AI Center of Excellence Helps Bridge Top College’s Talent Gaps

Client Profile

A prestigious private university with a flagship U.S. campus and multiple international campuses. The client is consistently ranked among the top colleges nationwide by U.S. News & World Report.

With cost pressures rising and resource constraints mounting in administrative roles, our client made a decisive move: turning to AI and automation to fundamentally rethink how work gets done. 

Its initiative reflects a broader trend across higher education. Amid reduced federal funding, talent shortages, and declining enrollment, institutions are increasingly leveraging AI and automation to reduce costs, optimize resources, improve user experiences, and boost efficiency in transactional tasks across both academic and administrative functions.

The momentum is accelerating: The global AI in education market grew almost 36% to $9.58 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach $136.79 billion by 2035 (Precedence Research).

With a long-term AI strategy already in place, the university moved quickly to establish an automation and AI Center of Excellence (CoE) that could:

• Roll out automations in a structured, sustainable manner, prioritizing processes most impacted by resource gaps and delivering clear, tangible benefits (i.e., improved accuracy, reduced labor hours). 
• Align efforts with the university’s broader vision of achieving 20% productivity gains from AI and automation by 2028, building an integrated, scalable AI foundation rather than fragmented point solutions.
• Reduce reliance on manual transactional work, enabling teams to focus on higher-value, strategic initiatives.
• Enhance data-driven decision-making across functions through improved visibility and analytics.

After internal efforts to launch automation projects using the UiPath AI and automation platform struggled, the client partnered with Auxis, a Grant Thornton company, to accelerate progress, scale execution, and achieve sustainable results. 

Recognized as a Diamond and an Agentic Automation Fast Track partner for UiPath, the #1 intelligent automation platform, Grant Thornton|Auxis brings deep platform expertise and a proven track record of helping businesses realize the full potential of AI at work through high-impact automation initiatives. It stands among the top 1% of UiPath business partners globally who have earned all three of the platform’s highest distinctions, including recognition as an AI Partner of the Year.   

Beyond UiPath, Grant Thornton|Auxis brings strong cross-platform capabilities, enabling the development of a flexible, scalable, and future-ready automation ecosystem. For the university, this meant integrating additional AI tools aligned to its evolving needs, including Power Automate, Claude, Google AI Studio, and n8n.

Unlike providers who are just technical experts, Grant Thornton|Auxis also brings a century of strategic advisory experience – ensuring automation initiatives are grounded in optimized processes and aligned to business goals.

Establishing an Automation and AI Center of Excellence on an accelerated timeline 

Leveraging its extensive experience establishing automation CoEs for leading organizations, Grant Thornton|Auxis moved quickly to address the client’s urgent needs. 

Within the first week of project kickoff, Grant Thornton|Auxis was able to identify automation opportunities for development in two areas. In the first month, Grant Thornton|Auxis laid the foundation for an Intelligent Automation CoE, establishing:

• The CoE operating model, scope, and functional design
• A governance framework to provide structure, accountability, and clarity in decision-making
• Key stakeholders and CoE resources  
• A pipeline management framework to manage the automation pipeline – from idea submission to implementation
• A value realization framework for managing and measuring the performance of automation initiatives, tracking KPIs, benefits realization, and conducting a cost-benefit analysis to measure efficiency gains and ROI.
• Process discovery, documentation, and development of the two prioritized automations

Grant Thornton|Auxis launched its CoE the very next month, conducting a kickoff session with the client’s leadership and key stakeholders. Multiple university business units are in scope: administration and finance, enrollment, research and grants, faculty affairs, HR and staff services, IT and digital operations, and other enabling functions. 

Grant Thornton|Auxis defined prioritization metrics for the automation pipeline aligned with the client’s strategic goals – focusing first on business processes impacted by talent shortages, followed by compliance risk, and then opportunities to reduce labor hours and free staff for higher-value work.

Weekly status meetings, in-person brainstorming sessions, and monthly reviews with key stakeholders assess the performance and progress of automation initiatives, ensuring transparency, accountability, and continuous alignment with strategic priorities.

Delivering next-gen automations

With a mandate to deliver 35 automations by the end of 2026, Grant Thornton|Auxis is building an aggressive opportunity pipeline, with multiple automations already in various stages of implementation:

95%+ touchless transcript processing 

Challenge: 

The client’s enrollment team manually processes about 65,000 student transcripts annually for admissions. Most transcripts contain unstructured data, with significant variation in format, content, and grading scales – creating near-infinite structural complexity. 

As a result, extracting consistent and complete data was extremely difficult. Staff were able to manually capture only about four attributes per transcript, leaving critical information either missing or inconsistently assessed. This limited analytical insight and slowed the enrollment process.

Grant Thornton | Auxis AI solution:  

Following extensive requirements gathering and stakeholder interviews, Grant Thornton|Auxis reimagined the process using the next-generation UiPath intelligent document processing tool – Intelligent Xtraction and Processing (IXP) – and LLM-based automation. The end-to-end transcript processing solution includes two core capabilities:

• Direct data extraction of key transcript fields
• Intelligent interpretation to derive deeper academic insights
  
  

Here’s how the customized AI process works:

• Extracts 9 core data fields directly from transcripts
• Derives an additional 17 academic attributes (e.g., grade distributions, course counts, GPA indices) through academic interpretation
• Outputs each transcript as a standardized spreadsheet with 26 attributes 

Reviewers now focus only on exceptions and low-confidence extracts flagged by the automation, significantly reducing manual effort.

Key benefits: 

• 95%+ touchless processing for directly extracted data 
• Processing time reduced from 30 minutes to 30 seconds per transcript – a 60x efficiency gain!
• 2,500 transcripts processed per day, up from just 1,000 per week manually
• Enabled consistent, accurate data capture across thousands of transcript variations
• Eliminated plans for a costly third-party solution
• Unlocked new analytical capabilities, using standardized data to build comprehensive academic profiles that track and analyze performance for every student

The next phase of the solution will expand capabilities to include international transcript processing and deeper analysis of transcript data and high school profiles. Grant Thornton|Auxis will also use AI to determine whether GPAs are weighted or unweighted.

End-to-end automation of hundreds of faculty reappointments 

Challenge: 

Each school within the university reappoints hundreds of adjunct faculty members annually. Traditionally, the process involved manual validation of data from chairperson memos and faculty resumes, generation of reappointment letters from approved templates, routing for electronic signature via Adobe Sign, and then final entry into a database. Each reappointment took 30–35 minutes of manual effort, plus additional time spent on follow-ups – creating delays, administrative burden, and limited scalability.

Grant Thornton | Auxis automation solution: 

Grant Thornton|Auxis initiated a proof of concept (PoC) with one school managing approximately 230 annual reappointments. Leveraging UiPath automation solutions and the client’s existing project management tool, Grant Thornton|Auxis built an end-to-end automated process that:

• Detects reappointment requests
• Validates required information
• Generates reappointment letters
• Routes letters for review and electronic signature
• Completes reappointment documentation

The solution incorporates embedded human review, with final approval retained by the school’s faculty affairs department.

Key benefits: 

• Eliminated manual processing and follow-ups, significantly reducing administrative burden
• Enabled overnight processing, with documents ready for validation and approval the next day
• Improved visibility and tracking through seamless integration with existing tools
• Enhanced user adoption by leveraging familiar systems and tools

With the PoC completed successfully, Grant Thornton|Auxis established a scalable automation framework that can be extended across the university’s various business units – supporting both faculty reappointments and new appointments.

Agentic AI executive assistants for university leaders

Grant Thornton|Auxis is piloting AI agents designed to serve as executive assistants for university director-level executives – streamlining administrative work and accelerating decision-making.

Leveraging its cross-platform capabilities, Grant Thornton|Auxis is building the solution using Agentic AI from Anthropic (Claude), Google AI Studio, Codex, and Google Vertex. 

These AI agents will act as a one-stop command center for executive support – delivering daily briefings, preparing meeting materials, scheduling travel, and managing other executive assistant tasks. With embedded chatbot functionality, the solution can also retrieve information and answer questions from business users’ emails and documents. 

After the pilot phase, Grant Thornton|Auxis will roll out other AI assistants customized for differentiated staff personas.

Expected impact:

• Significant reduction in time spent on administrative tasks for director-level leaders
• Faster knowledge sharing and access to information, reducing time spent searching emails and tracking down documents
• Faster, more informed decision-making with real-time, consolidated insights
• Increased executive productivity, enabling greater focus on strategic priorities
• Scalable digital assistant model that can be extended across job functions

Other pipeline automations 

Grant Thornton | Auxis has dozens of other automations in development to further enhance efficiency, accuracy, and scalability across the university, including:

• Faculty promotion support

Reducing ~ 85% of manual effort (from up to 4 hours to 20 minutes of effort) in the tenure-track promotion process – automating review of unstructured CVs, aggregating data from multiple systems, benchmarking publications and citations, and compiling complete document dossiers. With human oversight embedded into the solution, the automation is expected to yield continuous improvements in consistency and accuracy – enabling faculty committees to focus on evaluation rather than data gathering and preparation.

• International student data validation

Automating validation of incoming international student data prior to system upload is designed to identify missing or inconsistent information early – improving data integrity and reducing downstream risk. By introducing real-time checks into a process that previously lacked pre-validation, the solution can help prevent incomplete or inconsistent records that can lead to serious consequences for students, such as incorrect admission decisions and delayed or denied immigration authorizations. 

• Transcript fraud detection

Deploying an AI-driven anti-fraud solution to detect potential alterations, falsifications, or inconsistencies in student transcripts – reducing reliance on manual verification, improving turnaround times, and strengthening fraud prevention. 

The Grant Thornton|Auxis-led automation CoE reduced administrative tasks by 80% in critical areas, freeing staff to focus on higher-value work. 

Grant Thornton|Auxis continues to help the university bring its vision of an integrated, scalable AI ecosystem to life through a well-structured automation CoE and a robust pipeline of initiatives leveraging Agentic AI, GenAI, and other cutting-edge automation technologies. Pleased with the Grant Thornton|Auxis team’s agility and innovative solutions, the client extended the initial 6-month agreement for another year, adopting automation with a mandate to focus on Agentic AI solutions in the next phase.

As the program continues to ramp up, early results include:

60x efficiency gains rapidly offset resource gaps

With two high-impact automations launched out of the gate, Grant Thornton|Auxis immediately began to help fill capacity gaps – achieving 60x efficiency gains from its first AI use case. 

Measurable ROI

Even as 2025 MIT research found 95% of AI pilots fail to achieve expected ROI, the Grant Thornton|Auxis program is delivering results – achieving 90% accuracy and a 20% overall productivity gain that meets the university’s 2028 target two years ahead of schedule. 

On track to deliver 35 automations by end of 2026

With the automation CoE fully operational, Grant Thornton|Auxis scaled delivery capacity by tripling the development team – building a robust pipeline of 35 prioritized automations and accelerating execution timelines to meet its aggressive goal.

Sustaining momentum with continuous innovation

The Grant Thornton|Auxis automation CoE team maintains a steady pipeline of automation initiatives, advancing 3-4 automations at a time while keeping others approved and ready to develop next.

Leading the shift to agentic automation in higher education

Grant Thornton|Auxis is already piloting Agentic AI solutions that help position the university as an innovation leader in higher education. Besides the Agentic AI executive assistants, these include AI agents that can manage after-hours facilities requests, generate tickets, and resolve issues – unlocking new levels of efficiency and responsiveness. AI-enabled delivery is another priority – using AI to accelerate discovery, documentation, and development, reduce costs, and speed time to value.

Real-time visibility & smarter decision-making

Automated process advancements like automated data capture and standardized insights are building a strong data foundation that enables advanced analytics, data-driven decisions, optimized operations, and better student outcomes.

Reimagining roles and responsibilities across the university

As Grant Thornton|Auxis automations take over transactional tasks, staff are shifting their focus to higher-value, strategic activities – redefining roles, resource needs, and the processes and tools that support them.

Want to learn more about the benefits of building an AI Center of Excellence to achieve enterprise-wide transformation? Schedule a consultation with our dedicated team of AI and automation experts today! Or, visit our resource center for AI and automation tips, strategies, and success stories.