Upskilling Staff Members and Administrators to Leverage AI for Streamlining Day-to-Day Operations and Advancing Strategic Priorities

As part of the Gabelli School’s five-year Strategic Plan, the Faculty and Staff Development project team led by Jeffrey Haynes, senior director of information technology, and Beth Moore, senior director of operations, is tapping into the latest technologies to help advance the School’s strategic priorities by optimizing daily operations and empowering staff members and administrators to better serve students.

“With Dean Aksoy’s backing, we are investing in new platform tools and utilizing industry experts to provide perspectives on how technology is evolving and how we can best leverage it from a security, efficiency, and competitive standpoint,” noted Haynes.

In fall 2025, automation initiatives led to early wins with staff training on custom Excel tools, freeing up thousands of hours for undergraduate advisors to work with students instead of being bogged down in paperwork. Now the project team is looking at the next frontier—agentic AI.

“Automation is one thing, but having an agent do the actual work, with accuracy and security behind it, is going to be paramount,” Haynes said. “There are a lot of raw tasks that can be automated to free up people to provide the face time students expect and the Jesuit values-aligned personal touch, which is a differentiator for us.”

Working closely with Tal Goldhamer, founder and CEO of Find the Tailwind and an AI fellow of the Fordham Ethical and Applied AI Hub, the project team launched a pilot group focused on AI agents. They identified “superusers,” staffers from across the School who already had been experimenting with AI, to participate in a series of workshops with Goldhamer and bring new skills and solutions back to their respective departments.

Members of the group called out pain points in areas such as project tracking, career-development workflows, alumni data clean-up, advising support, and accreditation reporting, and Goldhamer helped them to utilize AI tools to address these challenges. The goal is responsible, human-centered AI adoption with AI agents performing routine functions, while people handle decisions, approvals, and relationships.

The project team aims to foster day-to-day efficiencies for individual departments while also supporting high-level strategies that can move the School forward. “We're looking at the big picture, talking to senior leadership about using technology to advance strategic goals,” explained Moore.

Moore acknowledges that the idea of letting an AI agent handle certain kinds of tasks can feel uncomfortable for some people, but she believes that the Gabelli School, with its ethical approach, can build the trust necessary for staff members and administrators to take full advantage of these tools. “We need to do our checkpoints, but I think that we can build that comfort level where everybody says, ‘You know, this is a good thing,’” she shared. “The higher education landscape is tough. We've got to evolve with the times. I think it's imperative that everyone has the opportunity to understand the efficiencies these new tools provide.”

Written by: Kimberly Volpe-Casalino