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AI isn’t just another technology, it’s a tectonic shift, says Gonick. He outlines Arizona State University’s threefold approach to AI: partnering with major technology companies, building secure internal infrastructure, and empowering faculty and staff to experiment freely. With more than 4,000 homegrown AI tools emerging from across the university, ASU’s strategy blends enterprise vision with grassroots creativity. The result is a living laboratory for how AI can personalize learning, enhance research, and transform institutional design.
Everyone needs to understand that AI is not just one more technology. AI is a fundamental change in the ways in which the tectonic plates of the ways in which technology is being used is going to transform everything, including our world of higher education. AI at ASU is therefore a strategic consideration for the institution, and it involves fundamentally rethinking the ways that we have been, as with the rest of higher education, has been an application centered world, a student information system, a learning management system, tools that support tutoring, tools that support testing, tools that support assessment, all separate tools, in an application centered world in which we think we have a lot of data but actually, we know almost nothing about the student experience end to end. AI unlocks the opportunity to go from an application-centered experience into one that truly has the data, creating a journey that allows the institution to support the students' success, rather than the brittle ways in which we try to bring together data from these discrete historical application-centered worlds. At ASU, AI is an invitation to rethink and redesign the fundamental ways in which we've organized, and the fundamental ways in which we can now achieve the aspirations of the institution to be indeed student centered, rather than ttruth be told, the LMS is a management system. It's not a learning system. The student information system is actually not about the students.
It's actually about the institution. This is an opportunity for us to completely change the architecture of the model, and along the way, it's an opportunity to unlock fantastic research opportunities, fantastic ways in which to transform the factory model of education, which has been around the world for the last 100 years or more, into a promise around customized and personalized learning that allows the faculty responsible for the pedagogy and responsible for the curriculum to realize that when you're working with one student in the world of AI, you can customize that one student's experience rather than figuring out how do you deliver a teaching experience to the middle of a 500 student lecture in order to try to capture as much of the epiphany, the light bulbs going off as you can through the ways in which you lecture, or the ways in which you use a case method, or other kind of pedagogical techniques.
So the promise of AI is the promise to unlock a fully customized and personalized experience. And that's what we're actually doing at ASU.
These are [the] early days of AI. At ASU, we've taken a three fold strategy. One is we are looking for partnerships because we understand where the market is driving this disruptive technology, and so ASU has created partnerships with OpenAI, have created partnerships with Adobe, with Google and many other technology companies because we believe that they can help accelerate our own journey. At the same time, we've come to a strategic decision not to take a bet on any one of those technology solutions.
And so the second arc of our own work is actually to build our own and support the design of what we call here, CreateAI. It's anAI builder that allows faculty, students, and staff with no code or low code to actually take the questions that are of interest or the designs of interest, or the research programs of interest, and actually use the university's platform in a secure, private environment
And not an environment where we end up sharing important institutional information with the underlying machinery of the generative AI technologies. We keep all of that inside the garden wall of the institution along the way. And the third piece of what we're doing here is we are trying to unlock the power of this technology right down to the individual faculty member, through the individual contributor at the university. Using the creator AI platform, we now have a library of over 4,000 AI solutions, not developed by central IT.
Most of them [are] developed by local IT, they're actually developed by faculty members, by staff members to help solve problems or to unlock value and creativity where they know the opportunity. So that's the three-part strategy here at ASU.