This article highlights the outstanding grassroots innovations developed during the summer 2026 AI Skills Pilot. By utilizing SJU's secure Gemini Pro instance and Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM), SJU faculty and staff have translated technical training into real-world administrative and operational breakthroughs.
Ai Skills Pilot: Prompt Engineering
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Problem Statement
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Prompt, Gem, or Best Practice
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Future Application/Strategic Impact
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"No Nonsense Nursing Nancy" (Student Persona Builder)
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Designing academic support programs and targeted communications that truly resonate with SJU's specific student populations (such as the Lancaster campus) can be challenging without deep contextual analysis. |
Staff built a custom "Gem" persona based on historical data regarding the characteristics of SJU Lancaster students. Users submit questions regarding scheduling, programming, and academic delivery through this persona to hone and adapt service delivery. |
Future Application: Other student-facing divisions (Admissions, Student Life) can clone this prompt structure to create tailored student personas (e.g., "First-Generation Undergrad" or "Commuter Student") to refine their communication campaigns. |
Automated Investment Roll-forward
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Staff spent hours on manual data entry, recording monthly activity from investment statements into spreadsheets. |
Staff designed a prompt within SJU’s secure Gemini Pro instance to read uploaded financial and investment statements directly. The prompt was instructed to extract the key opening balances, transaction types, fees, and closing balances, and format them into a structured output. |
Future Application: This workflow is easily adoptable by other offices managing external vendor invoices or ledger reconciliation. |
Standard Insurance & Agreement Document Pre-Screening
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Standard contracts, technology renewals, and onboarding agreements require tedious initial screening for compliance before formal review by the Office of General Counsel (OGC). |
Staff engineered a prompt to review incoming standard agreement drafts, checking them against a checklist of SJU's required legal and insurance terms and highlighting any discrepancies or modifications from previous versions. |
Strategic Impact: Pre-screens documents to flag obvious issues or deficiencies before sending them to OGC. This significantly reduces the time to process contract renewals and speeds up formal review cycles. |
Enrollment Forecaster
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The university faced declining 7th-to-8th semester student persistence due to an influx of early-graduating students entering with advanced credits, but manual modeling attempts to accurately forecast this attrition repeatedly stalled. |
Utilization of a custom "Undergraduate Enrollment Forecaster" Gem configured as an expert thought partner to challenge current thinking and build predictive modeling logic. |
Strategic Impact: The Gem enabled a shift to analyzing 6th-semester risk tiers, delivering a structured forecasting sub-model in minutes, surfacing critical early warnings for proactive intervention, and restoring confidence in enrollment projections. |