Navigating the Generative AI Journey: Collaborative Innovation and Leadership at Sydney

Over the past two years, our university has embarked on a transformative journey to develop a robust Generative AI capability. Born from our innovation portfolio, this initiative became a unifying project involving dozens of departments—including the Office of General Counsel, Research Informatics, Educational Innovation, Ethics, Library Services, Cybersecurity, Privacy, Records Management, and Human Resources among others—all coming together with a shared vision.

This presentation chronicles our humble beginnings, starting with the creation of foundational tools to spark interest and demonstrate capabilities. We'll delve into how we redefined traditional production models to keep pace with the rapid speed of AI innovation. Embracing our Vice Chancellor's challenge to become a leader in safe and responsible AI, we explored what "safe and responsible" truly means in practice.

Key highlights include:

° Educational Innovation and Cogniti: How we supported educational innovation to develop Cogniti, our in-house AI tool, and insights gained from its commercialisation.
° Capacity Tracking and Planning: The strategies we employed to monitor capacity and plan effectively amidst rapid growth.
° Rings-Based Support Model: Development of a support system that adapts to varying levels of user engagement and expertise.
° Staff Empowerment through Training: Enabling thousands of staff members with generative AI training focused not just on prompt engineering and utilising co-pilot features, but also on responsible data use, critical evaluation, and strategic thinking about AI.

This journey touches on several THETA 2025 themes, including Intelligent Transformation, Maturing Ethics and Governance, and Empowering Learner Agency, but it would be remiss not to prioritise the Digital Acceleration stream given the rapidly changing ecosystem of generative AI. Attendees will gain valuable insights into fostering cross-departmental collaboration, implementing ethical AI practices, and scaling training programs to empower staff and enhance the student experience, and hopefully come to understand that you don't need to start big to have a big impact.