Context: Employer work · CQUniversity
My role: Digital Services AI Taskforce lead
Status: Past leadership initiative at CQUniversity.
The challenge
There was plenty of interest in AI across CQUniversity, alongside questions about privacy, accuracy and what it might mean for people’s work. Giving staff access to a tool would only address part of that challenge. They also needed a useful reason to try it and clear boundaries for doing so.
My role
I led university-wide AI adoption at CQUniversity through the Digital Services AI Taskforce, overseeing security assessments of AI tools, developing responsible AI use guidelines and providing staff with a portal of approved tools for specific tasks. I brought staff into the discussion, helped prioritise opportunities and reported what we were learning to our CTO.
Start with the work
In workshops, we asked staff which parts of their day were frustrating or repetitive. Meeting notes, finding information and copying content between systems gave us concrete processes to explore.
We considered how often a problem occurred, who it affected and whether an improvement could help beyond one person. This helped separate ideas worth investigating from small tasks that did not need to become projects. Bringing different teams together also exposed problems they had in common.
Build confidence and shared ownership
We worked with internal cybersecurity colleagues on guidance about appropriate tools and information handling. Human review remained part of the process: generated summaries and action items needed checking before they were shared.
Our taskforce curated responsible AI use guidelines and a portal of tools approved for specific tasks, including generating emails, images and videos. This gave staff a practical way to navigate the available tools and understand which ones to use for different kinds of work.
I also encouraged interested staff to become champions within their own teams. A Teams community gave people a place to share examples, ask questions and support each other, rather than relying on the taskforce for every answer.
Practical evidence
Meeting documentation became a useful example of the approach. We used AI-assisted summaries as a starting point, refined prompts around what teams needed and kept people responsible for checking the output. I also created SharePoint Online meeting-report pages from notes to support historical tracking and transparency.
The work brought together discovery, staff support and responsible experimentation. The accompanying article describes the workshops and community in more detail. The leadership lesson I carried forward was to make adoption useful, understandable and supported, with people still accountable for the results.