A university-wide AI program with a dozen scattered pilots and no shared vision — duplicated effort, competing tools, no coherent story for the students or staff using them. My own research found 68% of students try to resolve issues alone before asking for help, not because they don't need support, but because the path to it isn't clear. I facilitated a high-stakes alignment workshop with 31 cross-departmental executives to convert the scattered pilots into one roadmap, moving the program from siloed "streams" to shared, reusable capabilities. What came out of it was a two-sided system: a persistent AI companion woven through the student journey, and a context-aware orchestration layer giving staff real-time visibility into student risk. 86% of surveyed students said they were open to AI support, but named trust as the number one thing that would make or break adoption — that finding shaped the phased rollout, proving the concept narrowly before extending it.
An AI Advising Ecosystem
An AI advising ecosystem, unified from a dozen scattered pilots
