New AI Committee is strengthening UCLA’s AI readiness
As artificial intelligence continues to accelerate across higher education, UCLA is taking deliberate steps to ensure its approach remains strategic, coordinated, and aligned with long-term institutional priorities and voices. The AI Committee, established in December 2025, serves as a central governance and coordination body designed to connect campus innovators, increase visibility into AI activity, and build the structures necessary for responsible and sustainable adoption.
The committee is co-chaired by Lucy Avetisyan, Associate Vice Chancellor and Chief Information Officer, and Eleazar Eskin, Professor and Chair, UCLA Computational Medicine and Executive Director of DataX. Together, in partnership with colleagues across the university, they are helping ensure that UCLA’s approach to AI reflects both its spirit of innovation and its commitment to academic excellence, collaboration, and institutional stewardship.
In keeping with UCLA’s culture of shared governance, the committee’s mandate is to enable, support, and align the impactful work already emerging across the university. Faculty, researchers, administrative teams, and students are actively exploring AI tools and methodologies in meaningful ways across campus. The committee helps ensure these efforts advance within a framework that promotes collaboration, safeguards the institution, and positions UCLA for long-term success.
The committee’s work is grounded in five strategic focus areas that collectively strengthen UCLA’s institutional readiness:
- AI governance and policy development — Establishing guiding principles, governance structures, and policy recommendations that promote ethical, transparent, and responsible AI use.
- AI integration across campus — Creating visibility into AI initiatives across academic, administrative, and research domains to reduce duplication and encourage shared learning.
- AI security, risk, and compliance — Evaluating emerging tools through the lens of privacy, security, and institutional risk management.
- Institutional innovation and strategic alignment — Identifying opportunities where AI can advance operational excellence, research collaboration, and student success.
- Continuous learning and community engagement — Supporting AI literacy and helping the campus community understand emerging capabilities and implications.
The committee is currently refining UCLA’s campus AI strategy and roadmap through a shared governance process that includes leadership groups and Senate partners. Key activities include reviewing alignment with UC systemwide recommendations, developing a campuswide AI inventory, and identifying opportunities for cross-campus collaboration and operational innovation. While many AI initiatives are already underway across UCLA, new and refined priorities emerging from the roadmap effort are expected to begin operationalization this summer.
AI will continue to evolve rapidly, and UCLA is committed to evolving thoughtfully alongside it, setting a standard for how a great university meets a moment of change. By connecting innovators, strengthening governance, and aligning AI activity with institutional priorities, the AI Committee is helping build a foundation for responsible, strategic, and future-ready AI adoption that supports UCLA’s mission of teaching, research, and public service for years to come.
Over the past several months, the One IT program has engaged more than 176 participants across 12 working groups, representing a broad cross-section of the UCLA community, including faculty, staff, and students. This effort reflects a highly collaborative partnership across campus, bringing together perspectives from academic and administrative units to ensure a comprehensive and inclusive approach.
The working groups were organized around key facets of UCLA’s IT ecosystem and were charged with evaluating current-state capabilities, experiences, services, and operating models; identifying pain points, risks, duplication, fragmentation, and opportunities; and recommending actionable improvements to governance, service delivery, prioritization, resource alignment, and future investments. Through collaboration, discussion, analysis, and stakeholder engagement, the groups developed insights, observations, and recommendations intended to help inform UCLA’s future-state IT operating model and identify opportunities for greater alignment, effectiveness, and sustainability.
A critical foundation of this work was the discovery data gathered by IT Unit Leads and teams across the institution. This discovery effort captured detailed information about current systems, services, staffing structures, processes, operational challenges, and service delivery models across UCLA’s distributed IT landscape. The discovery data informed the working group process and served as a foundational input for discussions, analysis, and recommendations across all 12 working groups.
The working groups have now completed and submitted their final reports and recommendations. As the program moves into the next phase, these outputs will be shared through a governance review process with campus leaders and stakeholder groups to help validate findings, align priorities, and inform future planning activities.
Together, the discovery work, working group findings, and governance review will complete the Discovery phase of the One IT program and inform the next phase of work, Design. In Design, the future-state operating models, organizational considerations, governance structures, and service delivery approaches will be evaluated and refined in support of UCLA’s mission of teaching, research, and service.
Protecting UCLA’s technology environment remains a priority as the university continues to expand its digital capabilities. The closeout of the Asset & Data Visibility project this spring marked an important milestone in enhancing the university’s ability to track and manage technology assets. With the transition of support to operational teams, partnership continues with campus units to maintain compliance with IT asset requirements while advancing efforts to incorporate cloud-hosted assets. This effort ensures the central campus repository remains a complete and trusted system of record for all IT assets.
The Network Unification program continues to make meaningful progress as efforts advance across the core infrastructure build and preparations for pilot migrations.
Work is underway to establish the foundation of UCLA’s future network, including enhancements to the network backbone to support 400G line-rate connectivity, an upgrade from the current 100G capacity, that will enable significantly faster network performance. The program is also strengthening security by introducing next-generation firewall protections at the network edge, capabilities that do not exist today, while continuing to increase bandwidth and modernize the core network to ensure reliable wired and wireless connectivity across campus. Completion of the core infrastructure build is a critical milestone that will enable pilot and phased migrations across campus, resulting in faster and more reliable connectivity, improved support for teaching, learning, and research, and enhanced security protections for UCLA systems and data.
At the same time, advanced preparation activities for July pilot migrations are underway that will allow us to prepare and test the campus network roll out before scaling to the broader campus. These efforts include conducting discovery sessions with pilot stakeholders, addressing site readiness requirements, and initiating device registration testing in a controlled environment to help ensure a smooth transition. Communications efforts are also ramping up to keep campus partners informed and prepared for upcoming changes.
In addition, the program website has been refreshed to provide the campus community with clearer updates, resources, and information about the program’s progress.
Together, these efforts support the vision of delivering a more resilient, scalable, and secure network that meets UCLA’s evolving needs.
UCLA's Digital Accessibility program has moved from initial launch into active implementation. UC Policy IMT-1300 took effect April 24, 2026, and the campus's compliance obligations under ADA Title II and Section 504 are well underway.
To support the campus community in taking action, the Digital Accessibility Hub offers guidance, tools, training, and clear pathways for every role, whether you own a website, manage documents, teach with digital content, or are involved in technology purchasing. The hub's Get Help page connects you to the right resource based on what you own or manage.
The Digital Accessibility Steering Committee provides strategic direction and institutional oversight. Six Action Teams are driving domain-specific work across web content, applications, academic and course content, health, research, and procurement. Together, these efforts are building a more consistent, sustainable approach to digital accessibility across UCLA.
Questions not answered in the hub, or interested in contributing to this work? Use this form to reach the Steering Committee.
The Bruin Financial Aid (BFA) program continues to strengthen the systems and processes that support students throughout their financial aid journey at UCLA.
Current aid-year disbursements remain on track, with teams across Digital & Technology Services, Student Affairs IT, Financial Aid Offices, and campus partners focused on readiness for the summer 2026 awarding cycle.
As shared in recent leadership communications, UCLA is actively reconfiguring systems, assessing impacts, and developing contingency plans in response to new federal financial aid requirements introduced under the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) legislation. This effort requires significant time and coordination across financial aid, technical, reporting, and communications teams, as OBBB changes how students are awarded federal aid and creates downstream impacts for system configuration, reporting, and student-facing communications.
Because UCLA’s new aid year begins in summer, these changes intersect directly with active summer award and disbursement processes, including institutional aid managed by individual departments. Teams are working through the operational and technical adjustments needed to maintain continuity, minimize student disruption, and prepare for the next aid cycle.
In parallel, the BFA program continues to mature its long-term operating model by refining support workflows, strengthening cross-campus coordination, and improving transparency around system enhancements. The Bruin Financial Aid Partners Forum remains a key channel for keeping campus stakeholders informed, aligned, and engaged as the program responds to current needs and emerging requirements.