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UT presenter urges practical, secure use of AI tools to ease financial aid workloads
Summary
Maria Serna of UT Austin told the Financial Aid Advisory Committee that AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT can speed routine tasks, improve knowledge transfer and help with student communications — but she warned institutions to protect FERPA data, train staff and continuously monitor outputs.
Maria Serna, associate director at the University of Texas at Austin, told the Higher Education Coordinating Board's Financial Aid Advisory Committee on Dec. 11 that artificial intelligence can deliver real efficiency gains in financial aid offices — but only when used with clear processes and safeguards.
Serna demonstrated use cases her office has deployed, including summarizing long email threads, converting meeting transcripts into step-by-step workflows, generating executive summaries from team channels and building a web-based agent that answers routine student questions. "AI is only as good as the person using it," Serna said, urging…
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