Episode 61: AI in Higher Ed: Shadow IT, TAC 219 & Campus Modernization

Well, and we also, we're talking about how hard it is to get anything done in any other department without technology.

I mean, in so many respects, we talked about like developing your own apps and stuff like that in order to try to address certain concerns.

Those are things that, you know, those individual departments are not going to even have the wherewithal of how to address.

Well,

they may because they saw a YouTube video on AI.

Right.

Well, that's a

whole different

thing.

And I'm sure Sebastian would agree that you don't want individual instructors or department heads going and saying, I need thing, Claude, build thing, without somebody with some sort of knowledge of IT going and taking a look at it and go, okay, I know you told Claude to build thing, but have you considered?

Actually, that's a really good question.

How – how much of an increase have you seen in shadow IT and what have you put in place in order to kind of address it or, or stamp down on it a little bit?

Yeah.

So, I mean, you know, kind of going back to the, the, the communication with leadership, you know, we know AI is being used not just by students, it's being used by employees.

And if we don't empower our students and our employees, they're going to do it anyways, whether we want them to or not.

And so we, we have an enterprise license with some AI products and, And, you know, we've spent a great deal of time showing slowly what AI can do and what we don't want it to do and setting up those enterprise settings to not allow things to happen.

So

you're setting up guardrails for folks to – because you know they're going to use it.

Yes.

So you're setting up guardrails that if they do use it inside of campus resources, you guys have controls in certain places to detect, I don't want to say misuse, but the ignorance of the use, I guess, is the term that I'm looking for.

Because I think everybody's got, you know, noble effort in mind, but the way they deploy stuff may not, again, they may not be considering all of the uh uh well ramifications

yeah a prime example is uh meta's new uh muse little yeah muse um i mean the only way to use it because of what it is designed to do is to over provision its permissions like just immediately you have to give it access to the entire kingdom so it can do whatever it wants to do because that's what it's designed to do i

gotta uninstall muse right quick

I'm kidding.

But yeah, no, we talked a while back about paving the road as opposed to trying to put up obstacles.