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If businesses, society, and individuals are to benefit and thrive in an AI-era it is vital that they receive training and education on how to work effectively and ethically with AI. As our recent community survey revealed, change management is considered to be the greatest AI challenge facing digital leaders. The education sector will play a key role in preparing our teams and society for AI, yet will also face significant disruption. Mark Bramwell, Chief Digital and Information Officer for the University of Oxford, Said Business School, and Director of Strategic Digital Partnerships for the University of Oxford, is ensuring this world-famous seat of learning is an AI leader, but also ethical and efficient.
Bramwell says AI presents a unique dual responsibility to academia. Universities and their digital leaders must adopt AI to support the institutions in becoming more efficient as funding becomes more challenging, but also provide students with access to the AI skills they will need for the future shape of work. He adds:
A big part of our education to students and a mission of the Said Business School is to create the next generation of morally ethical business leaders.
Said Business School has provided all of its students with access to ChatGPT Education, Gemini, and Notebook LLM from Google, as well as Microsoft Copilot. Bramwell says this is important educationally:
We want to position ourselves as a leading, digitally enabled institution.
The major AI vendors are not just suppliers of Artificial Intelligence, Bramwell says. Oxford has formed strong partnerships with all three, which is creating a two-way education. Whilst embracing AI for education and operations, Bramwell and Oxford are very aware of the risks:
Is AI a threat, a support or an enabler to education? Undoubtedly, there is an element of truth in all of these.
Growth opportunity
Over the last 18 months, the business world has heard a chorus of CEOs stating that AI will be instrumental for increasing productivity and enabling the firm to grow. Academia is no different; in the western world, a demographic challenge, coupled with poor economic growth, has made for a difficult fiscal climate for universities. In the UK, this has been exacerbated by a significant decline in overseas students following the Conservative government’s policy of leaving the European Union, once a rich seam of overseas students for the UK’s academic institutions. Universities, therefore, need to find new ways to source revenue. That means more students, more research, and greater efficiency, all ripe for AI opportunity. Bramwell says:
Higher Education has become an increasingly difficult space. You only have to look at the press to see the financial pressures that the large universities are facing, and Oxford is not immune to that. Yet, to tackle it, there are physical constraints on the campus. We cannot squeeze any more students in; the only way to grow our revenues and income is either through research grants, executive education or online education.
For the Said Business School, online is really important to us and it is something we have been ahead of. Our online learner community has now exceeded 50,000, which is twice the size of the physical on campus university student community. We are not complacent, though, as there are still reputational standards to meet in demonstrating that an Oxford programme is better in terms of quality, engagement, and insight than you get from other institutions or corporations.
That means courses must be constantly assessed for relevance and how they fit to the needs of a global marketplace. For a digital leader, that means supporting a university that not only has a campus in one of England’s most beautiful cities, but is also a 24-hour-a-day, seven days a week digital operation that has global impact written into its values and mission statement.
The need to be a global university means AI is, in Bramwell’s words, an enabler and opens up opportunities that just a few years ago would have been financially impossible, Bramwell explains:
We now have the ability, using AI, to translate research outputs automatically, in almost any language, and that is fantastic for expanding our research. The business school now has the ability to create avatars of faculty members, who can be online in any geography or region, in any language, and deliver their programme to support student outreach.
As online education has grown, so too have the data levels, creating an opportunity for greater analysis of courses and course content. Bramwell adds:
Through analytics, we can identify which content students are engaging with, or not, and feed that into the instructional design to make our courses even more relevant.
With a broad community of academics, remote and on-campus students, and staff adopting AI, Bramwell and his team have focused on the data to ensure AI can be trusted and that everyone is using good data for their decision-making and study. He says:
We deliberately, as a business school, spent a lot of upfront time ensuring that our AI systems and platforms have been architected securely and privately. Our current agreements with OpenAI, Microsoft and Google for ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini have ensured that they are within our own private tenancy. That means we have access to our data in a secure environment and can innovate, experiment and play safely.
We know from looking at our own data that it limits some of the risks around hallucination and misinformation.
Bramwell describes data management in a modern university as being akin to painting the Forth Bridge; CIOs can never stop, he adds:
Some of the discipline and governance that we have embedded and lived by at the school has stood us in good stead. We are ISO27001 certified as an information processor, and that means there is a rigour internally about how we process data, and that then drives how we operate as a business school.
That thoughtful culture is shaping how the Said Business School and Oxford embraces AI. Bramwell highlights the risks some AI tools pose. He adds:
Any provision has to be grounded in a morally ethical basis of responsible use. We are still learning every day, and AI is changing so fast, so we have set up an AI working group to make sure that we are able to be agile and responsive, which are not words always associated with higher education.
He uses the term agile not to be on message, but because this CDIO says adoption and governance of AI will need continual tweaks in order to get the most from the technology, to protect people and the university, and to be able to do things in completely different ways.
Budgeting for AI-led change
Academia is facing a challenging economic time, and yet it has to embrace AI. To do that cost-effectively, Bramwell has negotiated a token and tool-based consumption model for the use of AI across the business school. This variable costing requires close management, but Bramwell says it is the best fit to ensure equitable access to AI.
Variable cost is the enemy of higher education, given the tensions on our budgets, but it was a conscious decision to move away from AI models that are per-user, per-month licensing. When you look at the range of AI tools available, we cannot provide a portfolio of choice when a licence can cost anything between $8 to $30 per-user, per-month.
Bramwell’s team is using the reporting tools within the Microsoft Azure stack that underpins applications and AI at the business school. He says these identify consumption thresholds and provide proactive reports for budget forecasting.
My take
Education has the most to offer, the most to gain, and therefore the most to lose from AI not being used ethically. What Bramwell and Said Business School demonstrate is that you can offer and gain from AI by being ethical and mindful from the outset. Approaches like these will ensure AI becomes a force for good.