UCLA will become the first university in California to implement OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise.

With a limited number of accounts, UCLA will offer students, faculty and staff access to ChatGPT Enterprise – an artificial intelligence tool designed to streamline the teaching and research processes – according to a press release. The initiative will make UCLA one of the first universities to incorporate artificial intelligence in higher education, said Lucy Avetisyan, UCLA’s associate vice chancellor and chief information officer.

Avetisyan said after recognizing how AI could be used around many disciplines across campus, UCLA realized Enterprise licenses could transform tasks ranging from research to teaching. She added that UCLA is working with other AI vendors in addition to OpenAI, such as Google Gemini and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Integrating AI fits into the overall “digital campus” to significantly achieve some of the goals set last October, she added. Two of these goals are expanding the university’s global reach and enhancing creative and research activities.

“We’re working with them (OpenAI) on a lot of collateral that they already have for training and preparing users to interact with their licenses,” Avetisyan said.

Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s Chief Operating Officer, said in a press release that the company is excited about working with the campus.

“We look forward to working closely with UCLA to find the best ways for ChatGPT to support a rich learning experience and cutting-edge research,” Lightcap said.

Chris Mattmann, UCLA’s inaugural chief data and AI officer, said the university needs to educate people on AI so students and faculty know how to use the tools. He said this is necessary for the ethical use of such models in teaching and research.

Mattmann said that while the initial phase of the project involved planning and preparation – including ensuring data privacy by using an internal Enterprise version of ChatGPT – the next focus is on executing the program responsibly. He added that UCLA aims to allocate the accounts in a way that maximizes its impact while maintaining fairness and responsibility.

Avetisyan said success would be measured through a return on investment model.

“We want to measure the ROI (return on investment) and then decide whether these are things we want to continue to invest in or scale campuswide,” Avetisyan said. “We are putting that infrastructure in place to help manage these proof of concept projects with our campus partners, so then we know exactly what’s worth investing and scaling for UCLA.”

Avetisyan said UCLA is still formulating and asking questions as it tries to build an assessment process to allocate the accounts to specific AI projects at UCLA.

Mattmann said he also wanted to dispel the myths about the use of AI in education because AI isn’t used solely by students. He added that it is also used by teachers for creative purposes or improving media assets, in addition to the many other ways AI can be used to benefit students and faculty.

“If we don’t start figuring out how to make these things available, they’re going to be made available anyways. People are going to be using them,” Mattmann said. “This allows us to kind of take a leadership position in being involved and helping to shape the strategy.”