La Trobe VC Theo Farrell says unis must use AI in all that they do

New La Trobe vice-chancellor Theo Farrell uses AI as a personal productivity booster and wants everyone at his university to do the same.

La Trobe University vice-chancellor Theo Farrell says organisational leaders must use AI and gain an understanding of it. Photo: Brendan McCarthy

Theo Farrell, La Trobe University’s new vice-chancellor, is on a mission to integrate artificial intelligence into every activity at the institution and it starts with him, as the university’s head, to lead by example. He has the Microsoft AI app Copilot installed on his dev­ices and uses it to draft emails, summarise documents, produce minutes of online meetings and make PowerPoint slides for presentations.

“You can use it to basically take a Word document and produce PowerPoint slides from it. It will then populate it with images,” he says with some enthusiasm.

Professor Farrell, who has been in the job just over three months, says leaders like him must use AI if they are to be effective in changing their organisations to meet the challenges, and to reap the benefits, of this transformational technology.

Too many executives in all types of organisations are not using AI in their personal workflows, he says. “Therefore they’re not fully understanding what the technology can do.”

But already, in organisations everywhere, he notes, people in less senior roles are using AI in their day-to-day work because they find it to be a useful productivity enhancer. This happens before executives have fully understood the new technology, grasped what it can do and developed the appropriate policies.

Professor Farrell says universities should not fall behind. He notes that AI was not a central element of the federal government’s recent major report on higher education, the Universities Accord. And he says much of the debate about AI in the higher education sector is not broad enough or visionary enough.

“There’s been a lot of focus around AI and student assessment and integrity of assessment. But actually that’s not the really important thing,” he says.

“All universities are committed to preparing graduates for their futures. Increasingly these futures, their careers, will be reshaped by AI. So as universities what we actually need to do is we need to look right across our education, our research and, of course, our own operations, and look at how we need to integrate AI into everything we do.”

But he knows there’s “a whole set of fears and concerns around AI” and he says this can be addressed by changing people’s mindset and introducing real use cases.

At La Trobe this is already under way. “We’re taking a whole bunch of academics. We are training them up in AI. We’re giving them the full suite of AI tools – Copilot tools – and then we’re following up to see how it changes their productivity and their workflows.”

Another thing Professor Farrell has in mind is even more interesting.

“Let’s take a whole subject,: he says. “Let’s design it entirely by AI and let’s deliver it by AI. And then let’s see what the student feedback looks like.”

He is enthusiastic about a range of applications in teaching and in research. For example, AI can help design drugs, he says.

“One of the areas we are really focused on at La Trobe is biotech and we are establishing, with Victorian government funding, a Centre for AI and Medical Innovation. That’s going to transform drug design in the future.”

But these are early days. He says the university will work with its communities to build an ethical framework for AI and a responsible adoption strategy.

The university also has to find ways to build AI into its legacy IT systems, which are not necessarily suited to it.

We are “just at the cusp”, he says.

If you look at Professor Farrell’s path to becoming a vice-chancellor it isn’t immediately obvious that he would have becoming this driving force for transforming a university with technology.

He is a military scholar who wrote Unwinnable: Britain’s War in Afghanistan, a much admired book, published in 2018, on the mistakes made in committing to years of conflict there after 2001.

Before joining the University of Wollongong seven years ago he was dean of arts and social sciences at City, University of London.

But he says he has always been interested and involved in applying new technology to education and back in 2005, when he was at King’s College London, he was working with colleagues on developing digitally delivered courses.

A key reason he believes AI is important is its impact on productivity, not only in education but in all service industries where, until now, productivity-enhancing automation has not made an impact.

“My view is AI is fundamental to unlocking productivity in the Australian economy,” Professor Farrell says. “Ninety per cent of our economy, basically, is service-based. It’s incredibly hard to have productivity growth in a service-based economy.”

But, in the university sector, won’t that mean job losses as AI takes on roles that lecturers and tutors do at the moment?

Professor Farrell says Australian universities already have a low staff to student ratio compared with other countries and he thinks the outcome of Australian universities adopting AI will be to improve the education experience for students, and offering them more personalised attention, rather than cutting academic jobs.

“I’m not anticipating AI will result in job losses in the academic sector in Australia,” he says.