AI Usage at a Glance
Timeline
Sep 26, 2023
ProductivityPractice documented: UTK built its own AI chat tool, called UT Verse, and made it available free to all students, faculty, and staff starting in September 2023. Unlike commercial tools, UT Verse keeps conversations private — data is not shared externally or used to train outside AI models.
Practice DocumentedView practice →Jan 1, 2024
Customer SvcPractice documented: UTK's IT department runs a chatbot named Smokey inside its help portal at help.utk.edu. The bot answers common tech questions — like how to reset a password or access email — so students and staff can get help at any hour without waiting for a human agent.
Practice DocumentedView practice →Jan 1, 2024
ProductivityPractice documented: UTK offers Zoom AI Companion to all faculty, staff, and students in its university Zoom environment, providing opt-in AI features that automatically generate text summaries of meetings, highlight key moments in recordings, and support interactive whiteboard content creation.
Practice DocumentedView practice →Jan 1, 2025
ProductivityPractice documented: UTK offers Microsoft Copilot to all students, faculty, and staff at no extra cost through their existing Microsoft 365 accounts. It can summarize emails, draft documents, run Excel formulas using plain-language commands, and generate images — all within familiar Office apps.
Practice DocumentedView practice →Feb 28, 2025
ModerationPractice documented: UTK uses Turnitin Similarity, integrated with Canvas, to check student writing for potential plagiarism. The tool compares submitted work against a large database of academic papers, websites, and other sources, and recent versions can also flag text that may have been written by AI.
Practice DocumentedView practice →Feb 28, 2025
ModerationPractice documented: UTK uses AI-powered proctoring tools — primarily YuJa Verity, and also Proctorio — to monitor students during online exams. These tools use a student's webcam and behavior patterns to flag potential cheating, which instructors then review.
Practice DocumentedView practice →Mar 7, 2025
ProductivityNew evidence: Microsoft Teams Premium Has Arrived
Evidence AddedView practice →Jun 16, 2025
ProductivityNew evidence: Entering a New Era in the UT Verse
Evidence AddedView practice →Jul 15, 2025
Data AnalysisPractice documented: A UTK research team is developing an AI system that connects data from multiple clinical tests — including PET scans, brain MRIs, and cognitive assessments — to help detect Alzheimer's disease earlier in patients at UT Medical Center's Pat Summit Clinic.
Practice DocumentedView practice →Sep 15, 2025
Data AnalysisPractice documented: A UTK engineering team is building a computer vision system that watches football players during practice and games, detects flaws in their movement, and flags athletes who may be at higher risk of injury — before they get hurt.
Practice DocumentedView practice →Nov 1, 2025
ProductivityPractice documented: UT Verse includes a real-time translation tool called UTVersal Translator that lets two people speaking different languages have a face-to-face conversation through their smartphones, with the AI translating each person's speech on the fly.
Practice DocumentedView practice →Nov 1, 2025
ProductivityPractice documented: UTK integrated multiple AI features into its Canvas course platform (Online@UT), now branded as IgniteAI, including an AI-powered course search tool, AI discussion summaries, AI-powered translation of course content, and over 20 AI teaching assistant workflows from Khan Academy called Khanmigo Teacher Tools.
Practice DocumentedView practice →Feb 6, 2026
ProductivityNew evidence: Organize Zoom Content with Meeting Summary Templates
Evidence AddedView practice →Mar 16, 2026
ProductivityPractice documented: In March 2026, UTK deployed the UT AI Hub, a centralized platform giving all students, faculty, and staff free access to full paid versions of multiple leading AI models — including ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Google Gemini, and Meta Llama — through a single secure university portal.
Practice DocumentedView practice →Mar 19, 2026
ProductivityNew evidence: UT to bring ChatGPT, Grok and other AI tools into the classroom
Evidence AddedView practice →Apr 3, 2026
ProductivityNew evidence: Work Smarter with the New UT AI Hub
Evidence AddedView practice →Recent activity
UTK offers Zoom AI Companion to all faculty, staff, and students in its university Zoom environment, providing opt-in AI features that automatically generate text summaries of meetings, highlight key moments in recordings, and support interactive whiteboard content creation.
The Zoom AI Companion is available within UTK's licensed Zoom environment at tennessee.zoom.us. Users must opt in by enabling AI Companion features in their Zoom account settings. The meeting summary feature provides hosts with a text summary of topics covered, and as of early 2026 supports preset summary templates including brainstorming, lecture summary, and discussion formats. OIT notes it does not support third-party meeting summary tools such as Otter.ai, citing potential privacy vulnerabilities.
In March 2026, UTK deployed the UT AI Hub, a centralized platform giving all students, faculty, and staff free access to full paid versions of multiple leading AI models — including ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Google Gemini, and Meta Llama — through a single secure university portal.
The UT AI Hub launched on March 30, 2026, through a partnership between the UT System Department of Technology Solutions and OIT in collaboration with Microsoft. It provides private access to large language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Google, and Meta in a single interface at aihub.tennessee.edu, authenticated via UT Microsoft account. The hub includes an automated model-routing feature that analyzes each user's prompt and selects the most appropriate model based on the task, speed, accuracy, and past user preferences. All data stays within the university and is not exposed to public AI training pipelines. Access is available to active faculty, staff, and students at no individual cost.
UTK offers Microsoft Copilot to all students, faculty, and staff at no extra cost through their existing Microsoft 365 accounts. It can summarize emails, draft documents, run Excel formulas using plain-language commands, and generate images — all within familiar Office apps.
Microsoft Copilot is accessible inside the Edge browser and via Office 365 web applications. A higher-tier version — Microsoft Copilot integrated directly with Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint — is available to departments for an additional annual subscription fee. OIT explicitly advises users not to enter proprietary research data or sensitive university information into Copilot, directing them to UT Verse or the UT AI Hub instead for privacy-sensitive work. As of March 2025, UTK also introduced Microsoft Teams Premium, which adds AI-powered meeting features including automatically generated meeting notes, recommended tasks, and personalized highlights for licensed faculty and staff.
All practices by category
UTK offers Zoom AI Companion to all faculty, staff, and students in its university Zoom environment, providing opt-in AI features that automatically generate text summaries of meetings, highlight key moments in recordings, and support interactive whiteboard content creation.
In March 2026, UTK deployed the UT AI Hub, a centralized platform giving all students, faculty, and staff free access to full paid versions of multiple leading AI models — including ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Google Gemini, and Meta Llama — through a single secure university portal.
UTK offers Microsoft Copilot to all students, faculty, and staff at no extra cost through their existing Microsoft 365 accounts. It can summarize emails, draft documents, run Excel formulas using plain-language commands, and generate images — all within familiar Office apps.
UT Verse includes a real-time translation tool called UTVersal Translator that lets two people speaking different languages have a face-to-face conversation through their smartphones, with the AI translating each person's speech on the fly.
UTK integrated multiple AI features into its Canvas course platform (Online@UT), now branded as IgniteAI, including an AI-powered course search tool, AI discussion summaries, AI-powered translation of course content, and over 20 AI teaching assistant workflows from Khan Academy called Khanmigo Teacher Tools.
UTK provides Microsoft Copilot to all students, faculty, and staff at no extra cost through their existing Microsoft 365 accounts. It can summarize emails, draft documents, run Excel formulas using plain-language commands, and generate images — all within familiar Office apps.
UTK built its own AI chat tool, called UT Verse, and made it available free to all students, faculty, and staff starting in September 2023. Unlike commercial tools, UT Verse keeps conversations private — data is not shared externally or used to train outside AI models.
UTK uses a software platform called Slate to manage graduate and digital learning admissions, and has hired a dedicated analyst to build machine learning models that predict which students are likely to enroll, stay enrolled, or drop out.
A UTK engineering team is building a computer vision system that watches football players during practice and games, detects flaws in their movement, and flags athletes who may be at higher risk of injury — before they get hurt.
A UTK research team is developing an AI system that connects data from multiple clinical tests — including PET scans, brain MRIs, and cognitive assessments — to help detect Alzheimer's disease earlier in patients at UT Medical Center's Pat Summit Clinic.
UTK uses Turnitin Similarity, integrated with Canvas, to check student writing for potential plagiarism. The tool compares submitted work against a large database of academic papers, websites, and other sources, and recent versions can also flag text that may have been written by AI.
UTK uses AI-powered proctoring tools — primarily YuJa Verity, and also Proctorio — to monitor students during online exams. These tools use a student's webcam and behavior patterns to flag potential cheating, which instructors then review.
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