
OculusIT delivers experienced Chief AI Officers to colleges and universities, providing executive leadership and helping institutions assess, govern, roadmap, and execute AI initiatives. AI activations are predicated on a clean, trustworthy data ecosystem and strong governance, so we start by helping our institutions put the proper guardrails in place, enabling them to drive impact with AI. From there, we help implement AI initiatives, starting with the most strategically impactful ones first. AI strategy at OculusIT is designed to span every institutional domain: enrollment, marketing, finance, advancement, HR, and academics.
Executive Leadership
A Chief AI Officer (CAIO) that sits on the cabinet and provides the cabinet with informed expertise on AI strategy and initiatives.
AI Governance
A committee, led by the CAIO, with charter and decision rights in place to have proper boundaries around AI implementations.
AI Policies
Policies developed to safeguard AI use, data, and procurement standards, both now and in the future.
Responsible AI
Establishing an approach that alleviates any biases that may be in place and provides transparency to all stakeholders.
AI Roadmap
Establishing institutional and mission-aligned AI priorities, building out sequencing for launch, and aligning outcomes to investments.
Risk Management
Handling vendor relationships, modeling, and providing security measures to protect data-privacy risks.
A Four-Phase Engagement that Runs at the Cabinet’s Cadence:
A Four-Phase Engagement that Runs at the Cabinet’s Cadence:
Assessment
An AI maturity audit that identifies risk exposure, shadow-AI inventory, and a use-case pipeline informing where to start and what the timeline for implementation may look like.
Governance
Implementing a policy stack, responsible-AI framework, an AI committee, and a board reporting cadence.
Roadmap
Prioritized use-cases to implement, an investment plan, a vendor short-list, and agreed-upon sequencing dates in place to keep the institution on track for delivery of these initiatives.
Execution and Management
A cabinet cadence on timeline and progress with consistent updates, adoption at scale, and development of KPI’s and tracking reports.
Frequently asked questions
Is the OculusIT CAIO role full-time or fractional?
OculusIT is flexible in our partnerships, but the CAIO role is typically a remote, fractional executive for the institution, providing a cost effect way to establish and manager your AI initiatives.
Can OculusIT help us with our data challenges and disparate systems?
OculusIT currently supports colleges and universities with data governance, strategy, system unification and integration, and real-time automated reporting across the institution. So, yes, OculusIT can help with data strategy first as part of the Assessment and Governance phases prior to AI implementation.
What backgrounds do the CAIO’s have?
All OculusIT CAIO’s have an extensive mix of experience in AI and higher education roles either as direct college or university staff or with consulting organizations serving higher education.
How will OculusIT understand our specific tech ecosystem and data centers to help us implement AI initiatives?
OculusIT has supported 300+ colleges and universities over nearly 20 years and has exclusively focused on enabling higher education institutions. Given our breadth of managed IT services and full IT outsourcing that OculusIT provides, we have a depth of IT talent and technologists who have worked with and have deep expertise in nearly every higher education platform and solution in an institution’s tech stack.