Using a Cross-Functional AI Council to Support AI Adoption

About AI Councils 

As Artificial intelligence use continues growing, college campuses are working to integrate AI across the organization, while ensuring the tools are used ethically, and that universities are fiscally responsible in their implementation of these tools. 

One way that universities can approach AI implementation across campus is the development of a cross-functional AI Council. This group provides a governing body and offers guidance to units across the university looking to explore AI. Some of the objectives of the council include creating frameworks around adoption and providing a central point of accountability. This is key to ensuring AI adoption doesn’t become fragmented, duplicative, or misaligned with the organization’s strategy. 

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Why Should Colleges and Universities Create an AI Council?

AI changes incredibly fast, and an AI council helps keep the organization moving forward. With such rapid growth of tools, an AI council can help ensure divisions understand key goals for the university’s AI use and are aligned on what use cases should be priorities. An engaged AI council can help mitigate duplicate efforts and resources, determine ownership of AI tools, centralize siloed tools, and develop ethical guidelines.  

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Additionally, the AI Council can serve as a resource to campus helping orchestrate adoption through offering trainings, facilitating conversations around best practices and helping the campus community see the breadth of possibility for AI. Finally, an AI council is important to set guardrails about how AI is used responsibly on the university campus. Specifically, the council can help in the development of guiding principles for AI use. Some of the topics that could be covered in the guiding principles include guardrails about data usage, how files are stored, and institutional practices about acknowledging AI’s contribution in projects.  

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Who Should Serve on the AI Council 

The AI Council should be cross-functional and include representatives from each campus division. A cross-functional approach helps to ensure that varied viewpoints and considerations are considered. For example, a MarComm representative may use AI differently than a faculty member in the classroom. Having varied perspectives ensures that decisions made by the AI Council will work for a variety of institutional uses. Cross-functional collaboration not only supports ethical implementation but also enhances outcomes across key areas like enrollment marketing, instructional design, and IT infrastructure - all hot topics across today’s higher education conferences. 

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Here are some specific roles that should be part of an AI Council. 

• Executive Sponsor – This person leads the AI Council, sets the meetings, and helps lead discussions around strategic priorities. 
• Finance & Administration – The representative from this division helps evaluate the financial impact of tools. For example, when deciding to implement a broad tool, this role would play a key part in exploring other tools that may also work, or cost savings opportunities that could exist by bundling tools. Additionally, this position helps maximize limited resources and ensures operational feasibility for possible AI initiatives.  
• Legal – The legal team representative is a critical compliance role. Specifically, this role helps to review AI contracts and ensures they meet institutional compliance needs. This role is also important in discussing ethical and legal concerns as it relates to AI privacy around data and mandated institutional compliance needs. 
• Enrollment – The enrollment representative ensures AI proposals support enrollment goals and strengthen the recruitment funnel. This division speaks to thousands of prospective students, so it is important they have a voice in how tools are implemented in recruitment-based functions. 
• Academics – A representative in this role focuses on faculty and instructional needs. This representative helps assess how AI impacts the core academic functions of teaching, research, and service. Additionally, this role also plays an important part in ensuring that AI implementations do not compromise academic integrity of students, faculty, and staff. 
• IT – On the council, IT helps to manage the technical specifications for projects. As projects are being considered, IT can help with timelines for AI integrations. With multiple tools and proposals, this role is critical to ensure there is institutional capacity to implement selected solutions. Finally, this role helps provide ongoing support for AI tools and ensure they are regularly updated. 
• Marketing – Marketing serves on the AI council to help ensure AI tools align with brand consistency and audience experience. As tools may have writing functionality or branded interfaces, marketing can help ensure these tools are customized to meet institutional needs. Additionally, the marketing representative is a key voice in what metrics are important to consider when trying to evaluate the success of an AI tool. 
• Campus Leadership Representatives – Members of student, faculty and staff governments should be represented in the AI council. These representatives provide a means for the campus community to ensure their perspectives and concerns are considered in AI decisions on campus. 

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What Key Decisions Should an AI Council in Higher Ed Make? 

AI Councils can help the university in three key areas. The primary areas they should focus on include: strategic decisions, operational decisions, and performance decisions. 

Strategic Decisions 

• Key institutional priorities – This group helps set priorities for the institution and determines what are must-haves for the organization. These conversations likely focus on automation needs, efficiency desires, and maximizing resources.  
• Guardrails – This group plays a key role in developing guardrails to ensure the ethical use of AI across the organization. Additionally, this involves setting principles about acceptable data handling. 
• Ownership Decisions – This group can play a key role in deciding who owns which AI initiatives. Setting ownership decisions early helps ensure the owners and the university community understand the process to explore new tools and use the existing tools. 

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Operational Decisions 

• Evaluation criteria – This group helps determine key vendor criteria to ensure that AI vendors and tools meet university standards. Some of the criteria might involve customization, how the model is trained, and the number of licenses available. 
• Review process – This council can also help develop strategies for the evaluation of potential vendors and tools. This helps ensure that the review process aligns with institutional priorities and not individual preferences. 
• Integration strategies – The council also can help ensure that implementations are aligned and can talk to one another, helping avoid fragmentation among systems. Integration strategies also involve minimizing duplication with multiple departments purchasing separate tools for the same task.

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Performance Decisions

• Success – This group helps evaluate how success is consistently measured in the AI space. Specifically, what KPIs, efficiency improvements, and cost savings should be measured and what are benchmarks that indicate the tool is meeting expectations. 
• Scaling decisions – When testing different solutions, this group can play a key role in determining what pilot tests should scale versus which should be paused. 

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How often should the AI Council Meet? 

An AI Council is likely a working group and should have regular meetings. The initial meeting should start with the executive sponsor leading the group in understanding its charge. Then, the group should begin meeting two times a month to discuss needed items. 

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Having a bi-monthly meeting ensures that the council can move quickly on policy and review decisions. Additionally, a regular meeting cadence helps the group build cohesion and function as a council instead of disparate units who report out on actions already taken. 

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Frequently Asked Questions about AI Councils in Higher Education

Q1: What is the purpose of an AI Council in higher education? 

A cross-functional AI Council serves as a governance and strategy team that aligns AI tools with the institution’s mission, minimizes duplication, and supports ethical, campus-wide adoption. 

Q2: Who should be on a university AI Council? 

Representatives from enrollment, marketing, IT, academics, legal, finance, and student leadership should all have a seat at the table to ensure comprehensive oversight. 

Q3: How often should an AI Council meet?

Bi-monthly meetings are recommended to keep up with the fast pace of AI changes and ensure timely decisions on tool adoption and policy formation. 

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