Shared AI at Scale: Developed by Universities for Universities

Recorded live at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, this session featured Brett Pollak, Executive Director at UC San Diego, and Courtney Giordano, Associate Chancellor at UC San Diego.Higher-education leaders were navigating an increasingly noisy AI marketplace while seeking affordability, institutional autonomy, and demonstrated results across both enterprise operations and learning environments. In this fast-paced session, UC San Diego shared how TritonAI—the evolution of its award-winning TritonGPT platform—was becoming a full AI services hub built by universities, for universities.The speakers explored how TritonGPT grew from a single chatbot into a platform serving more than 73,000 users at zero per-query cost, and where it was headed next. TritonAI extended the platform into an AI Tools Hub with an Agent Builder for low-code automation, shared enterprise connectors via the MCP Server Hub, a reusable Agent Skills Library, Developer APIs, and a pre-packaged tools pipeline that brought transcription, captioning, OCR, and campus-specific services into everyday operations.The session demonstrated purpose-built AI services already in production, from contract review that reduced legal processing from hours to minutes, to AI-powered campus search, public-facing chatbot widgets, and instructional AI tools for faculty and students. Attendees also heard about UC San Diego’s pioneering work in agentic AI—multi-agent systems that plan, coordinate, and execute with human oversight. Operating as a turnkey SaaS platform, TritonAI was already powering AI across several institutions through shared infrastructure, championing the philosophy that universities should not have to navigate the AI landscape alone.