EDUCAUSE 2025: From Cloud to AI: How Higher Ed Leaders Are Building Communities of Excellence

Higher education leaders are navigating massive shifts in technology, teaching and student expectations — and no single institution or partner can do it alone. 

At EDUCAUSE 2025, Brandon Rich, director of AI enablement at the University of Notre Dame, and Sarah Christen, deputy CIO at Cornell University, led a session on this very topic along with Damian Doyle, deputy CIO at the University of Virginia, at the EDUCAUSE 2025 session, “Collaboration as Our Superpower: Building Specialized Higher Ed IT Communities of Excellence.”  

“We wanted it to be small, we wanted everyone in one room. It could be CIOs and it could be developers. We wanted to have a diverse group of people,” said Christen, who hosted the Cloud Forum for seven years at Cornell. “We limited it to three people per university so we could have a lot of them present. What we built together created this really cool community that has really worked together to solve problems. We’ve created things together, and we work with the vendors that best support us. 

LEARN MORE: The University of Notre Dame’s artificial intelligence data governance strategy.

The spirit of collaboration was infectious as the standing-room-only EDUCAUSE crowd contributed their own examples of how to encourage authentic collaboration between universities and industry partners to accelerate innovation, improve outcomes and create scalable change across the higher ed landscape. 

“These groups really represent an amazing opportunity,” said Doyle, who co-chaired the Cloud Computing Community Group along with Bob Flynn, a former Indiana University IT services manager, before the pandemic. “We wanted to explore how you go from information sharing to joint programming, and do this in an intentional way, where we are talking with leaders about these IT challenges, and figure out how we can be deliberate about that.”

From aligning shared goals to co-designing solutions that put people first and prioritize collaboration over competition, the conversation highlighted high-impact collaboration examples. This included the award-winning Cloud Forum, which originated at Cornell University, as well as  the creation of the AI Forum at the University of Notre Dame in 2023, with more than 60 institutions represented and 135 participants from higher education.

“This is the group that I rely on. No one institution has AI all figured out,” Rich said. “But in this room that we created, the answer’s in there.”