UT Forms AI Advisory Committee to Shape a Responsible Future for Artificial Intelligence on Campus

Enterprise Technology has long believed that deploying AI responsibly means more than selecting the right platforms. It means building the structures of trust, transparency, and shared accountability that the campus community deserves. This week, that commitment took a significant step forward. The UT.AI Advisory Committee convened for the first time, bringing together 15 faculty members, administrators, and students to help govern how artificial intelligence is used, evaluated, and made safe at UT Austin. The committee is coordinated by Mario Guerra, associate vice president of AI Platforms and Innovation for Enterprise Technology — and his framing of the work captures exactly why this matters.

Why this committee exists

AI is not a single-department challenge. It is reshaping how students learn, how faculty research, how staff work, and how the institution operates. Mario Guerra put it plainly when speaking to The Daily Texan about the committee's scope: "This technology is touching every single aspect of the University. It will impact every single corner of campus, so we need input from all of those folks, all of those fields."

That philosophy — that AI governance requires genuine community input, not just centralized IT decision-making — is what makes this committee meaningful. The 15-member body includes faculty from multiple colleges, representation from the provost's office and other university leadership, and critically, a student voice. Freshman chemical engineering major Jonathan Chao serves as the committee's sole student representative, bringing perspective informed by the Senate of College Councils' recent survey of student attitudes toward AI at UT.

The immediate questions on the table

The committee has two pressing priorities to start. The first is evaluating UT's AI platform landscape for the coming academic year. UT Spark — the free, UT-managed AI service available to all students, faculty, and staff — is currently the University's primary offering. The committee will help determine whether Spark remains the right platform going forward or whether the portfolio should evolve.

The second priority reflects something ET has heard clearly from the campus community: privacy concerns. Students and faculty want to understand exactly how their data is handled when they use university-supplied AI tools. The committee will help develop a formal privacy statement for UT.AI platforms — one that is honest, specific, and accessible. Guerra was direct about the intent: "We recognize that students are concerned about using University-supplied AI tools for privacy reasons, and we want to be transparent about the use of their data in these systems."

Recognizing Mario Guerra's leadership

It is worth pausing to recognize what Mario Guerra has built and continues to shape. As associate vice president of AI Platforms and Innovation, Mario has been central to UT Austin's AI initiative from the beginning — from the launch of UT Spark and the UT.AI Studio to the development of the governance frameworks now taking institutional form through this committee. His approach has always been rooted in a simple idea: that powerful technology, to be genuinely useful at a university, must earn the trust of the community it serves.

Coordinating a 15-member advisory body that spans faculty, administration, and students — and doing it in a way that actually produces useful governance, not just optics — is demanding work. It requires the ability to hold competing priorities in productive tension: moving fast enough to keep UT at the frontier of AI adoption while moving carefully enough to get the ethics and privacy right. Mario is doing that well, and the campus community is better for it.

The larger commitment

For Enterprise Technology, this committee is part of a larger, ongoing commitment. We do not believe that responsible AI is a checkbox you complete before deployment. It is a continuous practice — of listening to the community, evaluating outcomes honestly, adjusting when needed, and maintaining the transparency that makes trust possible in the first place.

The UT.AI Advisory Committee is one of the clearest expressions of that commitment. It creates a formal channel for the campus to shape how AI evolves here — not as passive recipients of technology decisions made elsewhere, but as active participants in an institution that is trying to get this right. Chao, reflecting on his role as the student voice on the committee, captured the spirit of that participation directly: "It's not just my opinions, but it's the opinion of the campus."