Administrative AI

Administrative Uses of AI

Generative AI, or GenAI, can be a powerful productivity tool that has the potential to increase productivity in our everyday work. UMBC wants to be at the forefront of supporting employees in using these tools to improve service and give employees more time to provide personalized support. As we use AI, we want administrative AI use to be guided by the following principles:

  • We want to put safeguard data in on our use of AI. Please remember, unless you are using a tool from the GenAI Tools  web page, you may only use public data with a generative AI service. Using any UMBC proprietary data is forbidden.
  • We want to support excellent self-service and err on the side of correct information over guessing. Our goals in launching myUMBC Answers was to provide students wanting to get self-service, personalized and curated information without having to search our web sites. In building myUMBC Answers we have limited what sources of data we use, recognizing that some university web sites are not actively updated.
  • We want to learn what does and doesn’t work. GenAI is a new technology that is evolving rapidly, we want to understand what does and doesn’t work. Sharing feedback is essential to help us learn what does and doesn’t work.

We have a number of free tools that employees (and students) can begin to use listed on the GenAI Tools web page.  Google Gemini works well with our Google Workspace environment and can help people manage their tasks, calendar, and email. Microsoft CoPilot likewise is a powerful tool when integrated with the Microsoft applications. Finally, the Amplify AI product provides employees with access to a variety of generative AI chat interfaces.

We recognize that we need to bring more training and support to

myUMBC Answers

The myUMBC Answers service utilizes UMBC’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment to run our Portal to redefine the myUMBC Search function. The original search has been extended with Amazon’s Bedrock AI services where you can ask it questions and myUMBC will answer the question. The initial focus on this has been on answering questions that students may have, including questions specific to them, here are some examples of questions it can answer:

  • How many days are left on my parking permit?
  • What is my date that I can register for classes?
  • What is my GPA?
  • What funds are on my campus card?
  • Where is the career center?
  • What are the hours to the tutoring center?

myUMBC Answers utilizes information from the student handbook, some of UMBC’s authoritative web sites, and your data that would be summarizes on your myUMBC profile.  For staff that answer student questions, we encourage you to try the questions you get from students in myUMBC Answers and give us feedback on how it works. Some areas we

Over the summer we will be working to extend this to better support faculty and staff by working with groups to add more content into our answers. Departments interested in working with DoIT on this should reach out to Collier Jones, myUMBC portal architect.

AI integration into RT (in alpha testing)

If you are someone that is responsible for answering RT student support tickets, we are interested in working with a few departments that have good student documentation or FAQs available to expand our testing of providing support staff with access to use GenAI services to provide answers inside RT. DoIT staff have been testing this with an RT enhancement defined by the RT queue the ticket is assigned too. When enabled, RT will show the AI answer to the question and provide a way to send the AI answer as the RT reply to the ticket. We hope over time as we improve documentation that this could help many overburdened support staff increase their productivity and have time to do other tasks.

Google Gemini AI (free)

Gemini AI is Google’s AI Generative AI product. Since UMBC has an enterprise license for Google Workspace and basic features of Gemini AI are available to all UMBC users free of charge. The information you type into Gemini AI is protected for Level 1 and FERPA data, data which is not considered public. To use this tool, visit gemini.google.com.

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Google Gemini AI (paid)

We recommend that all users interested in Google Gemini try the free version to see how it works for you. If you find that you want to use Gemini heavily for complex documents, coding, or other tasks the paid version is available for $240 a year. Gemini also allows users to create what are called Gemini Gems, which can have custom prompts and contexts built in for creating your assistant. To request a premium license, employees should use the DoIT Support – AI Tools form and enter your chart string into the notes or form to charge for the year.

Microsoft CoPilot (free)

CoPilot  is Microsoft’s generative AI product built using OpenAI’s large language model. Since UMBC has an enterprise license for Microsoft the basic features of CoPilot are available to all UMBC users free of charge. The information you type into CoPilot is protected for Level 1 data, data which is not considered public. The free version of Microsoft Copilot provides an AI assistant designed to help you with a wide range of daily tasks and is especially useful if you are primarily use the Microsoft 365 products such as Word, Excel, Outlook, and Onenote. Whether you’re looking for quick answers, detailed explanations, or help with daily tasks, Copilot Chat makes it easier and more efficient to get things done. CoPilot can be accessed on the web, Windows, macOS, and iPadOS. The free version does have some limits placed during peak business hours.

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Microsoft CoPilot (paid)

We recommend that all users interested in Microsoft CoPilot try the free version to see how it works for you. If you find that you want to use CoPilot  directly in Word, Excel, Teams, or Outlook and plan to work on complex documents, or other tasks the paid version is available for approximately $240 a year.  To request a premium license, employees should use the DoIT Support – AI Tools form and enter your chart string into the notes or form to charge for the year for the paid version you have selected.

 

Amplify

Amplify from Vanderbilt University is a front-end that allows individuals to interact with a variety of large-language models (LLM) in a controlled environment that protects institutional data from being used by the AI service. The LLMs that Amplify can presently (3/4/2025) utilize are the Anthropic Claude 3.5 Haiku and Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2, OpenAI ChatGPT 4o, and Meta Llama 3.2 90b instruct models. Each of these LLMs has different strengths and weaknesses. There are also a number of more specialized LLM models that may be better for STEM tasks. Information on using Amplify at UMBC is available on the Amplify FAQ page.

DoIT, in consultation with the Provost’s office, is making Amplify AI free to use by employees. Amplify is validated to work with protected data the same as Microsoft and Google. Since Amplify is not a commercial product per se, there may be bugs in the code and some features are still evolving. To request an Amplify account, please fill out the DoIT Support – AI Tools form and select Amplify.

  • Get Started:
  • Type: Conversation Based GenAI, GenAI Assistants
  • Approved Data Types: Public, Level 1, FERPA
  • Support: DoIT support – AI Tools

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