AI Ready

Program 1:
All Campus Essentials

*All new for year two*

Program 1 highlights education and learning goals through guided conversations. Each month, CIC will feature one topic, invite related campus members to join, and conduct three virtual sessions to prepare participants for the impact of AI in that space. This program equips faculty, staff, and administrators with a foundational understanding of AI.

The first sessions begin weekly in August 2025 and will continue through July 2026, excluding December and May. This will provide approximately 27 hours of content organized into nine essential areas.

Sessions are the first three Thursdays of the month at 2:00 p.m. ET / 1:00 p.m. CT / 12:00 p.m. MT / 11:00 a.m. PT.

Topics

Virtual sessions will address applications and use cases related to AI in…  

• Senior Leadership Decisions and Developments (August 2025)
• Admissions and Enrollment (September 2025)
• AI Pedagogy and AI in the Curriculum (October 2025)
• Retention and Student Success (November 2025)
• Administrative Use (January 2026)
• Hyper-Personalized Learning with AI (Faculty Focus) (February 2026)
• Student Affairs, Mental Health, and Career Services (March 2026)
• Communications and Advancement (April 2026)
• Academic Affairs, Data Management, and LMS Development (June 2026)

Approach

1. Each month’s topic is announced in advance so campus contacts can invite the applicable people from your campus to attend. Sessions are prescheduled and invites can be forwarded, making management simple.  
2. Each month includes:
   • Pre-Reads and Overviews
     This includes optional support material for attendees to review as desired.
   • AI Literacy Materials
     This includes both unique material to our network and best-in-class industry material about AI.
   • AI Emerging Use Cases and Needs
     This includes where AI is being used by similar offices at other campuses in relation to the topic.
   • Horizon Sessions
     These sessions identify emerging partner solutions and provide guidance on how to organize, identify, and choose what supports your institution will need.
   • Next Steps Conversations
     These discussions center on how campuses are advancing AI work.
   • Hands-On and Eyes-On Work
     Participants will be invited to use, watch, and demystify generative AI platforms.
3. This structure is repeated each month, potentially allowing 100+ campus members to participate for the duration of the program. 

Bonus: Cohort Connections

CIC is inviting partner associations to host monthly takeaway sessions for their individual members. These Cohort Connections take place on the fourth Thursday of every month and create more personalized moments for participants to talk through what they are thinking about next and how they are approaching the work with colleagues. Institutions that are a member of the below groups can join them for conversation; institutions that are not a member of these groups can use the fourth week to talk internally about next steps. (There is no CIC programming on the fourth week.)

Current partners:

Appalachian College Association
Associated Colleges of the South
Conference for Mercy Higher Education
Great Lakes Colleges Association
Others pending

(If your focused or specialized association is interested in hosting a Cohort Connection, please reach out ASAP.) 

Investment

As a result of the commitment to serve our members and campus leaders, CIC is able to offer this program for a one-time $2,000 institutional enrollment fee covering the entire 12 months of program service.

Application to AI Ready Program #1 has closed.

Year One Recap

In year one, we expected 40 institutions to join the network. Over 100 completed the yearlong experience. Some highlights:

• 15,000 hours of instruction
• 126+ curated resources shared
• 52+ unique guides and handouts for CIC institutions
• 30+ hours of webinar, etc.
• Active and interactive chat discussions

Some of our favorite comments:

“This was helpful. I was afraid AI would make me irrelevant as a teacher, but I can now see how I can use it to help students learn and help myself be more creative.”

“This was SO helpful as an intro for us who have not tapped into the true utilization and maximization of AI! Can’t wait to learn more and try out these suggestions to help personally and professionally.”

“These sessions were incredibly helpful and insightful in sharing the possibilities of AI within the context of Admissions.”

“The September webinars were some of the best I have ever attended—engaging and useful—and recognizing we are all multi-tasking.”

“It seems like the wild west out there and you shed some light on how these tools can be useful.”

“The sessions were very informative and helpful. I now have a framework of how to best infuse AI into our Institutional Advancement operations and some ideas about how to infuse it into the operations of the college. I’m looking forward to how we will optimize our overall operations with the adoption of AI.”

“Thank you so much! I greatly enjoyed (and benefitted from) every minute of the four hours!”

“I was working on a project with a friend, and because of this series we utilized AI to gather the data and put together the spreadsheet with the results we were looking for. It was fast, correct, and really made the project easy.” 

Program 2:
Building & Launching Together

Every CIC campus has AI All-Stars to unleash and more programs to pilot – Building and Launching Together supports these advanced engagements. Program 2 lets you pilot deeper use of AI on a safe, secure, non-indexed platform, that you can expand to all of campus as your use grows. Campuses build, share, and deploy AI with students and internal teams, actively using the platform for work and learning.

The first year of Program 2 was titled “Build Your Own,” but with the new Program 2, CIC is building a community of practice across the sector, for our institutions to learn sophisticated uses, including to build, share, and deploy bots for both in and out of class activities across institutions. We achieve this through a cutting-edge platform and a community of practice.

BRING AI INTO THE CLASSROOM SAFELY AND CREATIVELY

Program 2 provides a testing ground for what AI-enabled teaching and learning can look like on your campus. Faculty can use the platform to pilot AI integration in their courses, with full control over the experience.
Whether experimenting with small enhancements or redesigning assignments around AI collaboration, instructors can:

• Experiment with bots that facilitate classroom discussions, group projects, or reflections
• Use AI to model ethical decision-making or critique bias in generated content as part of a media literacy or philosophy course
• Collaborate with colleagues across institutions to build, troubleshoot, and share ideas

Program 2 provides a secure environment to explore what’s possible and responsible in AI-enhanced instruction, supported by senior advisors and a like-minded community.

THE COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE

Program 2 moves from learning to action for institutions that want to enable organizational generative AI use. The program places users in communities of practice based on campus role and provides in-platform training as the team actually deploys AI in their individual, faculty, and departmental functions, using internal data (as desired) and building off the work of the community.

Uses include:

• Supporting campus teams piloting AI initiatives
• Supporting faculty who are using AI in the classroom
• Professional development for campuses expanding AI availability to more of campus

THE PLATFORM

Users will access a new professional grade LLM Platform through our AI Ready Program 2 providers. The platform meets all common security and privacy requirements, opening the opportunity for expansive use.   

Approach

By using a community of practice approach with coaching and guidance on a first-in-class AI platform, this program builds campus capacity and actually gets AI in active use on a safe, private, shareable platform.

This is not demo work. This is deploying AI—in staff work, for faculty, and in the classroom. (Institutions can decide how broadly to deploy.)

1. We onboard and train on the platform for each community of practice. 
2. We provide starter apps/bots that allow members to cater to their own needs. 
3. Participants use the platform for simple or complex work, as department teams or individually, with students or not, starting with simple work and building from there. 
4. The community of practice meets monthly, sharing active apps/bots, demonstrating what’s been developed, and learning from the group. 
5. Senior advisors accompany the community of practice and are available for individual assistance and guidance. 
6. Everyone can produce numerous AI apps/bots for their individual and departmental work, and the full community will have access to 100+ AI apps/bots by the end of the program. 

Highlights

A fully deployed LLM platform safe for campus use with features like: 

• Access to multiple AI models and tools in one place: This includes popular models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Stable Diffusion, and more. 

• Integration of personal files and documents: Users can safely upload full data sets and various documents for the AI to reference in its responses. 

• Secure data handling: The platform ensures that prompts and uploaded documents remain private.  

• Collaboration features: The platform allows teams to work together both on campus and in the whole CIC community.  

• Senior Advisors who accompany the work of each community of practice through the year including: 

• Use-case development: Guidance for deciding when an AI tool is appropriate developed in conversation with community support. 

• Developing advanced prompt engineering techniques: This includes an introduction to computational thinking techniques and bot design principles for small-scale campus use. 

• Building templates for colleagues: Tips for teaching AI-reticent colleagues to use simple bots that go beyond basic prompting 

Investment

To expand active use of generative AI to all of campus, CIC is able to offer this yearlong program for a one-time $5,000 institutional enrollment fee covering the dedicated training, project support, community of practice sessions, and 30 seats in the shared AI platform.

Additional seats—up to campus-wide—can be added in the platform. See below for details. All faculty and staff with seats on the platform are eligible to participate in the community of practice sessions.

Application to AI Ready Program #1 has closed.

More About the Program 2 Platform

Through the AI Ready network, CIC institutions are ahead in the AI race, and we want to maintain this momentum. CIC has partnered with BoodleBox to rapidly scale AI use on campus at an affordable price.

An AI Platform at an Amazing Price—Institutions that sign up for Program 2 will automatically receive 30 seats on the partner platform.

CIC has negotiated a monthly rate of $8 per active user for all additional seats—a discount equal to that of the largest institutions in the country. Your institution can select the number of users as desired. Options for how to start on the platform include: 

1. Start with the 30 seats provided 
2. Expand for classroom use by platforming certain classes (i.e., freshmen seminar, senior capstones) 
3. Expand for a unit/department (i.e., student affairs) or the entire campus
4. Provide for all faculty to share and learn with faculty on other campuses  

• **Institutions that sign up to expand for all-campus use receive an additional 50 percent pricing discount from our network partner ($4 per active user per month). 

All employees on the platform are eligible to be in a community of practice.

*Notes:

• You do not need to know who will be on the platform at the time of sign-up. 
• Only active users are charged, so signing up additional people who do not use the platform that month has no cost. 
• Even schools that have invested in a different LLM platform already can benefit from participating in this program. Apps/bots developed as part of the community of practice could easily be moved over into most other LLM platform systems.