From Curiosity to Culture: How University of California–Irvine Student Affairs Built an AI Initiative from the Inside-Out

The State of the College Union
Editor’s Note: “From Curiosity to Culture,” the second piece in the 2026 State of the College Union series, provides a team of student affairs professionals from the University of California—Irvine the opportunity to tell the story of how AI has been integrated into their division’s everyday activities providing student services. At this campus, AI is not seen as an intervenor, but instead as a “success accelerator.”

Artificial intelligence has arrived in higher education, moving from an emerging concept to a present reality already embedded in the daily work of colleges and universities, from AI-powered advising platforms to generative tools reshaping administrative work. Coverage from The Chronicle of Higher Education, Times Higher Education, and EDUCAUSE have all documented a sector working through real questions about adoption, ethics, governance, and equity—questions that are especially pressing for the professionals who work closest to students.

At the University of California–Irvine (UCI), the Division of Student Affairs made a deliberate decision not to wait. Instead, division leadership chose to lean in thoughtfully, systematically, and with a clear commitment to bringing every staff member along. The result is a division-wide AI initiative grounded not in hype, but in the actual needs, concerns, and curiosity of those doing the work.

The initiative is built on a straightforward mission: to responsibly introduce and support AI tools that enhance personalized student services, increase efficiency in administrative workflows, support data-informed decision-making, and ensure equity, ethics, and transparency in AI adoption. The vision that drives it is equally clear—a UCI Division of Student Affairs where every staff member is confident in knowing how and when AI can help them, where students benefit from AI-powered support services, and where the campus is a recognized leader in higher education for ethical and innovative AI use. As the division’s own framing describes it, AI is seen not as a replacement for staff creativity and expertise, but as an accelerator. Pursuing that vision began with an honest look at where the division stood.

What is “Zot”?

The word “Zot” is a central, campus-specific term used to brand many resources and platforms at the University of California–Irvine.

• The Anteater Connection: The term is associated with the university’s mascot, the Anteater (whose rally cry is “Zot!”). It is used as a prefix to signal a service or item that is specific to UCI or the “Anteater experience.”
• Campus Examples: In this article, Zot is featured in two key institutional platforms:
  • ZotGPT: UCI’s institutionally managed AI platform.
  • ZotKey: The university’s digital OneCard (student ID) and payment platform.

Taking the Temperature: What Staff Initially Knew and Felt

Before building any infrastructure, the division sought to understand its people. In 2025, a survey of 50 staff members across roles and units assessed AI awareness, usage patterns, and concerns. The results were illuminating and instructive.

Sixty-four percent of respondents reported already using AI tools in their work. Yet the picture beneath that headline was far more nuanced. Of that 64%, only 22% described themselves as regular, confident users. Another 38% used AI tools only occasionally, 20% had tried them once or twice without going further, and 10% had never used AI tools at all. Just 4% were leading or training others. In short: the division had a broad but shallow foundation—many staff had touched AI, but few felt truly equipped to use it well.

The tools staff were reaching for reflected the broader market landscape. ChatGPT, the publicly available service from OpenAI, was used by 29 respondents. UCI’s own institutionally managed AI platform, ZotGPT, was used by 19. Microsoft Copilot (10 respondents) and Google Gemini (nine respondents) rounded out the top tier. 

The tasks staff used AI for clustered around communication and content: drafting emails or communications (22 respondents), editing or summarizing content (20), brainstorming ideas (18), and creating frameworks or outlines (17). Data analysis and fact-checking lagged considerably, with fewer than 10 respondents each—suggesting that most staff were in an early, practical stage of adoption rather than deeper strategic integration.

The concerns staff raised were substantive and specific. Accuracy was cited most frequently (15 respondents), followed by ethics (13) and privacy (12). Seven respondents worried about job displacement, and six raised concerns about AI’s environmental impact. Qualitative responses deepened the picture considerably. Staff asked directly: Would it be safer to use ZotGPT than ChatGPT? What are the implications for client confidentiality? How can copyright be protected in AI-assisted work? How do staff in legally sensitive roles protect the integrity of what they do?

These were not the questions of professionals resisting change. They were the questions of professionals who wanted to engage responsibly and needed institutional answers—in the form of tools, policies, and guidance—to be able to do so. That data became the foundation for everything the division built next.

Building the Framework: Three Pillars

In response to what the survey revealed, and in alignment with the recommendations of a special report published through NASPA in collaboration with Claire Brady of Glass Half Full Consulting, the Division of Student Affairs developed a three-pillar framework that now anchors the initiative’s strategy, website, and programming. Each pillar addresses a distinct dimension of the challenge: building the capacity of people, expanding the reach of student-facing services, and grounding the entire enterprise in ethical practice.

Pillar 1: Competency

The division’s goal is to help staff build the confidence, skills, and judgment to effectively use AI where appropriate in their daily workflows—not uniformly, but across a genuine range of experience levels. Formal training offerings include ZotGPT Academy (UCI’s hosted training program) and other free high-quality trainings such as Elements of AI (a free course developed by the University of Helsinki), Google AI Essentials, and AI for Everyone (via Coursera, developed by DeepLearning.AI founder Andrew Ng).

Supplementing these courses is a ZotGPT Prompt Library—a curated collection of sample prompts built specifically for workflows, designed to reduce the friction of getting started and give staff a practical entry point, regardless of where they are on the learning curve. 

Beyond individual training, the division has cultivated competence through a robust culture of collaborative learning and signature events, including the foundational AI Initiative Kick-Off Event on October 28, 2025, and the subsequent “AI as a Partner: From Experimentation to Impact” Conference on April 15, 2026. Supporting these major milestones, regular lunch-and-learn sessions provided an informal yet vital space for staff to share real-time use cases and peer-to-peer prompt engineering techniques, ensuring that learning remained a continuous, division-wide dialogue.

Pillar 2: Services

AI is being integrated into student-facing services to expand access, improve response times, and personalize support. Approved deployments include 24/7 chatbots at the Student Health Center, Disability Services Center, and Commencement Office, as well as through the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs and ZotKey digital student ID platforms. Each is designed to handle frequently asked questions and direct students to human staff when the need arises. The division’s standard for student-facing AI is deliberately high: students must be informed when AI is involved, and escalation pathways to staff are always present. AI in this context is positioned as an expander of access and responsiveness, not a substitute for the human relationships that define student affairs work.

Pillar Three: Ethics

Ethical governance is built into the initiative structurally rather than added as a procedural afterthought. Staff receive training on FERPA compliance, data classification, and the specific privacy properties of institutionally managed platforms versus commercial alternatives. The initiative’s resources address explicitly when not to use AI, how to disclose AI-assisted work, and how to protect confidentiality in legally sensitive roles. The strength of this pillar owes much to the division’s IT partners, who contributed technical expertise and institutional knowledge from the earliest stages—helping ensure that the ethical framework was grounded in real infrastructure, not just policy language. 

What it Looks Like in Practice

For the Division of Student Affairs at UCI, AI adoption does not live on a website or inside a training portal. It shows up in the daily rhythm of real work. Staff across the division have integrated AI into concrete workflows: 

• A housing team member used AI to streamline meeting agenda planning, reclaiming time previously spent on administrative preparation for deeper, in-person student engagement. 
• A policy team applied AI assistance to reduce the number of drafting meetings and shorten overall writing time, moving from concept to finalized documentation more efficiently
• A program director utilized AI during a comprehensive program review to capture and synthesize complex meeting themes, discussions, and recommendations, transforming multiple brainstorms into actionable insights.
• Staff across departments have drawn on AI tools for student outreach, program design, and communications.

These stories did not remain siloed within individual units. One of the division’s most important investments has been creating deliberate spaces for staff to share what is working—and what is not. Lunch-and-learn sessions became a regular venue for staff to demonstrate real use cases, walk colleagues through specific prompts and tools, and spark ideas that could travel across the organization. Cross-campus collaborative meetings extended that exchange further, connecting student affairs staff with colleagues in other divisions and surfacing approaches that no single team would have developed in isolation. When staff hear a peer describe how AI helped them solve a familiar problem, the technology becomes concrete and immediate in a way that no training document can replicate.

Critical Campus Partnerships

The division’s IT partners have been essential to this progress—and their role has been active, willing, and deeply collaborative. From the earliest stages of the initiative, IT leadership engaged enthusiastically, bringing technical expertise and institutional knowledge to the table in ways that went far beyond managing infrastructure. They helped shape how AI would be introduced, governed, and supported across the division. That contribution gave student affairs staff something genuinely valuable: the freedom to focus on the programmatic, cultural, and human dimensions of the work, confident that the technical foundation was in capable and engaged hands. This partnership has been a cornerstone of the initiative’s progress, and the division’s advancement reflects what becomes possible when technical and programmatic expertise work in
genuine alignment.

Nowhere has that partnership been more consequential than in addressing privacy concerns. When 12 of 50 survey respondents cited privacy as a top worry—and when qualitative responses surfaced pointed questions about client confidentiality, FERPA compliance, and data security—the division’s answer was grounded in infrastructure that IT had already helped build. That answer was ZotGPT.

ZotGPT is UCI’s institutionally managed AI platform, built on secure infrastructure through Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS. It provides access to over 35 different LLMs, ensuring staff have a wide range of tools for various tasks. Data processed through ZotGPT is not used for commercial model training, distinguishing it from ChatGPT, a publicly available commercial service from OpenAI that may use submitted content to improve its models. The platform requires university authentication, integrates with campus resources, and operates in alignment with campus data privacy policies. For staff working in roles governed by FERPA or handling sensitive student information, ZotGPT provided a direct, credible answer to the question staff are asking: is it safe to use this here? That answer, backed by IT expertise and institutional architecture, transformed a significant barrier into a manageable boundary and gave the division’s culture of experimentation the solid ground it needed to grow.

The division’s campus partnerships extend into the academic side of the institution as well. Collaboration with the Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation has opened important channels for connecting student affairs work with the challenges faculty are navigating in the classroom. AI has introduced real complexity for students—around appropriate use, academic honesty, and what it means to produce one’s own work. Those questions land in student affairs as much as they do in academic departments. The Office of Academic Integrity and Student Conduct, housed within the Division of Student Affairs, has been an active contributor to campus conversations on these issues, helping develop frameworks that are fair, clearly communicated, and responsive to what students are experiencing. These partnerships reflect a broader understanding that student well-being and student learning are not separate concerns, and that addressing AI responsibly means working across the boundaries that have traditionally separated student services from academic affairs.

Building a Culture: From the Kickoff to the April Conference

Frameworks and tools, however well designed, do not build culture on their own. The Division of Student Affairs understood this from the beginning and invested in programming designed to shift not just knowledge, but attitude—and to build community in the process.

On October 28, 2025, the division hosted its AI Initiative Kick-Off Event at the UCI Student Center, drawing 133 attendees in a hybrid format. The event featured Claire Brady, a national thought leader on artificial intelligence in higher education and co-author of “The Transformative Potential of AI: Recommendations for Student Affairs Leaders,” published by NASPA and the Strada Educational Foundation in 2024. The day was structured across three distinct learning modalities: an opening session establishing the landscape of AI within student affairs; an applied skills session focused on productivity and concrete use cases; and a hands-on lab where staff experimented with tools in real time.

The evaluation results, drawn from a post-event survey of 36 respondents, documented a meaningful shift. Prior to the event, nearly one-third of staff (31%) reported no or limited understanding of AI. After the event, that number dropped to zero. Those rating their understanding as “good” or “expert” increased by 42%. Enthusiasm more than doubled: staff identifying as AI enthusiasts rose from 9% to 20%, while those expressing negative attitudes dropped from 17% to 11%. Seventy-nine percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that they felt inspired to explore AI tools in their work. And 85% expressed interest in continuing to learn alongside colleagues—the highest-rated outcome of the entire evaluation, a result that pointed clearly toward what the division would build next.

Qualitative feedback reinforced the numbers. Staff reported gaining concrete skills in prompt engineering and tool navigation. Several noted a genuine shift in how they thought about AI—no longer as a threat or an abstraction, but as an assistant that supports rather than replaces human work. One attendee captured the new orientation directly: “Using AI as an assistant and for efficiency with supervision.” Another reflected on the practical dimension: “I feel much more confident in my ability to write a strong prompt.”

Building on that momentum, the division hosted a half-day conference on April 15, 2026—”AI as a Partner: From Experimentation to Impact”—in a hybrid format at the UCI Student Center. Where the October Kick-Off introduced the landscape and built foundational understanding, the April conference was designed to advance the work: moving from experimentation to applied, intentional adoption. Brady returned to deliver a keynote titled “From Curiosity to Capability: AI’s Next Chapter in Student Affairs,” reflecting on what the division had accomplished and pointing toward where higher education is heading. Concurrent sessions gave staff the opportunity to go deeper: a workshop on large language models and advanced prompt engineering, a cross-functional panel on AI in the classroom and academic integrity, and a session for managers and leaders on supervising AI-supported work and setting norms for their teams. The day closed with a panel discussion on governance, campus alignment, environmental ethics, and the future of AI at UCI, facilitated by Vice Chancellor Willie Banks and featuring campus, system-level, and external perspectives.

The April conference marked a visible point of maturation for the initiative: a moment when the division moved from introducing AI to deepening its integration, and from building awareness to building capability.

Where the Division is Headed

The Division of Student Affairs at UCI is not treating any of this as a finished project. The work is ongoing, and the vision is long-term. A multidisciplinary team—spanning roles and units across the division—provides the organizational infrastructure that keeps the initiative moving: managing implementation, coordinating evaluation, and ensuring that no single department owns the work and no department is exempt from it. 

Looking ahead, the division’s commitments include launching peer learning communities—a direct response to the 85% of the October Kick-Off attendees who expressed interest in collaborative, colleague-based learning. Advanced training on prompt engineering and ZotGPT use cases will provide the deeper development that staff have explicitly requested. And dedicated forums will continue the ethical conversations—around bias, sustainability, and equity—that the division’s own data shows staff are already raising and that responsible AI adoption requires.

The destination, as the division’s vision articulates it, is clear: a student affairs division where every staff member—not just early adopters or the technically inclined—is confident in knowing how and when AI can help them do their most important work.

Student affairs has always been a field that adapts. From the introduction of campus information systems to the rise of mobile student engagement to the rapid pivot to virtual programming during the pandemic, the professionals in this field have consistently demonstrated the capacity to absorb change, center students, and keep moving. Artificial intelligence is the next chapter in that story and, by most measures, the most consequential one yet.

What distinguishes the division’s approach is not the technology it has adopted, but the intentionality with which it has approached that adoption. The initiative began with listening to staff, to data, and to the real questions people were raising. It built a framework designed not just for the enthusiasts but for the full spectrum of the workforce. It answered legitimate concerns with institutional solutions rather than reassurances. And it invested in community—in the shared spaces, events, and conversations that turn individual experimentation into a collective culture.

The work is not finished. In a landscape where technology continues to evolve faster than any institution can fully anticipate, it may never be. But UCI’s Division of Student Affairs has built something durable: a foundation of trust, capacity, and shared commitment to doing this work in a way that is good for staff, good for students, and good for the broader mission of higher education.