C A S E S T U D Y
clear that they want to invest in their futures, and they want to invest correctly. Education, though, isn ' t the only thing people come to a university for. They come for personal growth and interaction. How do we take not just the education side, but also the personal side, and make sure that it is futureproofed from technology.
The Internet changed the way in which we operate. If you go all the way back in history, and you think about the Luddites and the weaving machines and the way it changed the way in which milling happened, we ' re going to see another technology come around, and hopefully what it will do is enhance the way in which we operate, rather than remove the way in which we operate.
Now, some roles and responsibilities will change, but we ' re quite clear about embracing Artificial Intelligence and teaching people how to use it properly and how to know when to trust or not to trust will be a significant driver for universities going forward. The art of creating knowledge, rather than the art of just being told an answer, will be significantly different, and I think that ' s where we will need to change the way in which we educate.
What I ' m saying now is that we can ' t stop AI, and we had a lot of conversations around what type of adoptor we want to be. Do we want to just be slowly drifting into it and just bumbling our way through AI with no real strategy, which I don’ t think is a really good idea for a leading university that is at the forefront of innovation. Do we want to take what is already out there, but tweak it a little bit, which would give us a bit of competitive advantage for a short period of time, but doesn ' t add any uniqueness to why you would come to Bristol. Or do we want to be bold? Part of our strategy is what we
Bristol Digital Futures Institutes, a community of University of Bristol academics and external partners with a shared mission: digital innovation for a better future call Bold Bristolian. And do we want to be that Bold Bristolian who is going to turn around and say we ' re going to embrace AI, we’ re going to use it in our education. We ' re going to build our own models to support our students that is actually better than what anybody else is doing. Let ' s take that ability to be a world-leading university with an open mind to how we educate and change our business model.
How do you see it all moving forward and where do you see the University of Bristol ' s place in moving forward with AI and research?
The reason the UK Government entrusted Bristol with the Isambard-AI, which is £ 258 million pounds worth of supercomputer, is because we were able to demonstrate that we ' ve taken things like cybersecurity and innovation absolutely seriously. It was quantifiable. We also have the best academics in the world working for us, which really helps when you ' re trying to get credibility. We are so lucky to have a fantastic workforce, clear vision and leadership through our Leadership University Executive team under Evelyn ' s [ Welch, Vice-Chancellor and President ] leadership, and then we have clear governance, clear strategy. We are able to set ourselves out as a world leader in it, which is exactly where we should be.
You ' re always going to see us pushing the boundaries of everything that we do. The reality is we still have to operate this technology. To operate this tech, we still have to work with all of our strategic partners and suppliers to understand their supply chain and what they ' re doing in their world, so that we can find ways in which we can take that in and operate it. What I love about what I have been doing with Broadcom, is that they don ' t build me products so that I can then find a problem to fix. What I do is, I turn around saying,‘ Here ' s the business problems I have’, and then they say,‘ This is how we can resolve them for you’. It ' s a really different way around.
When you say, where do you think it ' s going to go, how long is a piece of string? Let ' s never stop imagining. I ' m trying to build platforms now for business cases yet to be imagined. For example, how can we make sure that we can do full Virtual Reality and 3D reality? One of the aspirations I ' ve always had for our universities is to be able to work with young adults anywhere in the world, where as long as they ' ve got a device, they can connect to it and they feel that they ' re in the lab. They feel part of the actual Virtual Reality. I think that ' d be something fantastic – opening up education to everybody. That ' s what I ' m trying to do. ✓
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