For many people, 'cloud' storage evokes an image of something fluffy and white billowing in the sky, just as artificial intelligence (AI) conjures up a gigantic brainy android barking wisdom like the Wizard of Oz. At Windsor Forest Colleges Group, we recognised AI as an opportunity.
That confidence led to experimentation, then success. That success led to many invitations to advise schools, colleges and universities. We helped some with strategy, some with moving past policy discussions and even helped some delve into the technical aspects of creating their own secure AI tools.
This is something we are proud to be leading on, because AI is not just part of our future but a key element of our learners' day-to-day life.
Building Our Own AI Solution
Our AI journey began in earnest thanks to our tech-positive CEO, Gillian May. She set up a mentor meeting for our Executive Director of Technology, Dan Fairbairn, to explore how AI might help us. We are situated at the end of Heathrow’s runway and, having fostered excellent industry links, that mentor meeting was with an airline's Chief Information Officer (CIO). He had achieved some incredible time savings and quality improvements using AI. His frank comment was: 'If you're not using AI, what are you doing?'
We knew why, but not how. We knew what we wanted, but not where we could find it. We were keen to enable access for all, not just a select few. Most of all, we wanted something private and secure. Our pioneers already had ChatGPT subscriptions, but we wanted to signpost them away from unwittingly training a model on sensitive information.