Campus Technology Insider Podcast February 2025
Rhea Kelly 08:41
I thought it was interesting that this year's study touched on how institutions are accommodating new AI-related costs. Could you talk more about what's going on there?
Jenay Robert 08:51
Sure, and this was, again, something that came out of discussions with members, attending events, just kind of keeping my ear to the ground. We touched on it a little bit in the last survey last year, where we asked about if institutions were partnering with third parties, for example, to help fund pilots or whatever initiatives they had going on. We wanted to get a little bit more clarity on that this year. So first, important to comment on this, about a third of respondents said that their institution is not accommodating new AI-related costs at all. And over 40%, speaking of the don't, the don't know result, over 40% said they don't know how their institution is accommodating new AI-related costs. And what that says to me is that either budgetary impacts are not very significant across higher ed right now, or maybe they are, but they're not really being talked about widely. So that's something that perhaps institutions individually can dig into, kind of think about, what are the impacts, and how are we accommodating them, and are we raising awareness across the institution about budget that maybe is or is not available for this type of work. So for those respondents who said that their institution is accommodating new AI-related costs, a little over half of them said that it was primarily from reallocating budget previously spent on other things. And then we asked the survey respondents to describe what those sources were in the open-ended comments. So we know that there are things like discretionary funds, flexible technology budgets, innovation budgets. So I think it's, what, for the most part, what I'm seeing is that there's a little bit of shuffling in terms of flexible monies that they can apply to exploring AI-related costs. And then finally, in 2024, 63% of executive leaders said they weren't working with anybody to help fund AI-related costs. But in 2025 that number dropped to 56% of executive respondents. And the reason we're focusing on executives here is because we think that they're probably the best place to understand what's happening with those financial partnerships at their institutions. So seeing, seeing the, that number drop, in terms of people who aren't working with third parties, that certainly points to some increase in those types of partnerships.
Rhea Kelly 11:22
It's kind of interesting that AI costs would be seen as something special, like needing, you know, flex funds or whatever, and not just part of, say, the cost of your learning tools. You know, like they haven't quite become part of what, what is just considered your normal array of tools. Is that, do you get that sense?
Jenay Robert 11:40
Yeah. I mean, I think it's, if you kind of think about being on the ground in procurement or something like that, it's a question of, do we need to switch out a new tool? Do we need to turn on a new feature? And so that, that would require at least some shuffling in the budget. And so I think it makes sense in that way, that that's what we're hearing from institutions, that they're not necessarily, for the most part, going out and trying to get new money, but that they're kind of just reallocating — well, we used to subscribe to this tool, and now we're going to kind of shift over this way. But I think that where you might see needing new money is if you really want to be intentional about evaluating new tools, about bringing in new AI literacy programs, for example, training for faculty, you're either going to have to eliminate something else that's been important up until this point, or you're going to have to try to find some new money to support that. And I think we see this in the cases of institutions who are, for example, hiring new executive leaders or hiring new staff. That money certainly has to come from somewhere.