Beyond the Hype: Ethical, High-Impact Implementation of AI in Colleges and Universities

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the focus of many headlines and debates in higher education. But separating the hype from reality can be difficult for colleges and universities navigating strategic and operational challenges while leveraging the opportunities that AI poses.

Excelencia in Education hosted a webinar to discuss responsible, high-impact AI adoption for a wide audience of practitioners and institutional leaders. The discussion focused on Long Beach City College (LBCC)'s intentional and campus-wide AI implementation in partnership with AQL Labs.

To address the questions leaders and practitioners have about AI, Excelencia asked LBCC and AQL Labs to share insights on what responsible implementation looks like, where to begin, and how to build capacity for institutions seeking to more intentionally serve Latino, and all, students using AI in today's rapidly evolving landscape.

There are at least three critical questions that campus leaders need to ask as they evaluate AI strategies, use cases, and implementation:

Our approach to responsible AI implementation is grounded in equity and guided by both our institutional mission and strategic priorities. Recently, the college adopted a new institutional priority to strengthen capacity for the ethical, inclusive, effective, and equity-centered use of emerging technologies to support teaching, learning, workforce readiness, and operational efficiency. This priority serves as an important lens through which we evaluate opportunities and make decisions.

Rather than viewing AI as a strategy or a standalone technology initiative, we intentionally use it as a tool to advance the goals and values articulated in the LBCC Strategic Plan. For us, responsible AI implementation means asking how these technologies can help advance our institutional mission by improving student success, closing equity gaps, expanding access to opportunity, and strengthening institutional effectiveness, particularly for students and communities that have historically been underserved by higher education.

As represented in the Seal of Excelencia framework, leadership is key to institutional transformation. That said, successful AI implementation will require advocacy and enactment by both senior and junior members of a campus's administrative and academic leadership. This is mirrored in the audience for our recent webinar with Excelencia and LBCC: 67% of attendees were mid- or senior-level campus staff, and 63% worked in executive leadership or administration/operations.

LBCC is to be commended for its open dialogue and internal debates within the senior leadership team, as well as its ability to come together and champion an agreed-upon institutional strategy. Their thoughtful, iterative engagement with different leaders and groups drives micro-adjustments to the strategy as they learn and adapt in real time. Ultimately, Superintendent-President Muñoz, the Board of Trustees, numerous faculty leaders, and the college's executive leadership have seized an opportunity to define how they want to integrate AI to further the college's student success goals.

Another important capacity is to leverage existing working groups, or creation of new ones, that are already engaged in AI, innovation, teaching and learning, workforce development, or operational improvement efforts. These groups bring together leaders from across the institution — faculty, staff, and administrators — helping to build awareness, surface opportunities, and cultivate champions beyond the senior leadership level, while supporting a coordinated AI learning and engagement ecosystem.

LBCC has intentionally engaged these groups throughout the strategy development process, rather than waiting until the AI strategy is fully completed. This approach has allowed the college to simultaneously develop strategy, build capacity, gather feedback, and foster campus-wide ownership of the work. Importantly, the development of an institutional AI strategy has not slowed or halted grassroots AI efforts already underway across campus. Instead, those faculty- and staff-led innovations have informed the strategy, helped identify emerging opportunities, and surfaced champions who can help advance the work.

"The strategy development process itself has become an important vehicle for engagement, learning, and leadership development across the institution."

— Long Beach City College

The single most important step an institution can take is to align on a set of high-priority AI use cases anchored to the institution's success strategy. Careful deliberation is essential, but so is actual decision-making and actions that build proficiency and capability in implementing AI responsibly. We have focused on helping institutions like LBCC thoughtfully narrow down high-priority use cases to pursue deeper implementation through the development of a multi-year campus AI strategy. We think of two criteria to help the institution's leadership prioritize: 1) the depth and scale of institutional impact, and 2) time to impact.

By focusing on a limited set of high-priority use cases, we believe an institution can unlock opportunities to build transparency, surface valuable learning gained during implementation, and fulfill expectations for rigor in measuring and tracking outcomes.

While developing an institutional AI strategy requires identifying and prioritizing a focused set of high-impact use cases, it is equally important to take the pulse of the institution and understand where faculty, staff, and students are already experimenting, building AI literacy, engaging in faculty-led pedagogical discussions, and innovating outside of the formal use cases connected to that strategy.

Identifying these smaller pockets of innovation and campus leadership can help institutions surface promising practices, better understand campus needs, and cultivate and support champions who can help advance the work. An effective institutional roadmap should balance intentional prioritization with ongoing efforts to listen, learn from, and celebrate the innovative work already emerging across campus.

We are still working through this question. However, several deliberate steps helped move the college from isolated experimentation toward institutional alignment.

First, the LBCC Board of Trustees helped catalyze this work through the adoption of new Board policies and administrative procedures related to artificial intelligence. Together with the LBCC Strategic Plan, these governance actions established a clear foundation for the development of the college's AI strategy and future implementation efforts.

Second, leadership made a visible commitment to AI as an institutional priority while investing in capacity building. Faculty, staff, and administrators have been supported in attending professional development opportunities, sharing promising practices, and participating in AI-focused workgroups and communities of practice.

Third, LBCC has intentionally engaged stakeholders throughout the strategy development process — cabinet members, governance groups, faculty, staff, and administrators — and is now developing a more intentional strategy to partner with students in shaping the direction of this work.

By creating space for learning, dialogue, and shared problem solving, LBCC has focused on building understanding and readiness rather than mandating adoption. While the work continues to evolve, these steps have helped LBCC move from experimentation toward greater alignment, shared ownership, and a stronger foundation for implementation.

It is a national imperative for colleges and universities to learn alongside one another and cross-pollinate effective solutions for recurring challenges related to AI adoption and governance. Certainly, that is a goal AQL Labs and LBCC share in our collaboration. Some of those shared problems include ensuring equitable access to reliable AI tools — particularly for institutions without significant research capacity or sophisticated technology infrastructure — greater predictability in the campus-wide economics of AI use, and broader, more public definition and at-scale implementation of high-impact use cases with measurable results.

Partnerships, peer learning, and communities of practice are central to our approach to innovation and institutional change. Consistent with the college's Strategic Plan, meaningful progress is strengthened when students, faculty, staff, administrators, community partners, and peer institutions have opportunities to learn from one another, share promising practices, and collectively address challenges. Whether the focus is AI or another institutional priority, this type of engagement helps build trust, strengthen capacity, cultivate stakeholder support, and ultimately improve student success and institutional effectiveness as the college navigates change.

LBCC, through its partnership with AQL Labs, demonstrates what is possible when it comes to institution-wide alignment and capacity building for responsible AI implementation that delivers for Latino students while benefiting the entire student community. As more colleges and universities explore AI, leveraging emerging technologies must involve shared responsibility for scaling data-informed practices alongside protections.

This example of leadership and partnership highlights the broader need for institutions to connect, share promising practices, and engage in the collective work of shaping AI to serve all students. As a partner, Excelencia remains committed to identifying, elevating, and sharing what works when it comes to using AI for Latino, and all, student success — documenting emerging practices (such as in Examples of Excelencia) and fostering peer learning to help institutions leverage AI in ways that are student-centered, evidence-based, and focused on continuous improvement in outcomes.

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