The shift is designed to deliver a more responsive, intuitive, and streamlined experience for faculty, staff, and students submitting IT service requests or reporting technical issues.

This edition of AI Lightning Talks brings together campus leaders to share short examples of how AI shows up in their day-to-day work. The one-hour virtual session focuses on concrete experiences and reflections, not prescriptions, across areas like communication, decision-making, and local experimentation. Tuesday, Feb. 3, from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. CT. Live captions will be available, and all faculty and staff are welcome.

Custom GPTs in ChatGPT Edu allow faculty and staff to create reusable, task-focused AI assistants. External sharing is now available, making it possible to share a custom GPT beyond the university environment. This article explains what custom GPTs are, how sharing works, and what to review before making one available more broadly.

January offers an opportunity to start fresh and improve habits that keep our university secure. By using strong passwords, multi-factor authentication, and good credential hygiene, we can help protect everything we do at the university.

Brad Rohrer, vice president for information technology and chief academic and research information officer at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, has been named chief information officer and associate vice president at the University of Iowa. He will begin on Feb. 23.

Choosing between Teams Premium and Microsoft 365 Copilot in meetings depends on what happens after the meeting ends. This comparison explains when recap features are enough and when broader Copilot access makes more sense for follow-up work in Word, Outlook, Excel, and PowerPoint.

AI tends to help most when it replaces setup work, such as moving from a blank page to a first draft or basic structure. It’s less helpful when accuracy, verification, or judgment are the main task, because time saved drafting can disappear during review. This piece outlines a simple way to decide when AI is likely to help and when it may add extra steps.

The University of Iowa is launching a pilot for an AI tool that will allow access to multiple models. Iowa's AI Gateway is a pilot that allows us to test a secure, centrally managed AI workspace for teaching, research, and administrative work. The pilot runs from early February through April 2026, is no cost, and is open to up to 250 faculty and staff. Participants will use the tool during the pilot period and share feedback on where it helps and where it doesn’t.

ITS’s AI Support Team looks back on 2025’s rapid AI changes and highlights what they focused on: building AI literacy (including HawkAI courses), expanding training for enterprise tools (Copilot, prompting, Copilot Agents, and ChatGPT Edu), and helping Copilot for Microsoft 365 move from pilot to a full production service. The update also previews what’s next, continued chatbot pilots plus new efforts like a multi-model pilot and the Iowa AI Gateway, while inviting campus feedback and ideas.

This article explains five common “prompt traps” that can produce confident but unreliable outputs. Like hidden assumptions, demanding certainty, missing context, asking AI to “verify” facts it can’t check, or handing AI decisions that should stay with people. It offers safer prompt alternatives and a quick pre-submit checklist to help users get more accurate, responsible results in tools such as ChatGPT Edu and Copilot.