Ultimate help desk: UC San Diego’s TritonGPT allows staff of 38K to streamline tasks

UC San Diego has deployed TritonGPT, a collection of AI assistants powered by multiple large language models, to streamline administrative workflows and improve access to institutional knowledge across the university. The platform, which earned UCSD a CIO 100 Award this year, now serves 38,000 faculty and employees and has expanded to partner universities, demonstrating how academic institutions can leverage AI to boost operational efficiency while keeping sensitive data in-house.

What you should know: TritonGPT began as a solution to help student service desk staff answer queries more effectively by connecting the university’s knowledge base to large language models.

• Development started in June 2023 with a pilot launched to 400 administrative staff by October, followed by an official rollout in spring 2024.
• The platform uses an open source orchestration platform from Onyx, a software company, to integrate institutional data through connectors into various LLMs.
• Initially powered solely by Meta’s Llama models, the system now incorporates multiple commercial models accessible through API toggles.

Key use cases: The AI assistants have automated several time-intensive administrative processes across the university.

• Job description writing became significantly easier for hiring managers, with the tool also helping compile interview questions and post job information.
• Contract review processes saw dramatic improvements, with UCSD reducing hours spent on reviewing non-disclosure agreements by 60%.
• Service desk operations improved as student staff could better assist users by drawing from the university’s Confluence knowledge base, a digital repository of institutional information.

The training challenge: Users initially struggled to interact effectively with the AI tools, treating them like traditional search engines rather than conversational assistants.

• UCSD rolled out an AI essentials course to ensure basic AI literacy among staff before the official launch.
• “When folks first started using it, they treated it like a search engine,” says Brett Pollak, project lead and executive director for AI, data, and digital transformation at UCSD. “This is why training was so important to teach people to prompt and ask questions in the same way you would if you were chatting to a regular person.”

Expanding reach: The platform has grown beyond UCSD’s campus to serve the broader San Diego academic community.

• TritonGPT is now available to San Diego State University, the California State University system office, UC Berkeley, and the San Diego Community College District.
• The university is piloting instructional bots with a dozen faculty members to act as virtual teaching assistants, with plans to provide broader student access.

Future vision: UCSD aims to democratize AI assistant creation across the institution through no-code tools.

• The goal is enabling users to incorporate their own local content or context to create custom assistants for specific individual, team, or department use cases.
• “Unfortunately, some are worried about bringing in these tools because they fear they’ll be replaced by technology, which is why we had to do a lot of education around what we were trying to achieve,” Pollak explains. “Slowly, people are realizing they’ll need to adapt if they don’t want to be left behind.”