A Free Tool for High-Stakes AI Contract Decisions

This month, we are sharing something we built because we saw a problem coming and did not want campuses facing it alone.

Presidents, chancellors, and senior leaders are under increasing pressure to make high-stakes decisions about enterprise AI agreements, most often with OpenAI or Google Gemini. These decisions are not technical alone. They carry long-term implications for student data, intellectual property, academic creativity, governance, and procurement risk. The technology is evolving faster than institutional decision-making structures were designed to handle. Under-resourced institutions and students will feel the consequences most if these choices are rushed or poorly scoped.

After conversations with leaders at the forefront of AI in higher education, including Lev Gonick, CIO of Arizona State University, and Erin Mote of InnovateEDU and the Ed SAFE Alliance, we identified a core set of questions leaders should ask as they consider enterprise AI solutions. We then built a short, easy-to-use vendor diagnostic to help leaders and their teams interrogate these decisions with greater clarity and confidence.

The goal is not to push a single answer or vendor. The goal is to help leaders ask better questions, support their teams, and make decisions that align with their institutional values, capacity, and long-term responsibilities to students.

No one paid us to do this. No one sponsored it. We saw a shared challenge, shared learnings, and drafted something useful to help. That is the UIA model. We try to  identify and solve problems early, work together, and share what we learn openly so others do not have to reinvent the wheel.

Everything we do is built in the spirit of "yes and". We expect this tool to get better as others adapt it, add questions, and build on it. Please do.

One small request. Because we share our tools and learning openly, we do not always see where or how they are used. If a UIA tool, framework, or idea has been helpful to you or your campus, the most useful thing you can do is let us know. One sentence is enough. Hearing where our work is being used helps us focus our efforts and make the case for continued investment in shared solutions.

If you have feedback, improvements, or examples of how you riffed on something we shared, we want those too. That is how we get better and how this work stays grounded in real campus needs.

We built this for you. We are sharing it openly. And we hope it helps you navigate a fast-moving moment with more confidence. How would you make it better? Do you have a resource or tool we can share that will help others navigating this moment?

In partnership,
Bridget