What’s in your AI toolbox?

Trustworthy tools

AI assistants are increasingly present in Yale’s workplaces through the Clarity platform. The Clarity and Copilot Chat web pages are designed to educate users, making it easy to experiment with the technology.

Associate CIO Hadar Call, IT enterprise services and platforms, manages the Clarity platform with her team. “It has been our goal to make Yale’s AI Tools broadly accessible, free, and data-protected so we offer a host of different large-language models,” she said.

Call acknowledged that most staff members likely have a backlog of work, and an AI assistant is a welcome time saver, freeing them up to do less manual or tedious work or providing them with another perspective.

It is a fast-changing landscape, and new AI agents (or models) have recently been announced in university-wide messages. The Clarity Platform Agents vary in their capabilities. For instance, the 03 agent is considered the “most powerful reasoning model currently available from OpenAI and is suitable for tasks requiring deep analytical thinking, problem-solving, and complex reasoning,” while the Claude 3.5 Sonnet agent is “suitable for coding tasks, summarizing and reasoning on large amounts of text, and supporting creative and academic writing.” For those who haven’t logged onto Clarity recently, there are new capabilities to try and models to compare.

Associate Provost Jenny Frederick, one of the functional leaders in the design of the Clarity platform, noted that there are many tools because each is distinct. “The Yale Task Force on AI decided that it was more educational to securely license multiple models and then give everyone the personal agency to experiment and decide. That way we avoided the need to make one choice to meet the varying needs in our community.”

New to AI and a little apprehensive?

Frederick said she was a little afraid to start using AI herself. “I definitely recognize that feeling,” she said. “What flipped the switch for me was realizing there’s so much interesting conversation about this and I’m not going to be able to engage or even do the role I have here at Yale without having a more hands-on experience.”

She recommended finding a colleague or a friend who is using AI and asking them to demonstrate how they are interacting with it. Another way is to experiment with answering Clarity’s question, “What would you like to ask?” You can either attach a document and task Clarity with summarizing the contents or ask Clarity what it can do and how best to collaborate with it.

“We can ask ourselves where the fear is coming from,” Steel added. “Some of the apprehension might be well-grounded in questions that need to be asked to make sure AI is safe for their data. This is the primary concern for many faculty and staff that I’ve talked with, and that’s where the AI chart with data-risk classification comes in.”

Steel noted that the often-unspoken worry that this technology may take jobs away. “If we’re perceiving AI as a potential competitor, then I absolutely want to know what my competition is up to. It’s a good reason to learn more about AI,” said Steel. “Given that these tools are available Yale-wide, it levels that playing field and gives people the opportunity to investigate ways that AI can handle not just repetitious tasks, but also enormous volumes of data and do their jobs at a new level.”

In classrooms and workplaces

The Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning is playing a part in bringing AI tools to the Yale community. Pilar Abuin, senior director, Educational Technology, works with Yale faculty to complement AI-enhanced software with Canvas, their learning management system. Ed Discussions brings Q&A functionality into large classes. “By integrating AI into that tool,” said Abuin, “the faculty can upload relevant articles or documents so there will be context depending on the students’ queries. Then the faculty can endorse the AI-generated answer that comes up as a draft.”

AI is also being integrated into daily operations in the Construction Project Management area of Facilities. Associate Director Remy Edmunds noted that he and his team primarily use several agents in the Clarity Platform and the Zoom AI Companion for summarizing submittal packages and contractor requests; auto-generating meeting action items; analyzing project schedules for issues; and tailoring project updates for different audiences.

“The most significant advantage of using AI is speed,” said Edmunds. “Tasks that previously took hours can now be completed in minutes. AI also helps identify patterns across projects that may have been previously overlooked, which leads to better troubleshooting and root-cause analysis.”