Hundreds of colleagues paving the way for AI at Oxford

How can Oxford’s people use AI in their day jobs? To answer this question, the Generative AI Enterprise Licence Pilot team has given 250 ChatGPT Enterprise licences to colleagues in various roles across the collegiate University, with another 300 licences for Microsoft Copilot to be rolled out soon. This pilot aims to explore the various ways in which people can use premium (paid for) enterprise versions of AI tools to simplify their work and be more productive. Through this, the AI and Machine Learning Competency Centre, part of the Digital Transformation programme, will help the University to decide how it can best implement and embrace these technologies. 

Colleagues in the ChatGPT Enterprise pilot cohort have already started using the technology in their day-to-day work and have been taking part in trainings to get to know the tool. On Thursday 6 June, the ChatGPT cohort had the chance to gather in-person for the first time at a networking and training event held at Worcester College. In-person attendees heard from Professor Anne Trefethen, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for People and Digital, who thanked colleagues for helping to pave the way for Oxford’s future engagement with this bleeding-edge technology. 

Alwyn Collinson, Head of Competency Centres, also spoke on the uptake of the pilot licences, sharing the news of the enthusiasm colleagues showed to take part in the programme. He described how colleagues had responded wholeheartedly to being able to get hands-on with ChatGPT with twice the number of applicants as there are available licences and colleagues from over 60 teams across a range of colleges, departments and all divisions now enrolled. With this broad scope of users from across the collegiate University, the pilot will be able to build a comprehensive picture of how Generative AI tools can be applied in various roles through the assistance of crucial user feedback. 

A key benefit of these pilot trainings is the opportunity to engage with OpenAI representatives. Cohort members have been receiving live training from Oxford’s assigned customer success manager, dialling in from New York City to offer personalised introductory training to the company and platform. The in-person session also gave attendees the chance to interact with 3 representatives from OpenAI’s London office: Andy Brown, Jayna Devani and James Donovan. The cohort had plenty of questions for OpenAI, with much discussion around data security, custom bot creation and utilisation, where ChatGPT is getting its information, and how AI detection software works. This training session made it clear that there is still a lot for the cohort to explore with this technology and much that they can learn from each other as they continue their journey. 

So far, the cohort has been using ChatGPT Enterprise in a variety of ways. Colleagues have been exploring how to create custom GPTs, customised spaces where users can use ChatGPT with shared documents or custom instructions, as well as creating posters using the DALL-E 3 image generation model available in premium versions of ChatGPT. 

Celine Rich-Darley from Saïd Business School told us how she’s been applying the technology in her role: 

As a Prospect Research Manager, I gather and synthesise information from a variety of sources to create detailed briefings and reports for the fundraising team at Saïd Business School. I frequently use LinkedIn. Reformatting this information into a briefing format is a time-consuming task. However, using ChatGPT-4o reformatting goes much more quickly, and after some prompt engineering experiments, I find this prompt works the best: 

‘Bullet point list with the company, job title, dates of employment and no years of service’ 

followed by pasting in all the LinkedIn biographical info jumble of words. Then, hey presto, I get my list nicely formatted! 

Gavin Thomas from the Digital Innovation team has also been using ChatGPT to implement streamlined processes: 

The Digital Innovation team is working with the IT Services Communications team to explore if AI can reduce the administrative effort for the IT Services 2024 Staff Day. Inevitably people have questions… multiply by 300 attendees and that can be a lot of effort to answer each one, leading up to the event and on the day when there are plenty of other things to organise. Surely AI can help? We are using ChatGPT-4o to prototype a bot to answer FAQs on venue, menu, agenda, etc and considering the best delivery channel for simple and secure IT Services staff access.

As the pilots continue, further capabilities will be unlocked, and more questions answered. We will continue to share their progress and hear how AI is being adopted in Oxford. 

If you’re interested in using Generative AI tools in your work, contact the AI and Machine Learning Competency Centre who can discuss the tools available to you and how best to use them.