Questions by Camille Perlman
If you start a conversation about AI, be prepared for a lively one. It seems that most everyone has feelings about it, and they are more than happy to share them. One point everyone agrees on is that AI currently has many positive effects on the lives of individuals, and it will have more in the future. Campus housing operations will be affected in ways that are yet to be known. Will AI completely replace the human touch in the profession? Probably not, but it is poised to help perform various time-demanding tasks and provide insight into the issues it is asked to study.
Here to talk about how AI has shaped both their personal work tasks and their department’s processes are Kirsten Carrier, assistant dean of campus life and director of residence life at Elon University in North Carolina; Angela Storck, associate director of housing operations at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs; Daniel Laub, housing systems analyst at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and Megan Chibanga, executive director of residence life and student housing at The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
In what ways are you, individually, using AI and AI-related resources in your work?
Kirsten Carrier: I’ve used AI almost daily over the past couple of years, mostly in ways that enhance my everyday work. I’ve used it to write formal remarks (adding in some AI-created spoken word or funny jokes occasionally), draft a budget proposal (it’s great at putting the outline together before you edit for details), design a conference proposal, answer media inquiries and complicated emails, create presentations and infographics on Canva, review important emails for clarity and tone, draft policies, and create HTML code and case studies. I’ve also personally used it to write cards, plan trip itineraries, find a recipe, and create fun images for craft projects.
Angela Storck: I use the ChatGPT extension in Chrome when I am having a block on how to start a project or paper. I can type in a detailed prompt and get some ideas for jumping-off points. I don’t use the information I see verbatim, but it will provide good insights to help guide further research. It increases my creativity so I can approach a project with more enthusiasm and efficiency.
Daniel Laub: I use AI for drafting emails, refactoring code, simplifying lengthy documents, and understanding new technologies. It helps create icons and images for presentations and can analyze engagement survey trends by efficiently aggregating open-ended questions. I'm also an administrator for our AI bot from Ivy, which we've named Storkie (gender neutral), by customizing responses, uploading documents, and performing audits. My observation is that AI reduces repetitive tasks and optimizes data and its architecture; it is like a prosthetic that I use to do things that are hard or that I don't love doing, which frees up time for improving processes or concentrating on work that's impactful to the department and meaningful to me.
Megan Chibanga: I have come to find a lot of value in using AI technology to assist in my work, and in two areas in particular it has been quite helpful. The first has been developing position materials and interview questions that really dig into understanding a candidate’s qualifications for the job we’ve posted. I am able to refine and test questions, reorder an interview for flow and fit, and use the tool as a way to do the work more efficiently and ultimately with a better outcome. The second area has been synthesizing information to respond to upset parents and families. As departments, many of our actions or decisions require some explanation even under the best circumstances. AI resources help me respond in much more compassionate and empathetic ways, and this provides a more clear and robust explanation of the situation.
Is your department or campus using AI and AI-related resources to do its work? What does that look like?
Carrier: Yes, I’d say we’re using AI primarily in creative content ways. We generate a lot of social media captions, create images and logos for flyers and advertisements, review and rewrite email content for clarity, and generate catchy program ideas or titles. We’ve also used it to find trends in datasets and played with it as a meeting notetaker, but those uses have been limited so far. We also launched (with admittedly limited success) an AI-informed chat feature within our housing portal that students can consult if they have questions, but this is also actively monitored by staff to ensure quality. We’ve integrated some AI topics into professional and student staff training this past year and have found that our students excel at creating bulletin board content, programming ideas, and flyers.
Storck: We don’t use AI in any organized way to achieve specific work goals, but staff who struggle with writing sometimes use ChatGPT to craft professional-sounding emails. It increases efficiency and ensures that the emails are written with appropriate grammar. I was skeptical about this at first, but anything that can help a staff member in communicating information that is accurate and grammatically correct is okay with me.
Laub: Our campus is cautiously embracing AI, using bots like Storkie for FAQs and Google’s Gemini for productivity and insights. Our housing department will use AI as a fount for designing the residential curriculum, recognizing key performance indicators, and measuring success. A campus-wide AI community has subgroups for teaching and learning, workplace productivity, research and special interests, and application development. Based on my review of the questions asked of Storkie, I embrace a future of agentic AI or personal assistants whose structured implementation across campus will support staff collaboration and foster students' success.
Chibanga: We have been toying with the idea of using AI to help us develop a comprehensive FAQ for our department website and online resources. We’ve also been using AI tools to help refine our housing contract by improving the readability and clarity. So far, as a department, we haven’t delved into using AI tools at that level, but most folks in our department are using it on a regular basis to assist them in their roles.
Do you think the idea that housing and student affairs are so human-focused affects your professional opinion about using AI in the workplace? In what ways?
Carrier: The nature of much of our work, especially at a mid-size private residential university, will inherently be in-person via meetings, phone calls, and discussions. Students and families want that in-person, caring interaction especially as they are physically living in our communities. I certainly view AI as part of my toolkit right now and not as any kind of existential threat to our continued existence as a field. We encourage our staff to use all available resources to best serve students while making the best use of their time, so our staff are all dabbling with AI integration in various ways.
Storck: To some extent, yes. My biggest concern about AI is that it takes away a specific skill set from our students and staff. If a staff member never needs to write an academic paper or a highly structured communication piece, they lose a valuable learning experience that can benefit them in other endeavors. That said, in the world we are moving to, is that experience still necessary? I am reminded of a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where a species’ home world was so reliant on an AI machine that the inhabitants had no idea how to do anything themselves. The machine did everything, and when they had a question they simply asked the machine. Google anyone? When that machine started to fail, the citizens were lost without it. I worry that this is the direction AI will take us in the far future and that human beings will continue to essentially de-evolve.
Laub: In more than 20 years of housing work, I've noticed that we have a spectrum of housing staff whose experience ranges from "comfortable in databases" to "I'm organizing a flash mob for staff appreciation day and am trying to get my entire floor to uniquely participate." I'm on the end of “feels comfortable in databases,” so it's a natural evolution to adopt AI in my work. I was impressed by a presentation by Dr. Martin Hilbert at UCTech 2024, where he discussed how AI bots are being inserted in suicide hotlines because they are more patient, thoughtful, and compassionate than the responder might think to be. This demonstrates how AI can be used as an assistant for bettering the work of human-focused interactions. AI complements human-focused work by handling data-heavy or disliked tasks, allowing staff to focus on the critical work of creating safe, welcoming, and engaging communities that our residents call home.
Chibanga: This is an interesting question. Most of the uses we’ve found for AI have been as a supplement to our abilities as humans, and not as a replacement. I also think that AI has a unique capability to improve efficiencies, which can lighten some of the mental load that is required of the staff because our work is so human-focused. By outsourcing some tasks to AI, we are able to provide more time and attention to the very human elements of our work – or at least that’s how I feel about it.
What are some tasks or responsibilities that AI may have a dramatic impact on in the near future?
Carrier: Some of our housing software companies could incorporate AI in meaningful ways to help us with occupancy forecasting, auto-updating dates from one academic year to the next to keep our processes on track, and creating advertising to go along with each process. I’m really looking forward to having AI automatically draft summaries of long emails from families and give me a quick draft reply to edit as a response. We’re already seeing candidates use AI in drafting cover letters, so how we weigh the cover letter in a selection process has already changed. AI excels at predicting what’s next and learning from what’s happened, so I do think many cyclical functions of residence life will be quickly aided by AI efficiencies.
Storck: AI already has a dramatic impact on the learning (or not learning) of students at many levels, from grade school through post-secondary education. As AI gets smarter, the tools to detect AI must also get smarter. Using AI to make decisions for an organization makes sense because it can analyze and process multiple datapoints in a short amount of time. AI machines have already begun taking jobs in the auto manufacturing and fast food industries. I can see it taking a large role in any situation where specific human understanding, curiosity, and empathy are deemed unnecessary or irrelevant to the task.
Laub: AI is revolutionizing all disciplines, and in massively dramatic ways, and I would invert the question by asking which industries will NOT be impacted by the adoption of AI. This technology will have a dramatic impact when it can respond to questions like “What do you need help with?” and “What do you dislike doing?” You can create a funk song about homesickness or a country song about your roommates and their emotional support dog incessantly barking without ever writing lyrics or knowing how to carry a melody or play a bar (thanks, Suno). You can develop imaginative pictures that have never existed for presentations (thanks, Dall-E). You can take a photo of your refrigerator and ask a bot to develop recipes for a meal based on what's in the photo (thanks, ChatGPT). You can create a life coach to help formulate and achieve some goals or find a Character AI to help with some counseling considerations. You can have AI generate a schedule for your students and staff to balance their work/life experience or create a custom itinerary with endless ideas for an adventurous time away. The opportunities are only as endless as your imagination.
Chibanga: I think AI could be an exceptional resource for consistency in customer service inquiries. There are many reasons that companies heavily utilize chatbots that rely on AI-generated information to respond to general inquiries. Think about the amount of time some of our front line folks at desks and phones spend responding to easily answerable inquires; I think AI could be a big player in these spaces. I also think we could use AI in data and assessment spaces. The analytical capacity of AI is a really robust resource, so being able to ask questions about some datasets that we already have could be a really powerful tool.
What’s one piece of advice you would offer colleagues about using AI moving forward?
Carrier: Take it for a test drive! I’ve found that sitting with colleagues and brainstorming how you might use it together, practically, in your specific daily work is really helpful. I have a running list of ways to use AI that I keep updating as I learn more about how colleagues have integrated it into their work. Sometimes I forget that AI is available, and I go into autopilot on some tasks, so I find the ongoing list helpful to remember so that I can put it to use.
And, of course, I had to ask AI this question (Microsoft’s Copilot specifically), and it wisely says, “As a student affairs and residence life professional, one piece of advice I would offer colleagues about using AI moving forward is to embrace AI as a tool for enhancing student engagement and support.”
Storck: The increasing use of AI seems inevitable, but I would encourage my colleagues to remember the why of what we do. AI cannot teach that. Curiosity is an intrinsically human trait . . . for now. Use AI where it is beneficial, but don’t neglect the humanity of our profession.
Here is an example of ChatGPT AI Extension that includes the answer you would receive if you plug the question “What are some tasks and responsibilities that AI may have a dramatic impact on in the near future?” into ChatGPT. Several of the questions posed were personal viewpoint questions, which AI did not have great answers for (personal point of view counts for something). For this question, though, AI provided a much more thought-out and interesting answer than I did. It is the perfect example of how AI can be used to answer questions that don’t require a humanistic viewpoint.
When asked “What are some tasks or responsibilities that you could see AI having a dramatic impact on in the near future?” the AI response was “There are a number of areas where AI could have a significant impact in the near future,” followed by several detailed examples such as the following: “Customer service and support: AI chatbots and virtual assistants are already being used to handle many routine customer inquiries and tasks, freeing up human agents to focus on more complex issues” and “Predictive analytics and forecasting: AI models can analyze large datasets to identify patterns and make accurate predictions about things like customer behavior, market trends, and equipment maintenance.”
Of course, the specific impact of AI will depend on continued advancements in the technology as well as how it is implemented and regulated. But these are some of the key areas where I expect to see significant AI-driven transformation in the coming years.
Laub: Emphasis: Use AI actively and experiment to improve your skills and personalize your experience.
Caution: Verify results for accuracy and context with an understanding of the “P” on your GPT model. Avoid sharing sensitive or campus proprietary data. While AI offers infinite empathy, it's devoid of true empathy and requires critical oversight to ensure ethical and effective use.
Chibanga: It’s not going away, so don’t be Blockbuster.
Camille Perlman is the managing editor of Talking Stick.
