As Artificial Intelligence (AI) transforms higher education, the University of Hawaiʻi is launching a new systemwide office to meet the challenge and establish itself as a national leader. The UH Office of Academic Technology and Innovation (OATI) will guide the integration of emerging technologies and AI across all 10 campuses, serving as the hub for strategy, implementation and oversight in teaching, learning and operations.

Housed within the Office of the UH President, the office will be overseen by Ina Wanca, the UH Chief Academic Technology Innovation Officer. Wanca will work closely with campus leaders, ITS and the Institutional Research and Analysis Office and serve as the primary liaison between academic leadership and ITS.

OATI will support the consolidation and alignment of academic technology, advance AI adoption and transformative initiatives across the system and establish governance frameworks to ensure the responsible, ethical and equitable use of technology.

“The Office of Academic Technology and Innovation is a critical step forward in ensuring UH is not just adapting to emerging technologies but leading their thoughtful and strategic integration,” said UH President Wendy Hensel. “This office will help us realize the full potential of AI and academic innovation to support student success, faculty excellence, and operational efficiency.”

With AI adoption moving at different paces across UH’s ten campuses, OATI will create a single framework ensuring all investments, tools, and innovations drive a common vision for teaching, learning, and research.

“This new office turns that shared vision into reality,” said Ina Wanca. “By ensuring equal access to modern tools, building AI literacy for students and faculty and linking innovation to workforce readiness, we will prepare Hawaiʻi’s learners and educators to thrive in the AI era while honoring the values that define our university system.”

OATI will also support the AI Planning Group announced June 25 in developing a university-wide AI strategy aligned with institutional goals.

“With the AI Planning Group and OATI working together, we can align priorities across all campuses and move quickly from ideas to implementation,” said Kim Siegenthaler, Senior Advisor to the President.

The office will also help lead implementation of the $7.4 million, five-year subscription to EAB Navigate360 and EAB Edify, approved by the UH Board of Regents on June 16. The platforms use predictive analytics to alert faculty, advisors, and support staff at the earliest sign a student may be at risk. The systems have proven successful in closing student achievement gaps and improving retention and graduation rates.

If you are in your 70s, you didn’t fight in the second world war. Such a statement should be uncontroversial, given that even the oldest septuagenarian today was born after the war ended. But there remains a cultural association between this age group and the era of Vera Lynn and the Blitz.

A similar category error exists when we think about parents and technology. Society seems to have agreed that social media and the internet are unknowable mysteries to parents, so the state must step in to protect children from the tech giants, with Australia releasing details of an imminent ban. Yet the parents of today’s teenagers are increasingly millennial digital natives. Somehow, we have decided that people who grew up using MySpace or Habbo Hotel are today unable to navigate how their children use TikTok or Fortnite.

Simple tools to restrict children’s access to the internet already exist, from adjusting router settings to requiring parental permission to install smartphone apps, but the consensus among politicians seems to be that these require a PhD in electrical engineering, leading to blanket illiberal restrictions. If you customised your Facebook page while at university, you should be able to tweak a few settings. So, rather than asking everyone to verify their age and identify themselves online, why can’t we trust parents to, well, parent?

Failing to keep up with generational shifts could also result in wider problems. As with the pensioners we’ve bumped from serving in Vietnam to storming Normandy, there is a danger in focusing on the wrong war. While politicians crack down on social media, they rush to embrace AI built on large language models, and yet it is this technology that will have the largest effect on today’s teens, not least as teachers wonder how they will be able to set ChatGPT-proof homework.

Rather than simply banning things, we need to be encouraging open conversations about social media, AI and any future technologies, both across society and within families.

• 53% of all UK SMB owners use AI tools for business advice – 60% of 25-34-year-olds
• 31% use TikTok, but this is nearly doubled among 18-24-year-olds
• Human emotion, experience and ethics are crucial

Half (53%) of the UK’s SMB owners are now using AI tools, like ChatGPT and Gemini, for business advice – but this is even more pronounced among younger entrepreneurs, where usage rises to around 60% among 25-34-year-olds.

Artificial intelligence is clearly serving as a brainstorming tool to verify what family and friends are saying, with 93% still trusting those individuals for business advice.