What happened
UNC Greensboro's Information Technology Services (ITS) held its first AI Showcase on Oct. 20 in the Elliott University Center's Cone Ballroom. The event listing gave the hours as 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. It was open to UNCG faculty and staff. The university's account says more than 200 faculty and staff attended. That figure comes from Wade Maki, Senior Advisor to the Chancellor for Strategic Initiatives. The university has not published an independent count.
The pre-event listing said attendees could watch live demonstrations of Microsoft 365 Copilot, ChatGPT Edu, and Spartan AI. The university's report adds that demos began every half hour so people could move to the next AI station and compare the models. Registration filled up before the event. ITS opened a waitlist, which it said would also help it gauge interest in another showcase.
The presenters were ITS staff and Cloudforce, which UNCG describes as a Microsoft partner that supports Spartan AI.
The three tools in the pilot
| Tool | What UNCG says it is | Notable boundary |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft 365 Copilot | Productivity assistance across Microsoft 365 | UNCG's guidance separates the enterprise version from free Copilot |
| ChatGPT Edu | OpenAI's higher-education platform, in a one-year pilot | Limited licenses, mainly for faculty and staff |
| Spartan AI | A university-branded workspace powered by nebulaONE | Hosted in UNCG's Azure environment |
Spartan AI is not a Microsoft product
This distinction matters. Spartan AI is powered by nebulaONE and gives access to models from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Mistral AI. UNCG says it runs within the university's Microsoft Azure cloud environment. The student newspaper, The Carolinian, reports that nebulaONE is an AI gateway owned by Cloudforce. So the Microsoft link is the hosting and the surrounding Microsoft 365 data. Microsoft does not operate the front end.
ITS lists these uses for Spartan AI:
- drafting and revising
- summarizing and analyzing information
- brainstorming
- working with documents
- organizing related work in Projects
- building specialized Agents for particular tasks or workflows
What attendees asked
The questions show where ordinary users and IT governance meet. People wanted to know:
- how agents differ from chatbots
- how to build prompts
- how to pick a model for a given job
- how to look up records of earlier questions
- what the accessibility, data security and environmental effects are
The university reports these as questions. It does not report answers, benchmarks or an audit. Nothing published says one model beat another, and nothing quantifies environmental impact.
Use cases on display
- Data and automation: RK Harris, a senior director of revenue operations and data strategy, already uses Copilot and Spartan AI for coding, process automation and data analysis. She said the showcase showed her agents built as topic experts. It also covered email summaries, meeting briefs, and flashcards or quizzes for staff training. Those are things she said she learned about. They are not measured results.
- Teaching support: Drs. Cristiane Damasceno and Jessica McCall showed a training module for graduate students who teach Introduction to Communication.
- Student services: Thomas Payne of the Division of Student Success demonstrated a chat tool for scheduling peer tutoring.
Academic integrity suggestions
Anna Harding, Cloudforce's director of customer success, gave the lunch keynote. For academic integrity she suggested faculty build a scaffold of appropriate use. She also suggested guardrails inside AI agents so they don't hand students answers outright, and requiring students to attach chat logs to assignments. These were suggestions at an event. They are not a UNCG policy announcement. UNCG's published guidance says course AI use follows each instructor's rules and may be prohibited. It also says all coursework stays under the Academic Integrity Policy.
The governance rules
The practical lesson sits in UNCG's permissible-use guidance. Data protections depend on the specific tool, not on the word "Copilot" or "ChatGPT."
- Free Copilot integrated into Windows 11, and Copilot Chat, are approved for Level 1 and Level 2 data. That wording comes from UNCG's permissible-use table, which the research packet quotes.
- Enterprise Copilot for Microsoft 365, Spartan AI and ChatGPT Edu are listed as approved for Level 1 through Level 4 data.
- Several other tools stop at Level 1 and Level 2. These include the ChatGPT Business plan, Claude Pro and Adobe Firefly.
On Spartan AI specifically, ITS says prompts and data are not used to train AI models, and users can work with information they can access in Microsoft 365, including L3 and L4 data. That is UNCG's own description. It is not an independent certification, and it does not extend to every tool shown at the showcase.
Rules that apply to everyone
- UNCG says any purchase or use of AI-enabled products must go through an ITS Pre-Purchase Software and Hardware Review. A full security posture and risk assessment follows when applicable.
- For unapproved AI tools, the guidance says student records subject to FERPA, and Level 2 to Level 4 data, should not be shared with them.
- Users should never give Banner IDs, usernames or passwords to AI tools.
- Highly consequential uses need prior consultation. The guidance lists grading or assessing student work, recruiting and disciplinary decisions, and legal analysis or advice among them.
- Meeting recording and transcription tools are rated high risk. The guidance says the campus has no enterprise solution for this at present and prohibits free AI tools for it.
ChatGPT Edu: read the fine print
UNCG's ChatGPT Edu sign-up page lays out a few traps.
- Participation is optional and lasts one year. Whether it continues has not been decided.
- The pilot has limited licenses. Only a few approved courses include student access, and faculty who want a broadly usable student tool should keep using Microsoft Copilot.
- If your existing ChatGPT account uses a uncg.edu address, enrolling forces a choice. You can delete the old account, or merge it into the pilot and risk losing the data if the pilot ends. Accounts tied to non-UNCG email can sit alongside the pilot account.
Pilot, not a procurement decision
Spartan AI is part of a 12-month AI evaluation program. The showcase report says ITS is tracking how many people use AI, how they want to use it and which models they prefer. UNCG says that will inform future purchases and capacity. No source names a winning platform or a decision date. An earlier WindowsForum analysis made the same point about Spartan AI: the announcement doesn't commit to keeping Spartan AI or nebulaONE after the pilot.
What IT admins can take from this
My own read, based on general industry experience:
- Classify by tool and tenant, not brand. The same vendor name can mean Level 2 or Level 4 depending on the licensing and where it runs.
- A gateway can let people compare models without spreading data across vendors. Hosting it in your own Azure environment keeps governance in one place, though you still depend on the gateway vendor.
- Warn people about account collisions early. The ChatGPT Edu email-merge problem will show up at any organization where staff signed up for consumer accounts with work addresses.
- Collect usage and preference data. A pilot that doesn't measure adoption can't support a purchase decision.
The sources are also thin in places. The coverage is largely university-authored communications, and the event was a demonstration and a feedback exercise. Nothing here proves productivity gains, and it doesn't settle the security and environmental questions attendees raised. It is a good example of a campus IT team putting a Microsoft tool and its alternatives in front of users under written data rules.