Behind the Scenes of the 2027 EDUCAUSE Top 10

Sophie White: Hey everyone. In this episode of EDUCAUSE Shop Talk, it was recorded live here at the Denver Convention Center at the 2027 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference. Jenay and I talked to Mark McCormick and Stan Waddell about the 2027 EDUCAUSE Top 10 report. I loved this discussion. It really looked behind the scenes at some things that were surprising or interesting about this year's Top 10. We also talked about the emergence of AI as an important theme throughout and also how that underscores the importance of human connection and relationships in this age of AI. I loved Stan's perspective on how he actually uses the Top 10 report in his work prioritizing objectives at Carnegie Mellon. And I hope that this discussion will help you all figure out how to better use the insights from the Top 10 and think more about your strategic priorities going forward. So hope you enjoy.

***

Sophie White: Thank you all so much for joining us today for the EDUCAUSE Shop Talk podcast on the 2027 EDUCAUSE Top 10. I'm Sophie White. I'm a senior manager of program and content marketing with EDUCAUSE, and I'm one of your hosts for today's discussion.

Jenay Robert: My name is Jenay Robert. I'm a research manager at EDUCAUSE, and I'm your co-host.

Sophie White: Great. So we'll be having a conversation today about the EDUCAUSE Top 10. At the end, we'll have time for audience questions, so feel free to think about your questions as we go through the discussion today. I will start by introducing our two special guests. Thank you both for being here. We have Mark McCormack and Stan Waddell. So I'll start with Mark. Mark serves as EDUCAUSE's interim vice president of research, insights, and analytics, overseeing EDUCAUSE's portfolio of original research projects over the past nine years. Before coming to EDUCAUSE, Mark served in leadership and research positions for professional associations and nonprofit organizations in higher education, K-12 education, youth development, performing arts, and community development. Mark holds a doctorate in community psychology from Vanderbilt University. Thanks for being here, Mark.

Mark McCormack: Thank you. Delighted to be here.

Sophie White: Great. Sorry we're not in your hometown this year. It was cool to be in Nashville.

Mark McCormack: Yeah, it's fun to play host.

Sophie White: Yeah, definitely.

Mark McCormack: I love visiting Denver though, so I'm happy to be here.

Sophie White: I'm taking on that role this year as the Denver resident, so it's a good place to be. Next up, we have Stan Waddell. Stan is the Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer at Carnegie Mellon University where he leads a 270-person organization with a $60 million technology portfolio. He previously held senior technology roles at the University of New Hampshire, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center after nearly a decade as a US Navy electronics technician. He holds a PhD in information systems and completed Harvard Business School's advanced management program. You've done a lot. I'll also add, since I've printed out these note cards, Stan has joined our board of directors at EDUCAUSE. So thank you, Stan.

Stan Waddell: Awesome. Thank you for that, and thank you for that incredibly generous introduction.

Sophie White: Great. Well, thank you for being here. So we will jump into it. Earlier today, for those of us joining us in person, we saw the EDUCAUSE Top 10 general session, and I have a lot to think about based on that, but I'm curious, you might not have been able to tell us during that session, is there anything you found surprising about this year's Top 10? Is there anything that stood out that you didn't expect about it necessarily?

Mark McCormack: So it's a little bit tricky. So the Top 10 report, I think if we do it right, in a way it's not going to feel surprising. It's going to feel validating. It's going to feel like this resonates, this makes sense for me, and I understand what's on here. So I think if you looked at it and thought, well, why is that on there? Then maybe we did something wrong. I don't know. So that's my clever, tricky answer. But one thing I do enjoy being reminded of every year is the commonality of the experiences, the challenges and the excitement.

Mark McCormack: The things on that list are, I hesitate to say universally because that's such a strong word, but these are shared challenges and opportunities across higher education. So if you look at different institution types, different roles, these things are top of mind for most everyone in our community. Now that we're different in how we might navigate those things and what the implications might be for our particular context, but it's always encouraging for me to have that reminder that we're coming into this space with these shared experiences, these shared concerns and challenges and things that we're excited about. And I think that's a great starting point for the report. And then of course we can take it from there and land it on the ground in different ways, which is exciting as well.

Stan Waddell: Awesome. Awesome. I'd love to piggyback on those comments. I've followed the Top 10 forever, and I was mentioning to a colleague earlier today that I don't think I've ever seen one that has come out and I looked at it and went, "That's off the mark." They always resonate with me as a technology leader at the various organizations that I'm a part of. If I am surprised by anything this year, and it's not so much surprised as it maybe is, this is a validating thing as well, is that cybersecurity went from number one to three. And as a recovering chief information security officer, I'm actually glad that information security isn't the top thing that we're concerned about. I think that there are many opportunities for us that outweigh some of the risk that have to be managed from a cybersecurity perspective. Cybersecurity is still very, very important, but there's some other opportunities in front of us that we've got to capitalize on.

Mark McCormack: Yeah, I think it'll always be on the list, right? I think we should be worried if cybersecurity isn't on the list. It'll always be on there. But it's funny as a researcher and as the author of the report, you're always kind of rooting for an interesting list. You're like, "Let's mix things up a little bit this year. Let's not have cybersecurity number one again because the last two years." And so it's always like, "Okay, we've got some variety here and this is good. That's a good mix."

Stan Waddell: Agreed, agreed.

Sophie White: I will add that I think this wasn't surprising to me, but I do think it's interesting that the cybersecurity one was balancing cybersecurity boundaries with autonomy and trust.

Sophie White: I was thinking about that. Jenay and I, at the beginning of this week, we're in an annual partner summit where we were talking to different companies with technology solutions and institutional leaders associations. And there was a conversation in the first part about the student experience where I felt like there was this tension between students want a seamless technology experience, which you talked about in the Top 10, but also that takes data that requires some access to it in order to do. And I feel like the Top 10 for me this year was kind of highlighting all these tensions that we're trying to balance and all hold at once. So I'm curious, does that bring anything up for you? I feel like we're kind of in this middle of a lot of different conversations on autonomy, trust, data, AI.

Stan Waddell: Yeah, maybe I could start with this one. There's definitely a tension in regards to where technology is headed. The individual energy that can be created around technology now is more real and more impactful than I've ever seen it in my career. We've always contended with shadow IT or citizen developed applications. Now everyone has the ability to write software, everyone. I mean, without exception, if you have access to even some of the less capable frontier models, you can write software. And what that is doing is that it's pushing that boundary of cybersecurity even further away from center than it has been in many recent years. And so when we think about how do we as technology providers or even the guardians of the technology at our various organizations, how do we protect our organizations, we've also got to start thinking how do we enable this individual productivity that these new tool sets are providing?

Stan Waddell: Because I think that they're going to be a part of our productivity edge for the coming years, and they're also going to start to become a part of our competitive edge because we won't necessarily be bound to monolithic software providers to create technologies and applications that we need for real world application today. We don't have to wait a year for somebody's roadmap to enable some feature set that we want. We can write it in a couple of hours in an afternoon with a Claude or an OpenAI, ChatGPT or a Gemini.

Mark McCormack: So this came up in relation to cybersecurity. It came up in relation to AI, and I think you see other shades of it across the list, but it is an interesting time, I think, for governance. And this came up, I think, in issue number four, designing AI structures for responsible innovation. You've got these incredible new technologies. People want to experiment, they want to innovate, they want to get their hands in there and let's use this exciting thing. But for safety reasons, for protecting the institution and its people, you want to put guardrails in place. And so how do you do that? How do you balance those two things so that you're not being overly restrictive and people decide, well, I'll just go over here and play with this tool outside of the bounds of the institution's protection? How do you keep them in the bounded space, but still give them enough room to have their fun and experiment and explore?

Mark McCormack: I think it's an interesting challenge.

Stan Waddell: Yeah, it absolutely is. It also bleeds into item number seven, building strong and adaptive data governance backbones. And I actually did a presentation yesterday with Henry Zhang, who's the vice provost for institutional effectiveness and planning at CMU. And we talked about this exact issue. At Carnegie Mellon, we've made the decision to collapse data governance and AI governance into a single funnel. And that is exactly so that we can be more adaptive, more agile towards the shifts and the realities on the ground today. And we have this belief, and it's kind of bearing out already that it's the same people that are having to do this governance. So why have them have multiple meetings and have them trying to context switch across issues when you can marry the two domains and handle them all at once?

Jenay Robert: When you asked Sophie about what we found surprising about the Top 10, I was thinking a lot about number eight, measuring and navigating enrollment shifts. So this actually, I can't say that it surprised me. As Mark said, we've seen this coming for some time. It was almost like a refreshing take on this issue because as you said, Mark, this morning, we've been hearing about the enrollment cliff for so long and now it's here and now we're feeling it. And I think it was helpful to see that institutions are able to talk about how this is really playing out. We're taking it from that theoretical someday lens into what are the real impacts and what do we do about it? So that was one of the things that really stood out to me.

Mark McCormack: Yeah. And that's a great example of how our panelists really shape this report and how we talk about these issues. Early on in the development of these ideas, I was still talking about this in very theoretical terms. There's this enrollment cliff that's going to happen someday. And one of our panelists corrected me very rightly so. It's not out there someday. We're experiencing it right now, this is a today thing. And so I appreciated that correction or that distinction, and I can point in other examples on the list as well. And that speaks, I think, to the panelists' role and experience of this really is based on panelists and community input and insights. This isn't Mark McCormick's Top 10, this is the community's Top 10.

Stan Waddell: Yeah, agreed. And at the individual organizations, the recognition that data is everything is being underpinned by comments like you just made every day where we have more data at our fingertips now than we have ever had in my estimation. And we can see the trends unfolding in real time. You can actually watch over the semester or the year the enrollment trends by various demographic data and features and try to react to that in real time to protect your organizations or to ensure that your organizations can succeed at their missions. And without that data, you're kind of fumbling around in the dark pulling levers and punching buttons, trying to do things that may not have an impact, but when you can see what's actually occurring, you can deploy effective and rational controls and measures to ensure your organization is healthy.

Sophie White: Yeah, that's a great point. And to me, the fact that this issue is on the list also speaks to the power of technology leaders and institutions now that we're looking at the EDUCAUSE list and we're talking about something as fundamental as enrollment at our institution.

Mark McCormack: So much power.

Sophie White: We're doing a lot.

Stan Waddell: Yeah. I mean, I'm having a conversation over lunch with a colleague and I made the comment that we need EDUCAUSE more now than we ever have. This collective brain share, this unselfish sharing of information and having a convening organization that has the reputation and the means to pull us together from a worldwide standpoint is something that is going to be foundational to the success of higher ed in the coming years. And I think I'll go to the comic books and say with great power comes great responsibility. And EDUCAUSE has a responsibility and a set of missions that I think they are living up to in a very effective way and pulling us together, helping us navigate these very, very strong opportunities and challenges in ways that we couldn't do by ourselves.

Mark McCormack: Yeah. First of all, you're going to start talking about comic books and I'm going to go right there with you, so be careful. So the overall theme of the Top 10 this year is the age of perpetual change. And it does feel like a moment where at our institutions, all of you are navigating so many different areas of change coming at you. And it does feel like this environment where next week something could happen that you're not anticipating and it's going to completely shift the conversation. And I think in that kind of environment of uncertainty, of change, of disruption, a space like this, a community like this to get together and again, identify our common challenges, the things that we're all experiencing is even more important, even more powerful. And I'm going to think about a comic book way to frame that, but come back to me.

Stan Waddell: Awesome.

Jenay Robert: Well, as good hosts, we should try to set him up for that. We'll have to think about how to do that. I think it's a good time to start talking about action. So taking these insights and turning them into action. What advice do you have for people watching, listening in the audience? Okay, so I've read these incredible insights. Now what do I do?

Stan Waddell: Yeah, maybe I'll start with this one and I'll offer a Carnegie Mellon specific thing, but I do believe it's extensible to other organizations. So one of the things that we have at CMU is it's basically our technology portfolio management strategy in that every year organizations across campus bring things that they want to do from a technology perspective to university leadership for funding. And since I have been at Carnegie Mellon, so this is seven years now at this point, I have mapped those proposals to a number of things, strategic plan for IT at Carnegie Mellon, the university strategic plan, and the EDUCAUSE Top 10. Wow. And so seeing the commonality lends gravity and credence to the proposals. If our peers across our industry have said these are issues that are top for higher ed, that gives a higher credence to the proposals, and it does weigh very heavily into the decisions that we make.

Stan Waddell: And I think that, again, it's this commonality, this brain trust that we have that validates the things that we want to pull off and again, give additional gravity to these ideas. And I think that organizations don't necessarily have to borrow from that, but should be thinking in terms of if I'm trying to do something technology related and it's on that list, it's already got a gate of validation against it.

Mark McCormack: That's great. I'll give a shout out to EDUCAUSE's Young Professionals community. I was just in a session earlier today where basically they take the Top 10 list and they don't rip it up, but they fold it different ways and they hold it against the light over here. What does it mean over here? And they're just playing with it. Okay, here's the Top 10. What does this mean for us in our role? What does this mean for my institution? And actually, this is so clever, and I hope they don't mind me mentioning this because I love it, but they came up with an acronym TEN, so it's T-E-N, which is perfect, the Top 10. So the T stands for translate. So look at this list and translate these words in your own language. What does issue number one mean for you at your institution? How would you put that in your words?

Mark McCormack: The E is engage. How are you engaging with that issue at your institution? When are you encountering that challenge? What does it mean for you? And then the N is network. What conversations do you need to start having at your institution around that topic, around that issue? And so I just love that playful way of approaching it, and I would invite anyone to... This is a living document. Take it, use it, fold it in different ways, make a origami swan out of it, whatever you need to do, make it land at your institution in a meaningful way. That's ultimately what we hope for. Yeah, I

Sophie White: Love that, that it's intending as a living document. It's supposed to be actionable, not just something that's on a shelf. Yeah,

Mark McCormack: Absolutely.

Jenay Robert: Well, that actually reminds me of the new feature we have this year that we gave the markdown document. Do you want to talk about that? Yeah,

Mark McCormack: Thank you. I wasn't even...

Jenay Robert: Yeah.

Mark McCormack: So new this year with the Top 10, we have two new tools that you can take and engage in that play with it. We have an interactive table, so you can select from a dropdown, I'm from a small institution or I'm a doctoral institution, and it will resort the Top 10 for you based on our data so you can see, okay, for these types of institutions like mine, this is the reprioritized list, and you might even see one or two items on the list that didn't make the overall Top 10, so it's kind of fun in that way. The other thing we're offering is an AI discussion guide. So this is a markdown text file that has been de-identified, and we've added in some AI prompts and things to basically tell your AI tool of choice, you'll take this file and drop it into that AI tool, and it will guide you through a personalized conversation about the report and what it might mean for your role or your institution.

Mark McCormack: So that's a really cool thing that we're offering this year. We're going to test it out and see how it goes and see what people think. But EDUCAUSE, just like our members, we're trying to determine where AI adds value, so we're right in there with you trying to play with these new things.

Stan Waddell: And that's an awesome tool that I'm sure many of us will take advantage of, and it is an example of where AI adds real value today. It's not AI's adding real value tomorrow or maybe one day, to your points from earlier, AI and the way that these technology developments are hitting us are having an impact today, and it's on us to harness that impact and to use them in new and novel ways. And I guarantee you, when I do my technology portfolio ranking, I will be dropping that markdown language into the tool because that'll be an easier way to get this work done for me.

Mark McCormack: That's awesome.

Sophie White: I love your answer about how it helps you prioritize things, Stan. I feel like this is getting really meta because now I'm applying how we're talking about the Top 10 to the Top 10 issues again. But the issue number six of working creatively within real world constraints, I thought that was a really important issue because we know that higher ed institutions are strapped for resources right now and we can't prioritize everything. So even if there's one thing you take from it, prioritizing the issues that are on the list because those are showing themselves to be important with our community feels like a great step. I know you mentioned our workforce reports too have also shown this throughout the year.

Mark McCormack: Yeah, it's a consistent pattern, this challenge with resource constraints and keeping up with all the things that are being asked of your teams and your people. I love it that that made the list because I think it's something we need to continue to put in front of the community. It's something we need to continue to talk about and try to work together to address.

Jenay Robert: I really appreciated that issue as a fresh take on the do more with less conversation, and it reminded me of something that's kind of been floating around in my mind. These are some half-baked thoughts, so forgive me if it comes out a little wonky, but I've lately been thinking a lot about how for so long it's always been, how do we do more? How do we do more? How do we do more? In my experience, generative AI tools and agentic AI is shining a little bit of a light on the absurdity of the constant reaching for more. So it's sort of making you see that, okay, now the sky is the limit for more. We've kind of taken the cap off and said, "You can have as much as you want. How much is enough?" I think a lot of people are grappling with that, maybe not so explicitly as I've babbled it here, but that's kind of what I was thinking on that issue.

Stan Waddell: I think that there's an amount of accumulation that these tools will also enable. I mean, there's definitely an upside, but there's also the downside of junk and cruft being created for the sake of creation. I experienced this in my own productivity efforts. So in the past where maybe two sentences or a paragraph would've done for an email response, now maybe it's three paragraphs with a little bit more exposition because I have the ability to do the exposition with the tool. I make my salient points and the tool adds the exposition. At a certain point, I started thinking, "Why is it okay for me to add to somebody else's cognitive load because I can?" And the realities are they're probably going to drop this into their GPT and they're going to get the two sentences that I intentionally started with anyway. So even now for anything that I write, even if the exposition should be there, I start the email with a TLDR. If you don't read anything else, here are the two lines that you need to take from this. I think we're going to have to start thinking about this with agents because they're going to start to create a lot of new artifacts for us that will add value, but maybe the value's only marginal, and maybe we have to get to a place where we're marking things as this is a nice to see or a nice to have, but if you can't get to it, don't sweat it.

Mark McCormack: Yeah. One of my favorite little lines from the report is ubiquity doesn't equal utility. These technologies are everywhere, but it's got to serve a purpose. It's got to support the mission of the institution. It's got to be carrying us forward and not diminishing what we're doing or at the very least wasting time. Yeah.

Jenay Robert: I don't know if we've talked about this on the pod before, Sophie, but something that I've been thinking about related to this conversation is from Brene Brown's podcast, and she recently talked about this using AI for work. And actually, Stan, what you said about why should I add to someone else's cognitive load? There was an episode that basically boiled down to when I'm creating a work product and using AI to help me, I should really be critical about does this just move the cognitive works down the line or am I moving the project forward in a meaningful way? Am I moving the work forward meaningfully? I think it's a great litmus test that I've been using for myself, and that's what that reminded me of.

Stan Waddell: Yeah. No, so if I could borrow from another medium, anime, there's a concept of the filler episode, and so there are salient episodes that move the plot forward, and then there's some episodes that you could just skip and not lose anything in the story, and maybe we have to apply some of that to our work.

Sophie White: I think that's a great point in terms of... I mean, it applies to issue number one, determining where AI adds real value, and that's a governance structure in itself, I guess, is figuring out where is AI adding the value to the work that we're doing versus where is it just junk that we should be applying more rigor or robust discussion to.

Mark McCormack: Yeah. I think that one of the solutions that came out in our survey and in some of the interviews, that could be as simple as having a rubric or just having a list of questions, because it could just come down to that moment of pausing for just a minute and thinking critically about does this actually save time or effort? Is this moving the project forward? Is this introducing new costs or risks? So even something as simple as that, just take a moment, just stop, pause, take a deep breath, and ask a few tough questions About what you're doing here before you just move forward with using it.

Sophie White: I'm curious, I was inspired by issue number two, future-proofing students for a volatile world. I thought that fit really nicely with just the theme of the Top 10 in general, the age of perpetual change. I also love seeing the focus on students so high on the list when we think about focusing on the mission of higher ed and what we do. Anything you want to add to that issue in terms of the context that you heard from institutions, Mark, or how that lands for you, Stan?

Stan Waddell: We're having conversations, and I hear these conversations from people at other institutions as well, in that the way that students are presenting for internalizing information is being impacted by generative AI. And the expectations that the places that our students are going to land, the jobs that they're going to get, the companies they're going to work for are starting to shift as well. There's an expectation that students are going to come out of university with some understanding of how to use these tools in advanced ways, not just foundational capabilities. And so now we're starting to think about how do we embed foundational learnings into various courses and courseware so that the students do walk away from university with advanced skills that are much more along the lines of how do you think when interacting with novel technologies versus do step one, do step two, do step three.

Stan Waddell: It's much more about the logic, the philosophy and the critical thinking as well as the technical understanding for the domain that you're trying to become educated on. And watching higher ed respond to this as an opportunity, not as a challenge is inspiring because we could take a negative positioning or a negative bias and view this as an existential threat.

Stan Waddell: And maybe there's some of this too, maybe there's some peril there, but the other side of the equation is that this is an opportunity that doesn't present multiple times in a lifetime. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to impact the body of knowledge, to impact pedagogy and to impact society in a very, very positive way.

Mark McCormack: Yeah. I'll add to that just real quickly and then we can move to Q&A. But there's a theme through the Top 10 of collaboration of technology and data leaders and teams working with other departments, other leaders at the institution. And this one, issue number two for me is one that really emphasizes the importance of working with faculty and academic leadership, aligning your technology strategy with what they're trying to accomplish through learning and education with the students. So yeah.

Sophie White: Yeah. And it felt to me based on how you discussed it earlier that it also requires collaboration with industry, governments, all of the other places that students go after they leave the institution too, which is a challenge in our higher ed environment where we have the ways that we operate, but we need to see outside of the walls too. All right. Who has questions for us?

Audience: It struck me just as an observation of saying what you were talking about too long to read and how much you embellish and be people extra. AI in some ways becomes a time management problem, right?

Jenay Robert: Yeah.

Audience: Would you chime in on that?

Sophie White: Yeah. And I'll just repeat the question for the podcast. So the question is just thinking about how we use AI for individual work, does it bring up time management questions that we should be thinking about as professionals? Does that... Okay.

Stan Waddell: It absolutely introduces some time management challenges. And for me, my own personal experience has been that I've had to shift my way of work because if I was just working in the traditional mode that I've always worked in, I could get my workload done probably three days in the week versus five. And so now I've got two extra days of productivity available. Well, what do I do with that productivity? And so this is an opportunity for organizations, and I guarantee you 65, 70 percent, probably 80 percent is probably a pareto of our organizations are experiencing some level of productivity gain on the order of five to 40 percent. Well, how does the organization capture that? How do we reinvest that time in direct support of the missions that we have? This is a good problem to have. But then the other side of that coin is how do we, because we have become so much more productive, how do we not push that cognitive load on to others?

Stan Waddell: Is it fair when I can do two extra days worth of work every week to kick that out to somebody that might not be also experiencing the same productivity gains that I'm experiencing?

Mark McCormack: It could also depend on the use case. I don't know if this is getting to your question directly, but I've seen both sides of it. I've seen instances where these new tools can really genuinely help save time and improve productivity. I've seen other instances where people have said, "Well, it took me more time to get the output I wanted out of this tool than it would've taken me to just do it myself." So it's like it depends on use case, it depends on maybe your skill in using that tool. Are you using the correct prompts? Are you not using it as efficiently as you could? I don't know. So I've seen both sides of it, I guess.

Stan Waddell: One of the things, and I have a number of conversations around this, is the access to tools is distributed and it is not necessarily even. And so one of the things that I think technology leaders have to think about is how do we put more capable tools in as many hands as we possibly can? I've actually in real time seen people say, "I don't understand what all this hype is. From my perspective, these things suck. I tried to get it to create this flyer and this is what it gave me." And I look at that outcome and I'm like, "Oh wow, that really is bad." I'm not going to vendor shame. I put it into another model that is a more capable frontier model and I run the same prompt that they did and I show them what comes out of that and they go, "Oh wow, that's what people are talking about." And I do think we as organizational leaders and influencers across various industries and domains and specifically in IRED for EDUCAUSE have to grapple with eliminating situations where we have-nots and haves because some of these tools are not yielding the results that some of the more high-end feature-rich tools are.

Mark McCormack: I appreciated that advice yesterday in the general session from Heather McGowan of just try different tools, explore and to your point, test out three or four different tools for the same task and see what you get. Log out of your account and see the difference between your logged in output versus your log-out output. So it just takes experimentation and play and just seeing what works.

Jenay Robert: And learning from other people's experimentation and play. Talk to each other about what is going on. I've learned so much to your point about I saw it this way and it sucked, I saw it this way and it was amazing. And a use case that really opened my mind to the potential of agentic AI was I talked to some colleagues at DePaul University recently and they've just created an agent for their financial aid advisors and it takes the first 15 minutes of the meeting with a student. Instead of taking 15 minutes for that advisor to go to four different data sources and get an understanding of what's happening with that student, the agent has been trained to go retrieve the data from those four different places and give the advisor a profile. We're not cutting out the advisor. We're not shortening our meetings with our students.

Jenay Robert: We're not trying to see more students in a day. We're trying to just spend a lot more quality time engaging with students and hearing this real life, this is no longer theoretical in my mind, and this was pretty recent. I'm ashamed to say that it just became this real for me, that it's no longer this theoretical, okay, these tools can give us more time with students. I always felt like, are you sure? And then I hear about this use case and now I'm really excited about some of these applications. And again, that's the power of EDUCAUSE, of connecting with colleagues, of hearing those stories, that unselfish sharing that we talked about earlier that really can open your eyes.

Stan Waddell: Yeah, agreed, agreed. One of the use cases that I find extremely valuable personally is in regards to filling out forms and things like that. So form builders and tools like that have been available for a long time, but they really rely on what you placed into the browser the last time sort of browser memory. But if you give one of these tools enough context about you and your role and how you go about living life, they can fill out most forms for you with 90, 95 percent accuracy and a form that would take you 30 minutes to, let me go find this data point, let me go find this number and whatnot. You can have the tool working while you're doing something else. These are the things that I do to gain effectiveness and efficiency is stuff that's just like rote work. I don't do it.

Stan Waddell: The tools do it and I concentrate on the value add work, the stuff that the tool can't reliably do. I talk to a number of colleagues and they're doing very similar things like custom GPTs and gems, projects within other tools. Li I said, I'm not going to vend ashamed, I'm not going to name it, although I did just say gem, everybody knows what that is. But building these things with some knowledge about the way you work allows them to do work on your behalf so much more seamlessly and more effectively.

Jenay Robert: Yeah.

Mark McCormack: If I could call in audible, you started to mention this a minute ago, you've had some exciting news at Carnegie Mellon recently. Do you feel comfortable sharing a little bit about that?

Stan Waddell: Sure because it's extremely exciting. We've experienced an historic gift to Carnegie Mellon that is going to enable us to improve operations within Pittsburgh. So it's a $3 billion gift, a billion dollars identified and earmarked for operations in Pittsburgh, and then $2 billion to create a new campus in Miami that is focused on grand challenges. And it's going to be a new and novel way of engaging our colleges within Pittsburgh, our faculty within Pittsburgh in partnership with faculty in Miami to do interdisciplinarity on steroids. And that's one of the hallmarks for Carnegie Mellon. It's a very interdisciplinary place. And being able to focus on these grand challenges is really going to accelerate that. And I think it's going to be a superpower for Carnegie Mellon for years to come. And it's going to put resources into play that we did not have on our own in very exciting ways to impact society.

And I'm just, I mean, maybe you can tell the energy that's radiating off of me just thinking through it, but I'm very excited to be a part of this. This is an extremely exciting time to be a part of the Carnegie Mellon community, and I look forward to the outcomes that come from it.

Mark McCormack: And Stan, you said you're taking requests for funding, is that right? No, no. I have a list in my pocket.

Stan Waddell: So someone yesterday said, you said that you would share. And I said, no, I said that I would share the details of what has happened. Yes, yes.

Sophie White: No, thank you for asking about that. And I guess I'm just curious, it's really exciting news for Carnegie Mellon and higher ed in general, obviously. Do you think there are any other lessons that institutions should be thinking about from this type of news, just how you're thinking about grand challenges or why Carnegie Mellon's position to be a leader as a result of this gift?

Stan Waddell: Yeah, I think Carnegie Mellon has a number of inherent strengths. Ostensibly being the birthplace of artificial intelligence puts us into a place to have a meaningful impact on the artificial intelligence conversation and developments for years to come as we have in the past. And I think that those are definitely things that will be bundled into the grand challenges, but looking at sustainability, again, these are places that Carnegie Mellon has great strength, and I believe that we will leverage this investment against those strengths and have meaningful impacts in the way that the research and the education missions that we have impact society. But I also think that this is kind of a new way of thinking for higher ed. The federal landscape has shifted in regards to funding, and I believe organizations have to do a little bit more of getting out and figuring out additional streams to bolster their funding and resources to do work. And this can be an example for other organizations to realize that there are dollars that aren't tied to the federal government that can be impactful.

Sophie White: Well, thank you all so much for the fascinating conversation today, for all of your work on the Top 10 and leadership of higher ed. Thank you to our audience for joining us today in Denver. And again, this was an episode of EDUCAUSE Shop Talk. You can find the podcast in EDUCAUSE Review and on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. And the EDUCAUSE Top 10 is live on the EDUCAUSE website. Thank you all so much and have a great conference. Thank you.

Mark McCormack: All right, thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having us. It's awesome. Thank you.