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Reimagining How We Serve

At Gonzaga University, transformation often begins with curiosity. The Information Technology Services (ITS) department asked a bold question: What if we could reimagine how our community interacts with IT? The answer became Ask Isi, Gonzaga’s first AI-powered assistant designed to make getting help faster, simpler, and more connected.

The Ask Isi team within ITS built the first working version of the assistant in just 30 days and tested it with focus groups across campus. Within five months, the solution was migrated to Workato Go, an enterprise-grade orchestration and agentic AI platform that established the foundation for future scalability. Ask Isi’s story is not only about technology, but also about people—the way the team learned, experimented, and grew together. Guided by Agile Coach Danny Lopez IV, they embraced an iterative, learning-first approach that encouraged collaboration and experimentation across the department.

 

The vision was to improve the community’s experience with IT, making that first contact faster and easier while reserving our people for more complex work.

 

The Team Behind the Journey

Ask Isi began as an experiment, a chance to explore how AI could automate repetitive work and improve the experience for staff, faculty, and 51³Ô¹Ïs. ITS formed a diverse, cross-functional team that blended experienced professionals with emerging talent, including former 51³Ô¹Ï employees who began as work-study contributors on Ask Isi and have since joined Gonzaga full time. This seamless transition from 51³Ô¹Ï innovators to full-time team members highlights how Gonzaga grows its own talent through meaningful, hands-on experiences. The goal was simple: learn by doing.

 

My team is awesome. They empower me to explore and figure things out, and that often turns into something the team can use.

 

Through daily collaboration, rapid feedback cycles, and a focus on user experience, the ITS team cultivated a culture of curiosity, transparency, and shared learning. They didn’t wait for perfect clarity, they moved forward, adjusted fast, and learned as they went.

Being a part of this team that was built from the ground up has been one of the most energizing experiences I’ve had. Everyone brought different strengths, and we quickly learned how to collaborate and adapt.

 

Having an open-minded team was critical. Everyone came into this willing to experiment.

 

The leadership support here has been incredible. They didn’t just approve the work, they encouraged us to experiment, even if it meant failing fast and learning faster.

Learning and Growth Through AI

The Ask Isi journey has been full of discovery, blending technical experimentation with human collaboration. The team quickly realized that effective AI isn’t about perfection, it’s about iteration, data quality, and trust. Their growth extended beyond the technology, shaping how they think, work, and learn together.

Technical Learnings

• Start Small, Learn Fast: The MVP approach helped ITS build confidence quickly. “When we broke the work down into small chunks, it suddenly felt achievable,” said Ken Nguyen.
• Data Quality Matters: “Our hallucinations dropped considerably once our knowledge base got cleaned up. Clean, accurate data is everything,” explained Tom Buck, Infrastructure Architect.
• Train the Model, Train the Team: “You have to dig in and get your hands dirty,” said Tom Buck. “You can talk about AI all day, but until you start building, testing, and breaking things, you won’t learn how it really works.”
• Agentic Mindset: The team learned that AI systems evolve through continuous teaching and refinement, requiring thoughtful prompts, feedback loops, and well-structured data.
• Human in the Loop: “AI isn’t replacing anyone’s job anytime soon. It’s a great tool, but it’s only as good as the people using it and the data behind it,” said Brian Adamson.

Human Growth

• Transparency Drives Progress: “We talked about what wasn’t working as openly as what was,” shared Hannah Cylkowski. This openness built trust and created space for innovation.
• Empower the Curious: Choose people who are eager to learn and experiment. “Find the people who are open to trying new ways of working,” said Borre Ulrichsen. “Celebrate what the teams achieve. Make it visible. Give them chances to tell their story and demonstrate their results— that’s how you move people from hesitant to inspired.”
• Prioritize Progress Over Perfection: Define what’s good enough to test and improve. Each iteration builds momentum and insight.
• Invest in Learning: Building AI capability means empowering people to think differently, adapt faster, and create lasting impact.

 

AI doesn’t always give the same answer every time, but when your data is structured and verifiable, you can give users the confidence to trust the results.

What Ask Isi Can Do

Today, Ask Isi automates ticket creation and routing, retrieves information from multiple knowledge bases, integrates with Gonzaga’s website, and provides ChatGPT-style support for common IT requests. It’s even piloting agentic software installations, signaling a future where routine IT tasks are handled automatically.

We wanted an agent that was more than just a chatbot. This had to be action-oriented, and long term, the automations are going to provide the value we’re looking for.

Looking Ahead

The journey doesn’t end here. Gonzaga’s next chapter includes scaling AI capabilities beyond IT, into areas like HR, finance, and facilities. The goal is to create an ecosystem where AI and people work together seamlessly, improving experiences while maintaining transparency and governance.

Now we have the opportunity to go broader and deeper, beyond IT into areas like HR, finance, and facilities, and enable AI to fulfill requests automatically so staff can focus on higher-value work.

 

Turning the agentic work into a self-service model with change management and governance around it is where we’ve got to start heading.

 

Technology alone isn’t enough. What makes this work powerful is how people and AI are coming together to imagine what’s next.

 

As Gonzaga continues this journey, Ask Isi stands as proof that when a community of innovators comes together with trust and vision, meaningful change can happen in weeks, not years.

Meet the Ask Isi Team

• Borre Ulrichsen, CIO, Gonzaga University
• Darren Owsley, Deputy CIO, Gonzaga University
• Ismael Teshome, Senior Director of Service Management, Gonzaga University
• Brian Adamson, Project Manager, Gonzaga University
• Hannah Cylkowski, Business Analyst, Gonzaga University
• RJ Riley, Information Security Analyst, Gonzaga University
• Tom Buck, Infrastructure Architect, Gonzaga University
• Vipul Saxena, Enterprise Architect, Gonzaga University
• Ken Nguyen, IT Service Management Specialist, Gonzaga University
• Delainey Maxwell, Data Analyst, Gonzaga University
• Danny Lopez IV, Agile Coach, Gonzaga University