From Discovery to Action: A New Resource for AI-Enhanced Intermediaries

Katie O’Brien, Ph.D.

When T3 Advisory released our discovery report, AI-Enhanced Intermediaries: Accelerating Student Success in Higher Education in April 2025, we heard a clear message: intermediary organizations are exploring generative AI with growing curiosity, with many remaining early in their journeys. Staff are testing tools, piloting practices, and asking essential questions about ethics, equity, and implementation.

Now, we’re excited to share the next step: AI in Action: A Practical Playbook for Postsecondary Intermediaries. This new resource builds directly on our discovery work and provides support for real-world application through guidance on how to construct AI prompts and how to implement centralized AI policies and processes. If our first report was a snapshot of the field, this playbook is the map; highlighting pathways for action and providing the tools to get started.

Why a Playbook? Why Now?

Intermediary organizations occupy a unique position in the higher education landscape. They don’t operate campuses, but they shape what happens on them; offering technical assistance, tools, and strategy to support transformation. As AI continues to evolve, intermediaries must not only adopt new tools internally but also model responsible, student-centered use for the institutions they serve.

The playbook is structured around three stages of AI adoption, identified in our discovery report:

• Cautious Exploration: For those just beginning, we offer simple prompts and use cases.

• Building Momentum: For teams experimenting and piloting tools, we include guidance on scaling innovation.

• Strategic Integration: For organizations ready to create policies and processes, we provide examples and implementation strategies .

Each section focuses on high-impact areas: content creation, data analysis, meeting support, and knowledge management. We’ve organized these use cases through the lens of the Gates Foundation's Intermediary Capabilities Assessment (ICA) framework to ensure relevance and alignment with core organizational functions.

Moving from Ideas to Implementation

The playbook doesn’t just describe possible uses of AI, it shows you how. Each prompt is accompanied by a problem statement, suggested input, implementation tips, and example outputs. Whether you’re writing a grant proposal, analyzing qualitative data, or designing a cross-institutional strategy, the playbook can help you get started, or go further.

A Collective Call to Action

As AI adoption deepens across the postsecondary education ecosystem, intermediaries can lead by example. This moment requires us to center students, equity, and relationships in every decision we make about automation.

AI in Action offers practical strategies and concrete steps to move from exploration to integration, and from pilots to policies.

We are grateful to the Gates Foundation for supporting this important and timely work as artificial intelligence and its role in higher education continue to evolve.

Read the full playbook here.