Academic Chat AI

Overview

In mid-2023, before internal AI tooling became standard, Cambridge's editorial and academic teams had no safe, approved way to use AI assistants for their work. They were either using personal ChatGPT accounts or not using AI at all.

I started Academic Chat AI as a personal project — a lightweight internal ChatGPT wrapper with Cambridge-specific context, guardrails, and logging. It became the first internal AI product at CUP&A.

What it does

• Chat interface for academics and editors to interact with AI models
• Pre-loaded with Cambridge's content policies and style guides
• Logging and usage tracking for governance and cost management
• Role-based access to different model capabilities

What I learned

Building this early gave me deep intuition about where AI assistants break down for non-technical users. That informed a lot of the CoE's later governance and training work.

This project was the seed that eventually grew into the Gen AI CoE Services Ecosystem.