AI Updates

What’s New in Your AI Tools

Google Gemini & Workspace

• Gemini in Forms can now turn your survey responses into next steps — Announced November 6: actionable insights in Google Forms uses Gemini to analyze form responses, surface key trends, and recommend next steps — so a survey with hundreds of replies across a dozen questions produces “here’s what stood out and what to do about it” instead of a wall of data. For campus teams that run registration forms, event feedback, or intake surveys, this is the first Gemini feature aimed squarely at making sense of results rather than drafting content. Rolling out now.

• Educators can add Guided Learning to any Google Classroom assignment — Also announced November 6 and now rolling out globally in all Gemini-supported languages: teachers can attach Guided Learning — the Gemini app mode that walks students through material step by step instead of handing over the answer — directly to any Classroom assignment. It’s the practical middle path for instructional staff who want AI to support comprehension without doing the work, and it’s the same tension the campus’s broader AI-deliberation conversations keep circling: support the learning, don’t substitute for it.

• Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash comes to Vids with longer generations and better quality — Video clips generated inside Google Vids can now run up to 15 seconds on the Omni 1.2 Flash model, with noticeably better character consistency and vocal realism across shots. If your team tried Vids earlier and bounced off the short, uncanny clips, the quality jump is worth a second look for quick explainers and event promos.

• Admins can now display a custom AI policy message before anyone joins a Meet call — Rolling out since late October: Workspace admins can set custom policy text in the admin console that appears in the Green Room before users join a Google Meet call, spelling out the organization’s rules for AI-handled meeting artifacts — recordings, transcriptions, and notes by Gemini. With Gemini features touching more of our meetings, a just-in-time reminder about what gets captured and how it may be used is cheap insurance against “I didn’t know it was recording” moments.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• The October Copilot wave rolls out worldwide this month — expect the app to look different — The big October announcements we covered two weeks ago move from the Frontier early-access program to general rollout in November, which means most campus Copilot users will see them land this month. What’s arriving: the redesigned Home that puts Chat (quick questions, first drafts) and Cowork (hand over a multi-step task) side by side with a shared navigation pane; Projects in Copilot Chat, which keep related chats, files, meetings, and instructions together so you stop rebuilding context every session; skills in Copilot Chat, letting anyone save a reusable set of instructions in plain English and share it with their team; OneNote and Planner support in Cowork, so it can read your notebooks and plans and update them with your approval; Excel’s interactive canvas and accounting skills; and the Workforce Insights Agent for admins. Practical advice: brief your teams now that the Copilot app is changing, because “where did everything go?” is about to be a common question — and skills in Chat are the quiet standout for units that answer the same kinds of requests every week.

• Microsoft Ignite is next week, November 17–20 — San Francisco and online, with a free digital pass. Expect the next wave of Copilot and agent announcements; we’ll summarize what matters for the campus in a future edition.

Zoom AI (ZoomMate)

• From ZoomMate’s October 19 release: workflows you can describe in plain language — and agents that can trigger them — The October 30 release we covered last week had a sibling we didn’t: the October 19 ZoomMate release, which is all about making workflow automation something a normal person can use. The headline items: you can now create a workflow by describing it — a “Describe it” tab in My Notes turns a plain-language description of your post-meeting task into a running automation through a short conversation; a new “when anyone joins my meeting” trigger fires per-participant in real time, enabling welcome messages, VIP arrival alerts to the host, or attendance logging the moment a specific person enters; admins can deploy workflows organization-wide on the My Notes trigger, so standardized post-note processing (task creation, notifications, data capture) reaches everyone without individual setup; and meeting summaries can now be routed to many more destinations — OneDrive, Google Drive, Confluence, Notion, Dynamics 365, HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoom Canvas, and Zoom Mail. The structural piece is a Workflow MCP server: external AI agents can now invoke your pre-defined Zoom workflows through simple calls, keeping workflow logic in Zoom and agent logic elsewhere. For campus teams building agentic automations on TritonAI that need to touch Zoom, that last one is the bridge to watch.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

• Campus AI Town Hall — Thursday, November 12, 2:15–3:45 p.m., virtual (Zoom webinar). The campus conversation on where AI stands and where UC San Diego is headed with it: how the AI industry got to this point, what our supported AI tools — from TritonGPT to the TritonAI Harness — actually do today, and what comes next. Register and submit questions in advance here. If you’ve been waiting for one event to get the full picture of campus AI, this is it.

• Calibrating your Compass: AI and Academic Integrity — Tuesday, November 10, 2:30–3:30 p.m., Center Hall, Room 339. OASIS and the Academic Integrity Office host a workshop on the role AI apps like ChatGPT and Claude should — and shouldn’t — play in your academic work, and how to build an approach that protects your learning. Aimed at students, but faculty and staff who field these questions every week will recognize the material.

• UC San Diego Horizon x Techstars Startup Weekend: Justice + AI — Starts Friday, November 13. The Office of Innovation and Commercialization teams with Techstars for a weekend build session on AI for legal access: whether a tenant can fight an eviction, whether a small business owner can draft a contract without a $400-an-hour phone call, and whether courts buried in backlogs can function. Builders, designers, lawyers, operators, and the legally curious are all welcome — no law background required.

Self-paced options in the meantime:

• Take the AI Foundations course to learn core AI concepts and UC policies on AI tools.
• Browse all 15 TritonAI Discovery Series training videos — hands-on sessions covering Zoom AI, TritonGPT, Google Gemini, Gemini Notebook, and the Citizen Developer track.
• Explore the Everyday I AI video series for short, practical prompting tips that work across TritonGPT and other AI tools.

TritonAI News

TritonAI Harness

• Harness v0.4.1 is the current stable release — and it shifts the app from conversations to projects — Published October 26, v0.4.1 is the newest stable version of the TritonAI Harness desktop app, and it’s a bigger jump than the version number suggests. The theme is continuity: instead of treating every task as a fresh chat, the app now keeps your work stitched together. Project overviews gather work in progress, recent updates, project memory, and suggested next steps in one place. Ideas offers ready-to-use suggestions drawn from your recent work, saved memory, and connected tools — with an editable draft before you send anything. A new record-a-skill capability lets you record yourself doing a task in your desktop apps and work with the agent to turn the steps into a reusable skill — the fastest path yet from “I do this manually every week” to “the agent does it.” And memory settings now manage memory and optional OneDrive sync for all your connected computers from a single place. One change to note: v0.4.1 removes the Tableau connection and the experimental guided tour from the Stable app (both remain in the Nightly version) — Tableau actually moved to Nightly-only back in v0.3.7, so anyone relying on it should plan accordingly. If you’re updating from an older 0.3.x build, you’ll also pick up optional UCSD sign-in with automatic session renewal (v0.3.6) and approval prompts that show the full details of what the agent plans to do (v0.3.7). For staff using the Harness for recurring work, the project-and-skills direction is the story: the app is getting better at remembering your context so you spend less time re-explaining it. Update in the app under Settings, About, Check for Updates.

Around Campus

• Halıcıoğlu School and IT Services launch PARASOL, nearly tripling campus GPU capacity for AI coursework and research — Announced November 3: PARASOL — the Platform for Applied Research, Analytics, Science and Open Learning — is the next generation of the campus’s long-running Data Science & Machine Learning Platform (DSMLP), jointly delivered by the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing and IT Services. Starting in Winter quarter 2027, new School-funded GPU servers — four machines carrying 32 NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs — will nearly triple the platform’s overall GPU capacity and nearly quadruple peak-period capacity for Halıcıoğlu School courses, adding roughly 66,800 GPU-hours during instructional peaks plus more than 213,000 off-peak GPU-hours each year for research, capstones, and graduate work. The driver is demand: Halıcıoğlu School programs alone are projected to grow from about 43,000 GPU-hours a year in 2026 to more than 140,000 by 2030, and students had been paying out of pocket for commercial cloud GPUs to keep up. Halıcıoğlu School students will also be the first to get automatic access to Open Learning workspaces for exploring large language models on their own. A new reservation system gives Halıcıoğlu students and faculty first priority while PARASOL continues serving coursework campuswide — a capacity model worth knowing about if your unit’s AI coursework has been competing for GPU time.

• $15 million DOE Genesis award will use AI to decode the 3D shape of RNA — Announced November 2: Professor Navtej Toor (Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics) received a three-year, $15 million Department of Energy Phase II Genesis Mission award — one of 12 awards totaling $159 million announced October 8 — for “Decoding the RNA Structurome to Secure AI Advantage for the Bioeconomy.” The project tackles the bottleneck head-on: AI transformed protein structure prediction after training on 200,000 experimentally determined structures, but fewer than 200 protein-free RNA structures have been solved in the past 50 years. Toor’s lab, which holds the record for the largest protein-free RNA structure ever determined by X-ray crystallography (a five-year effort), will scale up the experimental pipeline that produces the training data, then use it to build AI models that predict RNA’s three-dimensional shape from sequence alone — with applications in biofuels, healthcare, and engineered crops.

• Qualcomm Technologies backs a new AI-driven chip design initiative at the Halıcıoğlu School — Also announced November 2: a $500,000 gift from Qualcomm Technologies launches the AI in Microelectronic Systems (AIMS) initiative, pairing Qualcomm researchers with Halıcıoğlu School and San Diego Supercomputer Center faculty to apply AI to the design of systems-on-chips and the hyperscale computing architectures that AI itself runs on. Chip design remains largely manual and exponentially expensive; the initiative will develop AI methods for exploring architectures, predicting performance, and improving energy efficiency, and builds on existing collaborations including Yusu Wang’s AI-assisted chip design work and an independent benchmarking effort for AI processors led by Associate Dean Jinendra Ranka that already feeds performance data back to Qualcomm. It’s the recursive AI story in miniature: using AI to design the hardware that AI needs.

What’s New in Your AI Tools

Google Gemini & Workspace

• Gemini in Slides can now edit an entire presentation at once — Announced October 29: a single prompt in the Slides side panel can now update content across a whole deck, not just one slide. You can restyle everything at once (“Update this whole deck to match the style of this reference file”), simplify or expand the presentation grounded in files from Drive, condense multiple slides into one, or align title styles across all slides. Gemini decides which slides need changing, applies edits as if you made them (so undo and version history work), and shows a summary of what it changed in the side panel. Through at least December 1, 2026, Workspace customers get promotional access to higher limits for multi-slide creation. Rollout is extended (potentially longer than 15 days), so campus users will see it over the coming weeks.

• Fill with Gemini in Sheets adds cell-level citations and much larger requests — Rolling out since October 20: when you use the Gemini AI function to fill cell values, each cell now shows the exact web sources it referenced, so AI-generated data in a spreadsheet can actually be audited and verified instead of taken on faith. Upgraded processing is faster and more consistent cell-over-cell (Google cites up to 55x faster than manual entry on a 500-cell task), and capacity jumps to 3,000 cells per request — enough to summarize, categorize, or translate entire columns in one pass. On by default for anyone with Gemini in Sheets enabled; no admin control.

• You can now create, preview, and edit files directly in the Gemini app — Gemini app chats can now generate real files and let you work on them in place: expand to full screen and type edits directly, highlight text to ask questions, or have Gemini refine what you highlighted. It handles presentation outlines and slide content (editable in Slides or exportable as PPTX/PDF), structured trackers and tables that open straight in Sheets, and PDFs, Docs, LaTeX, Markdown, and TXT files you can upload to Drive when done. Available now to all Workspace customers, Workspace Individual subscribers, and personal accounts, in all languages where the Gemini app is available. No admin control — worth knowing if your unit tracks where documents get drafted.

• Immersive explorations arrive in the Gemini app — The Gemini app now includes a library of interactive, visual “immersive explorations” that let you peel back topics layer by layer — tracing trade routes on the Silk Road, peering inside a jet engine, or studying the physics of lightning — with guided explanations at each node you tap. More of a teaching and learning feature than a productivity one, but it’s a natural fit for course material and concepts that are easier to show than to describe. Available on web and mobile to all Workspace customers and personal accounts; English plus several other languages, with an English-only experience elsewhere.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• Microsoft’s October Copilot recap: Copilot Notebooks becomes Workspaces, and Copilot gets an autopilot — The October 30 “What’s New in Microsoft Copilot” post is one of the biggest monthly updates in a while. Highlights: the Copilot app gets a redesigned shared navigation pane and Projects (a persistent space that keeps related chats, tasks, instructions, and files together so you stop rebuilding context); Copilot Notebooks is becoming Copilot Workspaces, a shared team surface where you can create and edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files collaboratively without leaving the workspace; Autopilot runs Cowork tasks on a schedule or when a specified event occurs, so routine multi-step work moves without a manual prompt; and skills — reusable capabilities built in natural language — expand from Cowork into Copilot Chat, alongside role-based plugins for Sales, Service, Education, Legal, and Finance. There’s also a lot for the apps: Excel gains accounting skills, a clean-data skill that scans for duplicates and type errors, and an interactive canvas that builds a live report from workbook data; PowerPoint gets a stronger design model, interactive slide generation, and reusable task skills; Word adds a legal plugin with 20+ purpose-built skills and native Markdown round-tripping; and Teams meeting organizers can now get AI meeting summaries without retaining a transcript. On the governance side, Purview DLP now extends to Microsoft Cowork, and Copilot memory can be placed under retention policies. Most of this rolls out to the Frontier program now and worldwide in November.

• Microsoft Ignite is November 17–20 — Still the date to watch: expect the next wave of Copilot and agent announcements, and we’ll summarize what matters for the campus in a future edition.

Zoom AI (ZoomMate)

• ZoomMate’s October 30 release: meeting summaries can fan out to multiple apps in one step — Zoom’s October 30 ZoomMate release is all about the post-meeting workflow. A new Send Meeting Data action node lets a single reusable workflow step push a customized meeting summary to multiple destinations at once — first-party and third-party — instead of one app per workflow. Meeting criteria filters on the My Notes trigger got finer-grained (external meetings only, internal only, topic matching), the AI reasoning node can now read uploaded HTML files as context, and admins can deploy standardized meeting summary templates that users pick from a drop-down when configuring workflows. My Notes replaces its Workflow tab with a Follow ups tab that surfaces suggested tasks derived from meeting notes and connects directly into Workflows. Automated workflows are also now available to EU-region users through local infrastructure. For campus teams already sending Zoom summaries into Slack, email, or docs, the multi-destination node is the practical upgrade: build the routing once, reuse it everywhere.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

• Bridging Biomedical Breakthroughs Summit: AI in Biomedical Innovation — Wednesday, November 4, 1–6:30 p.m. at Price Center West, Ballroom AB. The School of Biological Sciences’ fourth summit brings together faculty innovators, entrepreneurs, investors, and healthcare leaders on how AI is accelerating therapeutics, diagnostics, and medical imaging, with faculty innovation pitches and sessions on moving discovery toward real-world impact. Open to faculty, postdocs, students, and industry partners.

• Operationalizing AI: From Research to Real-World Impact — Thursday, November 5, 8:30 a.m.–1 p.m. at the HDSI Data Science Building, Multipurpose Room. Part of the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing’s Mini-Symposium Series, on what it actually takes to translate AI research into scalable systems, products, and applications. Eventbrite registration closed November 3; if you registered, it’s this week.

• UCSD/SDSU Fall 2026 Software Carpentries Workshop — Tuesday–Friday, November 3–6, mornings. The UC San Diego Library, Research IT Services, and SDSU Research Cyberinfrastructure team up on a free, four-half-day workshop for novice-to-intermediate learners covering the core software and data skills researchers need: Unix shell, version control with Git, and programming fundamentals. A solid foundation before layering AI tooling on top.

Self-paced options in the meantime:

• Take the AI Foundations course to learn core AI concepts and UC policies on AI tools.
• Browse all 15 TritonAI Discovery Series training videos — hands-on sessions covering Zoom AI, TritonGPT, Google Gemini, Gemini Notebook, and the Citizen Developer track.
• Explore the Everyday I AI video series for short, practical prompting tips that work across TritonGPT and other AI tools.

TritonAI News

• UC San Diego launches the Center for Principled Agentic Intelligence — Announced October 28: as AI agents increasingly plan and act with limited human direction, UC San Diego is launching the Center for Principled Agentic Intelligence (CPAi), a partnership between the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing and the School of Arts and Humanities, with $1 million in support over three years plus $250,000 in shared computing resources. The center organizes its work around three principles — alignment, trust, and responsibility — and runs two initiatives: an AI Alignment and Society program co-led by Mikhail Belkin (HDSI) and Eddy Keming Chen (Philosophy and HDSI) examining how training and evaluation shape agent behavior, and a second team building an open-source testbed that simulates real-world tasks to measure how and why agentic systems fail, whether they stay within defined boundaries, and whether their behavior can be audited. For a campus deploying agentic workflows in production — ours and the ones we run on TritonAI — an independent, university-based evaluation capability is exactly what the sector is missing.

• $1 million gift advances agentic AI for education at UC San Diego — Announced October 29: Sanjay and Charlene Srivastava have given $1 million to the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing to fund research on how agentic AI — systems that can independently carry out complex tasks and adapt as information changes — can create more effective, accessible, and personalized learning experiences, from UC San Diego students to working professionals. The gift also names the Sanjay and Charlene Srivastava Multi-Purpose Room in the Halıcıoğlu School. It’s one more signal that the agentic AI conversation on campus now spans both the technology side (CPAi’s evaluation work) and the human side (how people actually learn with these systems).

What’s New in Your AI Tools

Google Gemini & Workspace

• Meeting recaps are coming to Google Chat — Announced October 19: Google is introducing meeting recaps in Chat, so the summary of what was said and assigned lands directly in the conversation instead of living only in Meet or your notes. The recap pulls from Meet’s “Take notes for me” output and gives teams a single place to follow through on meeting tasks. Rapid Release domains started seeing it October 16; Scheduled Release domains start October 27 (both gradual, up to 15 days). Availability is Business Standard/Plus and Enterprise Standard/Plus for now — Google hasn’t listed Education editions, so treat this as a preview of where Meet-to-Chat follow-up is heading rather than something campus users will see this quarter.

• Gemini in Google Sheets is now on iOS — Following its Android launch, Gemini in Sheets is now available on iPhone and iPad, so you can ask questions about your spreadsheet data and get analysis while away from your desk. Gradual rollout started October 15, and notably the availability list includes Google AI Pro for Education, the add-on edition UC San Diego users are on — so this one should reach campus Gemini users as the rollout completes.

• You can now analyze BigQuery data in Sheets with natural language — Also announced October 19: connect a spreadsheet to BigQuery with Connected Sheets, then ask Gemini questions conversationally — and Gemini runs the query against the full dataset in BigQuery, not just the rows visible in your sheet. Ask “What were total transactions last quarter?” or “How does that compare to the same quarter last year?”, then describe a dashboard (“revenue by region, monthly trend, top 10 products”) and Gemini proposes a plan and builds a new tab with refreshable pivot tables, database formulas, and charts. This is ON by default with no admin control, so if your unit has Connected Sheets users with BigQuery access, they now have conversational access to the warehouse.

• Google Vault can now export Gemini in Workspace conversations — Announced October 22, available now: Vault adds filtered eDiscovery exports for Gemini in Workspace. Administrators can filter users’ Gemini conversations by custodian and date range across Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Meet, then export them (JSON, with metadata aligned to the GenAI conversation format) including user prompts, AI responses, and generated attachments. Availability explicitly includes Education Fundamentals, Standard, and Plus — meaning Gemini conversations across UC San Diego’s Workspace domain are now exportable for records and legal holds. If your unit handles public-records or litigation requests, this closes a real gap in the campus AI compliance story.

• Gemini Notebook connects to the Gemini app, and Gemini apps publish to Google Sites — Two smaller Gemini app updates from the October 23 recap worth knowing: Gemini Notebook (a supported campus tool) is now a Connected App in the Gemini app, so you can type @Gemini Notebook in a chat to create notebooks, add sources, save notes, or query existing notebooks without leaving the conversation. And interactive apps built in the Gemini app can now be exported to Google Sites with one click, landing as a private site draft you can customize and publish. Both are available now to Workspace customers and personal accounts.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• Copilot Code wants to make everyone a (governed) app builder — Announced October 21 and rolling out through the Frontier program: Copilot Code is a new AI coding experience inside Microsoft Copilot aimed at the person who knows the workaround, not the professional developer. Describe a goal in natural language and Copilot asks clarifying questions, uses Work IQ to pull requirements from your email, meetings, documents, and connected data, then builds a working application — you can refine it by conversation, edit the code directly, run locally, or publish to a Microsoft-managed cloud. Two things matter for campus: when an app is shared, it runs on Copilot Managed Runtime and inherits your organization’s existing governance, security, and data-permission controls, and when a personal tool grows up, you can connect it to GitHub and open a draft pull request for review — a clean on-ramp into the engineering workflow rather than a parallel shadow-IT track. Watch this one; it’s the citizen-developer story Microsoft has been promising, arriving through the same agentic tech that powers GitHub Copilot.

• Microsoft Ignite is November 17–20 — Registration is open for Microsoft’s annual conference, which this year runs November 17–20. Expect the next wave of Copilot and agent announcements there; we’ll cover what matters for the campus in a future edition.

Zoom AI (ZoomMate)

• Zoomtopia recap: the Unified Context Layer, and AI that finishes the meeting — At Zoomtopia 2026 (October 20), Zoom pitched its next chapter: a Unified Context Layer that links conversation history with documents and data across Zoom and third-party apps, so people and AI agents get the full picture of a discussion instead of fragments. The concrete capabilities riding on it: Enriched notes (November) link shared screens, slides, and in-meeting chat to the exact moments they appeared in a searchable transcript; Follow the meeting (December) delivers personalized transcripts and summaries for people who missed part of a meeting; My Notes Workflows (rolling out now) turn meeting summaries into follow-up work in Zoom Chat and Salesforce, with ready-made workflows for sales, marketing, and IT or custom ones described in plain language; and ZoomMate Agent Teams (available now) runs specialized agents as a coordinated team. Zoom also showed My Notes hardware integrations with DTEN and Bota devices (November and Q1 2027) that extend AI note capture to in-person conversations — relevant to anyone thinking about hybrid meeting equity. On the meetings side: Translate Me (October) translates your audio into another language using a synthesized version of your own voice, and a Live Meeting AI Agent (Q1 2027) will privately assist during meetings.

• Zoom is opening its platform to external AI assistants via MCP — The quieter Zoomtopia story may matter most long-term: new MCP servers across the Zoom portfolio let developers and AI agents schedule meetings, pull transcripts, search content, and run admin actions from outside the Zoom app entirely. Search & Ask APIs are available now for querying Zoom’s context layer from Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, Copilot, Gemini, and Slackbot; an Admin MCP Server (October) handles admin tasks conversationally; and Zoom capabilities are being wired into external assistants including Claude, Codex, Copilot, and Muse. Zoom also added new management controls for governing AI activity across the account. For campus, this means Zoom context is becoming a first-class citizen in whichever AI assistant you already use — including the agentic tooling we’re building on TritonAI.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

• Bridging Biomedical Breakthroughs Summit: AI in Biomedical Innovation — Wednesday, November 4, 1–6:30 p.m. at Price Center West, Ballroom AB. The School of Biological Sciences’ fourth summit brings together faculty innovators, entrepreneurs, investors, and healthcare leaders on how AI is accelerating therapeutics, diagnostics, and medical imaging, with faculty innovation pitches and sessions on moving discovery toward real-world impact. Open to faculty, postdocs, students, and industry partners.

• Operationalizing AI: From Research to Real-World Impact — Thursday, November 5, 8:30 a.m.–1 p.m. at the HDSI Data Science Building, Multipurpose Room. Part of the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing’s Mini-Symposium Series, this event asks what it actually takes to translate AI research into scalable systems, products, and applications — the technical, organizational, and strategic decisions that determine whether a promising model becomes a deployed one. Registration is via Eventbrite (tickets free to $53.24) and closes Tuesday, November 3.

Self-paced options in the meantime:

• Take the AI Foundations course to learn core AI concepts and UC policies on AI tools.
• Browse all 15 TritonAI Discovery Series training videos — hands-on sessions covering Zoom AI, TritonGPT, Google Gemini, Gemini Notebook, and the Citizen Developer track.
• Explore the Everyday I AI video series for short, practical prompting tips that work across TritonGPT and other AI tools.

TritonAI News

• NSF renews TILOS with $15 million, keeping UC San Diego at the helm — Announced October 15: the National Science Foundation awarded $15 million over five years for Phase II of the AI Institute for Learning-enabled Optimization at Scale (TILOS), which UC San Diego has led since it was established in 2021 as one of the nation’s first NSF AI Institutes. The renewal runs November 1, 2026 through October 31, 2031 under PI Yusu Wang of the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing, with UC San Diego co-PIs Tara Javidi, Henrik Christensen, and Arya Mazumdar. Phase II widens the aperture from learning-enabled optimization to physically embedded intelligence, organized around three thrusts: foundational AI that adapts and generalizes more robustly, embodied multi-agent AI that coordinates in the physical world, and an AI hardware substrate for reliable operation across chips and infrastructure. Brown joins as a new partner alongside MIT, Penn, UT Austin, and Yale.

• UC San Diego is part of a DOE-funded multi-agent AI push for geothermal energy — Also announced October 15: the Department of Energy Office of Science selected MAESTRO — Multi-agent AI Expert for Subsurface Reasoning and Optimization — among its Genesis Mission Phase II awards. Led by UC Irvine, the project brings together researchers from five UC campuses (including UC San Diego’s Lianhui Qin, assistant professor of computer science), four national laboratories, and three industry partners to use multi-agent AI to discover and tap geothermal resources safely and economically. It’s another signal of how federal AI investment is funding agentic systems applied to hard physical problems — the same shift TILOS Phase II is betting on.

• A new global guide to higher-ed AI governance lands, and it validates the deliberation-first approach — Released October 21: D2L, WCET, and OpenEd Culture published “Governing AI from Strength,” findings from a multi-year global longitudinal study on AI governance in higher education, packaged as an action guide covering governance strategy and AI literacies. The guide’s throughline — that sustainable AI adoption comes from institutional deliberation and built-in literacies, not top-down mandates — tracks with what UC San Diego has been doing with its departmental AI deliberation process, where faculty bodies work through AI’s implications discipline by discipline. Between this, last month’s EDUCAUSE Top 10, and peer institutions formalizing faculty-led governance, the campus’s approach is increasingly the one the sector is converging on.

What’s New in Your AI Tools

Google Gemini & Workspace

• Gmail Live is rolling out to paid Workspace users — Announced October 15, gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility): Gmail Live brings Gemini-powered voice search to the Gmail mobile apps on iOS and Android. Tap the Live entry point in the Gmail search bar, ask a question naturally (“When is my next mandatory training due?” or “Show me the latest update from my manager”), and hear a synthesized answer drawn from your inbox. An email source card now appears at every conversational turn so you can see exactly which message the answer came from, and you can pick your preferred voice. The feature is ON by default for organizations with Gemini in Workspace access and respects existing smart features and personalization admin settings. One caveat for now: it’s currently US-only with EN-US as the language, so most campus users won’t see it immediately, but it’s a clear signal of where Google is taking search across Workspace.

• Gmail’s AI Inbox is rolling out to paid Workspace users — Also announced October 15: AI Inbox, first launched earlier this year, is expanding from its initial audience to paid Workspace editions. It automatically extracts suggested to-dos (action items, deliverables, and deadlines) from your email and summarizes priority work updates, so the important items surface instead of sinking. Rapid Release domains started seeing it October 12; Scheduled Release domains start October 26. Google notes AI Inbox will roll out later to Starter and Education editions in the coming months, so campus Gmail users should watch for it rather than expect it this week.

• Skills arrive in the Gemini app; the Workspace launch slips — Announced October 13: skills — reusable, stackable custom instructions that replace Gems — started rolling out in the Gemini app for all users, with completion expected by mid-November. Skill sharing and a Google Drive integration follow in the coming weeks. The bigger news for admins: the launch of skills in Workspace (Workspace Studio and Workspace apps) is delayed until further notice; Google had previously targeted Rapid Release completion by October 12 and a Scheduled Release start of October 19, and now says it will confirm a new timeline. The Gems retirement clock is still running: Gems move to Settings in the Gemini app on November 17, business and enterprise users lose Gems no sooner than March 1, 2027, and education users no sooner than June 1, 2027, with remaining Gems auto-migrated to draft skills. There are no admin controls for skills in the Gemini app; Workspace skills do have admin controls and are limited to users 18+. If your team built Gems for recurring workflows, start planning the manual recreation now — skills don’t sync between the Gemini app and Workspace.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• Office is now built into the new Copilot app — Announced October 9: you can now create, edit, and collaborate on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files directly inside the new Microsoft Copilot app, without hopping out to the individual Office apps. Combined with Copilot’s chat and agents, the Copilot app becomes a single surface where you can ask about your work, act on it, and produce the document, spreadsheet, or deck — all in one place, inside Microsoft 365’s existing security and compliance boundary.

• Copilot Notebooks gains delegated work, Office-grade editing, and more reference types — Also in the October 9 roundup: Copilot Notebooks (the AI workspace that gathers your references and project context in one place) now lets you delegate simple work to Copilot, edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files with the full power of the Office apps, and build interactive reports — plus Markdown, TXT, and RTF files can be added as references alongside existing source types. If your team is evaluating NotebookLM-style grounded workspaces, Notebooks is Microsoft’s answer and it’s moving fast.

• Copilot for legal is generally available — 20+ purpose-built legal skills — Announced October 15: Microsoft shipped more than 20 legal-specific skills into Copilot, plus partner plugins from 25 legal-technology vendors (iManage, NetDocuments, Docusign, Adobe Acrobat Sign, Everlaw, Relativity, Harvey, and others) that are beginning to roll out. In Word, Copilot drafts new agreements from approved precedents and reviews contracts against your playbook, proposing changes as native tracked changes that apply only with your approval. In Cowork, it handles multi-step work: building obligation trackers across contracts, drafting the transmittal email, and adding deadlines to your calendar. The Word plugin is enabled by default for commercial Microsoft 365 Copilot subscribers (governed by the “Legal Skills in M365 Copilot in Word” policy); in Cowork, users add the plugin themselves and admins govern it on the Agent Tools page. Directly relevant to campus offices that live in contract review — and a preview of how vertical skill packs are coming to Copilot generally.

• Admin note: Copilot offer structure changes December 1 — Per Microsoft’s October partner announcements (updated October 14): beginning December 1, 2026, new Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Business offers can be purchased without a qualifying Microsoft 365 base subscription, and those new offers replace the add-on offers for new purchases. Separately, usage-based billing will be default-on for new Copilot Business licenses starting December 1, with default spending limits. This extends last week’s billing-split item: the license line item keeps shrinking as a share of the real cost story, so units budgeting Copilot renewals should model credits and spending policies now, not in December.

Zoom AI (ZoomMate)

• Zoomtopia 2026 runs October 20–22, with education AI on the agenda — Zoom’s annual conference kicks off Tuesday (Americas session October 20; EMEA October 21; APAC and Japan October 22), and the education track previews several things worth watching for campus: Zoom Classroom, a new LTI 1.3 application that integrates directly with leading LMS platforms so instructors can schedule, launch, and manage Zoom sessions without leaving the LMS and students can submit video assignments from inside it; Zoom Video Management 2.0 for centralized lecture capture with AI-driven search and automated captioning; My Notes for Education, included with most Zoom Education licenses; and ZoomMate in education, applying the agentic assistant to administrative workflows. If you missed EDUCAUSE, Zoom’s education team is also hosting a recap webinar, AI in Action: A Recap of EDUCAUSE 2026 and Zoomtopia. Expect the usual wave of product announcements during the event itself — we’ll cover what matters for UCSD next week.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

• Bridging Biomedical Breakthroughs Summit: AI in Biomedical Innovation — Wednesday, November 4, 1–6:30 p.m. on campus. The School of Biological Sciences’ fourth summit brings together faculty innovators, entrepreneurs, investors, and healthcare leaders on how AI is accelerating therapeutics, diagnostics, and medical imaging. Open to faculty, postdocs, students, and industry partners.

• Catch up on the Discovery Series — All 15 TritonAI Discovery Series training videos are now live, covering the approved tools hands-on: Zoom AI, TritonGPT, Google Gemini, Gemini Notebook, plus the Citizen Developer sessions on AI strategy at the leadership level and building with harnesses and automation. Each video pairs a tool with campus use cases you can repeat at your own desk. Watch at tritonai.ucsd.edu/training-resources/videos — progress carries across the series.

Self-paced options in the meantime:

• Take the AI Foundations course to learn core AI concepts and UC policies on AI tools.
• Watch the AI Webinar #6 recording — a practical walkthrough of TritonGPT’s first year, including MyDocuments, model switching, and chat sharing.
• Explore the Everyday I AI video series for short, practical prompting tips that work across TritonGPT and other AI tools.

TritonAI News

• UC San Diego awarded $2.35 million from Google to advance AI-driven climate modeling — Announced October 14: Duncan Watson-Parris, assistant professor jointly appointed at the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, received $2.35 million through the Google.org Impact Challenge: AI for Science, a $36 million global initiative. The project uses AI agents both to improve how existing ocean data is represented in climate models and to identify where new observations would add the most value — including measurements from specially adapted Argo floats that capture small-scale ocean mixing, a process current models handle poorly. The work builds on the campus GAIA Initiative, which brings together researchers using AI to understand Earth’s natural systems, and it’s a strong example of the agentic-AI approach applied to hard scientific problems rather than office workflows.

• The 2027 EDUCAUSE Top 10 puts “determining where AI adds real value” at No. 1 — Unveiled at EDUCAUSE 2026 in Denver and covered by Inside Higher Ed on October 5: for the first time, an AI-related item tops EDUCAUSE’s annual list, which draws on a survey of 882 technology leaders across hundreds of institutions. The framing is notable — not “adopt more AI” but figure out where it demonstrably serves the mission, alongside future-proofing students, responsible innovation structures, and a strong data-governance backbone. EDUCAUSE’s Mark McCormack called it urgency rather than consensus: adopting technology because it’s there “isn’t good enough.” That value-first posture is the same discipline behind TritonAI’s task-specific assistants — tools that meet people where they already work — and it’s a useful citation when a unit asks why we build vertical assistants instead of pointing everyone at one generic chatbot.

• Peer institutions are formalizing faculty-led AI governance too — October 8 at CU Boulder: the faculty assembly introduced an AI resolution, moving shared governance formally into how the campus sets AI policy. It’s the same direction UC San Diego took with its departmental AI deliberation — asking faculty bodies to work through AI’s implications discipline by discipline before the university writes its next set of principles and policies. As more campuses land on deliberation-first models, the approach stops looking like an outlier and starts looking like the emerging standard for getting AI governance right.

What’s New in Your AI Tools

Google Gemini & Workspace

• Markdown files now open natively in Docs and Drive — Announced October 5, gradual rollout (up to 15 days): you can now view, edit, and collaborate on Markdown (.md) files directly in Google Docs without converting them, and Drive shows rendered previews with clickable links and formatted tables. Google explicitly built this for AI-era workflows: Markdown is the format LLMs use to preserve structure like tables and headers, and the update lets people and AI agents work on the same file with Docs’ real-time editing and commenting intact. No admin or end-user settings; available to all Workspace customers. If your team’s AI workflows involve round-tripping generated content through Google Docs, this removes a long-standing friction point.

• Google announces the Gemini agent at Gemini at Work 2026 — Announced October 8: Google introduced a single, universal Gemini agent for work that answers questions, handles knowledge work, creates images and media, and writes and runs code from one prompt box. The same agent now works inline inside Gmail, Drive, Docs, Slides, Sheets, Chat, and Calendar, carrying its memory, skills, and controls across surfaces. Google paired the launch with enterprise governance controls (identity and policy management, permission enforcement, secure sandboxing) and cost controls including multi-model orchestration, Smart Routing, and real-time spend caps. Nothing lands in a UCSD domain until Google’s October feature releases reach Workspace and admins see the corresponding Admin console settings, but the direction is clear: Gemini is consolidating into one persistent agent rather than a collection of per-app features. Watch for the Workspace-specific rollout announcements that follow.

• Workspace Studio gains nested logic, Gmail reply filtering, and a Drive search step — Announced October 9, gradual rollout starting October 13: the October Workspace Studio release adds nested conditionals for multi-layered branching, a Gmail trigger option that ignores follow-up replies so flows fire only on primary incoming email, Meet steps that output Calendar metadata (including full invitee lists) with templates for post-meeting follow-up drafts, and a dedicated Drive step that searches for documents by parameters instead of hardcoding file references. Features are ON by default for anyone with Workspace Studio access and inherit your existing domain and OU-level policies. This builds on the custom starters, steps, and webhooks that landed in September, so automations that needed workarounds a month ago are now first-class.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• Chat is now embedded in Copilot Search — In the October 6 release notes (covering September 22 through October 6): Microsoft 365 Copilot Search now embeds conversational chat directly in search results, so you can ask follow-up questions, synthesize findings, and generate content from what you found without switching to a separate chat tool. The same release adds a Regenerate action in Copilot Chat with “Try Again” and “Switch Model” options, so getting a different answer no longer means re-entering the prompt.

• Copilot in PowerPoint gains custom skills and file references — Also in the October 6 notes: you can now create custom skills in Copilot in PowerPoint, defining your own commands for repetitive presentation tasks, and Copilot on Mac can reference files stored in SharePoint and OneDrive by name in a prompt without manual uploads. Both run inside Microsoft 365’s security and compliance boundary.

• Admin note: Copilot billing split and spending policies — Per Microsoft’s October 1 partner announcement, everyday AI stays on the flat per-user Copilot license, while frontier models and advanced capabilities (Cowork, Code, Autopilot) move to usage-based billing in Copilot Credits, and nothing usage-based activates in a tenant until an admin creates a spending policy in the Microsoft 365 admin center under Copilot > Cost management. Usage-based billing starts rolling out in Q4. Units evaluating Copilot should factor this in now: the license line item no longer tells the whole cost story.

Zoom AI Companion

• ZoomMate expands from a side panel into the Workplace Home tab — New on Zoom’s What’s New roundup: ZoomMate now lives as a fully integrated home-tab experience in the Zoom Workplace desktop app, with agentic search, workflows, and AI agents running where the rest of your work is. My Notes gained Q&A (ask what you missed, with or without summaries enabled) and post-meeting follow-ups that send notes to a Google Doc or Gmail, update your CRM, or apply a note template automatically. ZM+ (Zoom-Hosted Models Plus) now routes to OpenAI and Gemma models through Amazon Bedrock alongside Anthropic, with data staying inside Zoom’s trust boundary. ZoomMate is also now available to K-12 institutions and organizations that require a Business Associate Agreement. Some capabilities require a ZoomMate license and consume AI credits.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

• Six more Discovery Series videos land October 15 — The next batch of TritonAI Discovery Series trainings goes live Thursday, covering the approved tools hands-on: Zoom AI, TritonGPT, Google Gemini, and Gemini Notebook overviews, plus the two Citizen Developer sessions on AI strategy at the leadership level and building with harnesses and automation. Each video pairs a tool with campus use cases you can repeat at your own desk. Watch at tritonai.ucsd.edu/training-resources/videos — your progress from the first nine videos carries over.

• Bridging Biomedical Breakthroughs Summit: AI in Biomedical Innovation — Wednesday, November 4, 1–6:30 p.m. on campus. The School of Biological Sciences’ fourth summit brings together faculty innovators, entrepreneurs, investors, and healthcare leaders on how AI is accelerating therapeutics, diagnostics, and medical imaging. Open to faculty, postdocs, students, and industry partners.

Self-paced options in the meantime:

• Take the AI Foundations course to learn core AI concepts and UC policies on AI tools.
• Watch the AI Webinar #6 recording — a practical walkthrough of TritonGPT’s first year, including MyDocuments, model switching, and chat sharing.
• Explore the Everyday I AI video series for short, practical prompting tips that work across TritonGPT and other AI tools.

TritonAI News

• UC San Diego’s departmental AI deliberation is drawing external attention — An October 5 piece in the AHigherVision higher-ed daily brief flagged UCSD’s approach of asking every academic department to formally deliberate on AI before the university writes its next set of principles and policies, framing it as a leading model for discipline-aware governance: AI questions differ across engineering, medicine, and the arts, and governance should consume those differences as input rather than issue one blanket rule. Third-party validation of the deliberation-first approach is worth citing in your own departmental conversations.

• Instructure’s first higher-ed EdTech Top 40: no dedicated AI tool cracks the top 100 — Released September 29: Instructure’s first higher-ed edition of its EdTech Top 40 research, based on Canvas LTI launch data from 19.5 million users between September 2025 and April 2026, found that despite the intense attention on AI in education, no dedicated AI tool ranks among the top 100 in actual instructional usage. Google Gemini, the most-adopted dedicated AI tool, reached about 88,000 users across 211 institutions — still outside the top 100. The report also notes only 11% of higher-ed instructors have received comprehensive AI training. The takeaway for campus: generic AI tools aren’t embedding themselves in real workflows; task-specific tools that meet people where they already work are what gain traction, which is exactly the design principle behind TritonAI’s vertical assistants and embedded experiences.

• Ai2’s budget-based GPU scheduling offers a model for shared campus clusters — Published October 9: the Allen Institute for AI replaced priority-based GPU scheduling with time budgets, hierarchical fair-share allocation, and time-slicing contracts, treating compute as a budget set by leadership rather than a queueing problem. With demand running 2–3x supply, debug-workload p90 queue wait fell from 2 hours to 30 seconds, and researchers described the change as feeling like 30% more compute. Directly relevant reading for anyone thinking about how campus GPU capacity across colleges and research programs gets governed as demand keeps climbing.

What’s New in Your AI Tools

Google Gemini & Workspace

• Find your learning tools all in one place with the student hub in Gemini — Announced October 1: the Gemini student hub is now available to Google Workspace for Education users of all ages. It gives students one starting point for Gemini’s learning tools, including study notebooks, flashcards, and practice quizzes. Admins: the hub rides along with the existing Gemini App and Notebook controls in the Admin console, so your current settings decide who sees it.

• Simple setup option for Workspace Client-side encryption — Announced October 1: Client-side encryption now has a simplified setup path in the Admin console. Google combines Cloud HSM keys with Google Identity to automate most of the setup flow, cutting deployment from a project to minutes while keeping encryption keys in your control. Availability is Enterprise Plus with the Assured Controls or Assured Controls Plus add-on. If your unit handles HIPAA- or export-controlled-adjacent data and has been deferring CSE because of the setup burden, this changes the math.

• Built-in interoperability between Google Meet and Microsoft Teams on Android devices, now generally available — Announced October 1, full rollout starting that day: Meet hardware can join Microsoft Teams meetings, and Teams Rooms devices can join Meet meetings. Full rollout reaches all Google Workspace customers with Android-based Meet hardware over one to three days. Useful if your shared rooms still split between the two platforms.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

• TritonAI Discovery Series is live — The first nine training videos launched October 5 on the redesigned Learn pages, covering the ecosystem from first orientation through safe, responsible use. The next six videos follow on October 15. Watch at tritonai.ucsd.edu/training-resources/videos.

• Digital Education Council certificate enrollment is open — Staff and campus leaders can enroll in the DEC learning streams tied to the TritonAI program, including the leaders stream. Start at tritonai.ucsd.edu/training-resources/certificate.

Self-paced options in the meantime:

• Take the AI Foundations course to learn core AI concepts and UC policies on AI tools.
• Watch the AI Webinar #6 recording — a practical walkthrough of TritonGPT’s first year, including MyDocuments, model switching, and chat sharing.
• Explore the Everyday I AI video series for short, practical prompting tips that work across TritonGPT and other AI tools.

TritonAI News

• Learn and Connect are live on the TritonAI site — The site restructure launched October 5: Learn gathers training pathways, the Discovery Series, and certificate enrollment in one place, and Connect collects community and event links, including the AI Community of Practice and use-case submissions.

• September gateway usage is published — TritonAI’s Developer Gateway processed 71.7 billion tokens and 13.1 million requests in September; January through September totals reached 527.0 billion tokens and 157.0 million requests. The public page notes the reporting caveat that shared application keys combine their users’ usage. See the gateway usage section.

• EDUCAUSE puts AI at the top of its 2027 issues list — Announced October 1 at the EDUCAUSE annual conference: AI holds the No. 1 slot for the first time in the Top 10 IT Issues list, framed around a theme of “perpetual change.” The report calls for AI governance, funding, and staffing decisions to move into formal planning cycles. GovTech’s coverage includes the full list and the sector context.

What’s New in Your AI Tools

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• The new Copilot: Home, Code, and Autopilot — Announced September 25: Microsoft is rebuilding Copilot around three capabilities. Home becomes the single starting point where Chat and Cowork come together, and with Office in Copilot, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint now run directly inside the Copilot app — files stay in sync between Copilot and the desktop Office apps. Code lets anyone build their own apps and automations in plain language, powered by the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot and running in an IT-governed Copilot Managed Runtime inside your tenant. Autopilot (previously previewed as Scout) is a persistent, proactive agent with its own identity, memory, and workspace that keeps working between prompts — monitoring channels, following up, and resuming projects days later. Home and Code start rolling out through the Frontier program in the coming weeks; Autopilot expands to private preview at the end of the month. Note for budget holders: Cowork, Code, and Autopilot move to usage-based billing in Copilot Credits, and Microsoft says metered services stay disabled until admins establish access through spending policies — new FinOps for AI tooling lets you set those policies, cap spend by group, and choose which model families each group can use.

• More Models, One Copilot: Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Sol roll out — Announced September 22: Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 and OpenAI’s GPT-6 Sol are rolling out to Copilot across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Copilot Chat, Copilot Cowork, and Copilot Studio — added the same day both models launched publicly. Whichever model a user picks, Copilot still works from the same Microsoft 365 context and permissions through Work IQ. Availability varies by license, region, and tenant, so expect the model picker to fill in gradually rather than all at once.

Google Gemini & NotebookLM

• Custom starters, custom steps, third-party integrations, and webhooks in Workspace Studio — Announced September 17, now fully rolled out: Workspace Studio flows gain four new building blocks. Custom starters trigger flows from events in other applications; custom steps run your own Apps Script logic inside a flow; third-party integrations (beta) connect Asana, Confluence, HubSpot, Jira, Mailchimp, QuickBooks, Salesforce, and Slack; and webhooks send HTTP requests to external endpoints. Note for admins: all four features are OFF by default, managed under Apps > Google Workspace > Workspace Studio, with per-feature approval settings and a URL allowlist for webhook access. If your unit has been waiting to build real automations beyond Google’s own apps, this is the release that opens the door — just decide your approval workflow before turning it on.

• Notebooks in Gemini now available for schools and organizations — Gradual rollout began September 14: Notebooks — the dedicated workspace that combines the Gemini app and Gemini Notebook — is now available to organizational accounts (outside the EEA). Users can gather up to 10 sources on one topic in a single notebook and work with them as a set: course materials become a study partner, rubrics and templates generate aligned coursework. Admins: access is on by default and governed by the existing Gemini App and Gemini Notebook access settings, so your current Gemini controls apply as-is.

• Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash in Vids, with 1080p and duration control — Announced September 23: Google Vids now generates AI video scenes in full 1080p HD (or upscales existing AI clips to match), extends scenes with more consistent characters, lighting, and audio, and lets you set exact clip durations to align with voiceovers. No admin control for this one — it rides along with Vids. Relevant if your team produces training or communications videos.

Zoom AI Companion

• ZM+ brings Anthropic models inside Zoom’s trust boundary — New on Zoom’s What’s New page: ZM+ (Zoom-Hosted Models Plus) adds Anthropic’s Claude models to ZoomMate through Amazon Bedrock’s managed service, with all processing handled inside Zoom’s trust boundary by a designated provider. The pitch for institutions watching data flows: you get a second frontier model without your meeting and chat content making a detour through a vendor you haven’t vetted. If your unit has residency or third-party-processing concerns about AI features in Zoom, ZM+ is the configuration worth reviewing — the details are in Zoom’s AI models and processing documentation.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

• Bridging Biomedical Breakthroughs Summit: AI in Biomedical Innovation — Wednesday, November 4, 1–6:30 p.m. on the UC San Diego campus. The School of Biological Sciences’ fourth summit brings together faculty innovators, entrepreneurs, investors, and healthcare leaders to explore how AI is accelerating therapeutics, diagnostics, and medical imaging, with faculty innovation pitches and sessions on moving discovery toward real-world impact. Open to faculty, postdocs, students, and industry partners.

Self-paced options in the meantime:

• Take the AI Foundations course to learn core AI concepts and UC policies on AI tools.
• Watch the AI Webinar #6 recording — a practical walkthrough of TritonGPT’s first year, including MyDocuments, model switching, and chat sharing.
• Explore the Everyday I AI video series for short, practical prompting tips that work across TritonGPT and other AI tools.

TritonAI News

• SCOUT is now broadly available at UC Merced — TritonAI’s multi-institution footprint keeps growing: SCOUT, the campus AI assistant built on the TritonAI platform, moved from production beta to broad availability at UC Merced on September 18. TritonAI’s multi-tenant deployments now span BearGPT (Berkeley), ANR AI, FredGPT (Fairleigh Dickinson), and SCOUT — the strongest evidence yet that the UC-hosted, model-agnostic approach scales beyond a single campus.

• UC San Diego holds steady as the nation’s No. 6 public university — and climbs in AI — Published September 22: in the new U.S. News Best Colleges rankings, UC San Diego held its No. 6 public-university position and rose in several AI-relevant measures — a four-spot jump into the top 20 of Most Innovative Schools, and a five-spot rise to No. 8 in the undergraduate computer science artificial intelligence specialty ranking, based on peer assessment surveys of deans and senior faculty.

• UC system charts systemwide, human-centered AI course — The UC systemwide AI Steering Committee delivered its first report to the Board of Regents on September 16, outlining five working groups (health and longevity, learning and work, discovery, protecting humans, and public good), campus showcase events over the coming year, and a push toward coordinated approaches with AI developers and cloud providers so UC is not reliant on a single vendor. UC also noted it was the first university to address AI explicitly in a Digital Risk Appetite statement — the same governance-first posture that shapes how TritonAI reviews and approves campus AI tools.

What’s New in Your AI Tools

Zoom AI Companion

• Zoom’s agentic search now spans ten enterprise connectors — Zoom’s What’s New page currently features a batch of agentic AI updates: AI Companion can answer enterprise-level questions across Salesforce, Google Drive, ServiceNow, Box, Workday, Confluence, SharePoint, Zendesk, and more, with ten connectors now live (requires the Custom AI Companion add-on). Agentic retrieval also now pulls Gmail and Outlook messages into AI Companion 3.0 on the web as context for questions and summaries, and a new MCP integration lets Claude Cowork and Claude Code use Zoom’s meeting intelligence to power context-aware workflows. If your team lives in both Zoom and Claude, that pairing is worth a look.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• Brand Kit and Skills arrive in Copilot in PowerPoint — Announced September 14: Copilot in PowerPoint gains Brand Kit, which applies your organization’s visual identity to AI-generated slides, and Skills, which carry reusable instructions so Copilot’s output stays consistent deck after deck. The goal is spending less time formatting slides to match organizational branding and more time shaping the story. For departments that produce a lot of leadership decks, this closes the gap between “AI made these slides” and “these slides look like ours.”

Copilot Studio

• Managing apps built in Copilot Studio — App creation is on by default for all users in both Copilot Studio and Copilot Cowork, and Microsoft’s September 15 post walks through how to keep the resulting app estate under control. Published apps are inventoried in the Microsoft 365 admin center, and the “Choose where people can make apps” setting (under Apps > Overview) lets admins decide which creation paths stay open. Worth a read if you track governance: the default is open, so if your unit wants to constrain citizen-built apps, this is the control to set.

Google Gemini & NotebookLM

• Gemini in Workspace can now connect to third-party tools — Rolled out September 15: third-party connectors let Gemini in Workspace work with content beyond Google’s own apps. Users reach connectors through the Gemini side panel in Docs, Sheets, and Slides, as well as in Google Chat. Note for admins: the feature is ON by default for users with Gemini for Google Workspace, managed at the domain, OU, or group level under Apps > Google Workspace > Gemini for Workspace > Third-Party Connectors.

• Workspace Studio flows can now move Drive files, reply to emails, and post in Chat — Four new automation steps in Workspace Studio Flows — Move Drive file, Copy Drive file, Send a Chat reply, and Reply to email — completed their rollout this month, with the Gmail step finishing September 14. Together they enable end-to-end automated flows for intake triage, template generation, and project-folder organization without scripts or third-party tools. The steps are available by default wherever Gemini for Google Workspace steps are allowed.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

• 2026 AI and Healthy Aging Symposium — Thursday, September 24, 9:30 a.m.–4 p.m. at Park & Market, hosted by the Stein Institute for Research on Aging. Keynotes from Noom’s chief medical officer and UC San Diego’s Amy Sitapati, plus expert panels on independent living, personalized healthcare, and using new technologies safely. Free to attend, but space is limited and registration is open now.

• Bridging Biomedical Breakthroughs Summit: AI in Biomedical Innovation — Wednesday, November 4, 1–6:30 p.m. on the UC San Diego campus. The School of Biological Sciences’ fourth summit brings together faculty innovators, entrepreneurs, investors, and healthcare leaders to explore how AI is accelerating therapeutics, diagnostics, and medical imaging, with faculty innovation pitches and sessions on moving discovery toward real-world impact. Open to faculty, postdocs, students, and industry partners.

Self-paced options in the meantime:

• Take the AI Foundations course to learn core AI concepts and UC policies on AI tools.
• Watch the AI Webinar #6 recording — a practical walkthrough of TritonGPT’s first year, including MyDocuments, model switching, and chat sharing.
• Explore the Everyday I AI video series for short, practical prompting tips that work across TritonGPT and other AI tools.

TritonAI News

• SDSC wins $10M NSF award to deploy Expanse2 — The NSF has awarded $10 million to the San Diego Supercomputer Center to deploy NSF Expanse2, a next-generation supercomputer supporting scientific discovery, engineering innovation, and AI-driven research nationwide when it enters production in 2027. The machine is architected for AI and machine learning workloads, with latest-generation GPUs and an all-NVMe file system, and will serve the NAIRR research community alongside traditional computational science.

• Virtual cells built from 4D AI models and digital twins could speed up drug discovery — UC San Diego researchers published two Cell studies showing how “virtual cells” — digital models that mimic the dynamic processes of real cells — can predict how mitochondria within human cells will respond to drug treatment. One approach trained a deep-learning model on 40,000 4D movies of drug-treated cells; the other built a physics-based “digital twin” of a living cell that reproduced real drug responses without changing a single parameter. Together, the studies could reduce dependence on time-consuming lab experiments and accelerate drug discovery for diseases including cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s.

• SDSC will lead the new NSF NAIRR Operations Center — The NSF has awarded $35 million over five years to SDSC, in collaboration with the Texas Advanced Computing Center, to establish and run the NAIRR Operations Center — the operational backbone that transitions the National AI Research Resource from a successful pilot into sustained national infrastructure. The center will coordinate private-sector, federal, and academic resource providers, build and operate a unified national NAIRR portal, and lead training and workforce development, building on a pilot that connected roughly 900 research teams across all 50 states.

• Scripps researchers diagnose why AI weather forecasts miss extreme events — A CW3E study led by Yanbo Nie, published in Geophysical Research Letters, introduces fast, interpretable methods for investigating why AI weather forecasts miss specific extreme events and how remote atmospheric processes shape them — directly relevant to atmospheric river forecasting in California. The work was funded by the Office of Naval Research and the California Department of Water Resources Atmospheric River Program.

What’s New in Your AI Tools

Zoom AI Companion

• Zoom Slides turns a prompt into a full deck — Zoom has added AI-powered slide generation: describe what you need, or point Zoom at a Canvas doc or your meeting content, and it builds a complete presentation you can refine with built-in AI editing. Useful for turning a project Canvas and its meeting notes into a leadership-ready deck without opening a separate tool. Also new on Zoom’s What’s New page: Auto Writing drafts recurring recaps, reports, and proposals automatically after meetings you set up once.

Microsoft Copilot with Data Protection

• Copilot adds Grok models from SpaceXAI — Microsoft continues its multi-model strategy: Grok models from SpaceXAI (xAI) are rolling into Copilot through the Microsoft Frontier Program, starting with a preview in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Access is managed by an admin setting that is off by default, and the preview is not available in the EU, EFTA, or UK. Worth knowing for anyone tracking data governance: SpaceXAI has been added to Microsoft’s Online Services Subprocessor List, and data sent to Grok models is processed outside Microsoft’s managed environments under xAI’s terms rather than Microsoft’s standard agreements. Nothing changes for campus users unless the feature is enabled at the tenant level.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• Domain Exclusion is back after its August rollback — The feature that lets admins exclude up to 1,000 domains from Copilot’s web grounding, abruptly pulled in early August, is available again as of September 9. If your department held off on configuring exclusions, the PowerShell-based setup is supported once more. Excluded domains are skipped at retrieval time, so their content cannot influence Copilot responses that use web search.

• Copilot in SharePoint gains reusable skills with evaluations — Copilot in SharePoint now supports reusable skills that follow you across SharePoint and OneDrive, and it can measure and improve those skills: ask Copilot to improve a skill and it suggests tests, evaluation criteria, and targeted updates instead of you rewriting instructions and hoping. Copilot’s chat cards are also more consistent across surfaces, which makes information, approvals, and available actions easier to act on.

Google Gemini & NotebookLM

• The Gemini desktop app is now available for Windows — Gemini now has a native Windows desktop app alongside the web and mobile experiences. Workspace admins can turn the Gemini app on or off for their organization from the Admin console, so availability at work depends on your domain’s settings.

• Gemini can now create content, schedule events, and coordinate tasks across Workspace apps — New cross-app agentic capabilities powered by Workspace Intelligence are rolling out (the rollout began September 2): ask Gemini in Chat to assemble a Slides deck from your project context, draft and send an email without leaving Docs, turn a long Gmail thread into a structured document, or schedule a meeting that checks everyone’s calendar — all without switching apps. Available for Business and Enterprise Standard and Plus editions.

• New admin controls for Gemini Notebook — Google rolled out two governance pieces for Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM): admins can now choose among four external-sharing options for notebooks, and comprehensive Gemini Notebook audit logs are available in the Admin console, giving full visibility into notebook actions and data access through the security investigation tool. Relevant if your unit uses notebooks with campus or research material — note that notebook user data itself is stored globally and does not currently support data regionalization.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

• The Secret Life of LLMs: The Hidden World of Experts Shaping AI — Wednesday, September 16, 1–2 p.m. PT, virtual. The UC San Diego AI Alumni Council hosts leaders from Handshake AI and Databricks for a look at what happens after model training: who actually teaches and evaluates frontier models, and why human expertise has become one of AI’s most valuable inputs. Registration required.

• 2026 AI and Healthy Aging Symposium — Thursday, September 24, 9:30 a.m.–4 p.m. at Park & Market, hosted by the Stein Institute for Research on Aging. Keynotes from Noom’s chief medical officer and UC San Diego’s Amy Sitapati, plus expert panels on independent living, personalized healthcare, and using new technologies safely. Free to attend, but space is limited and registration is open now.

• Bridging Biomedical Breakthroughs Summit: AI in Biomedical Innovation — Wednesday, November 4, 1–6:30 p.m. on the UC San Diego campus. The School of Biological Sciences’ fourth summit brings together faculty innovators, entrepreneurs, investors, and healthcare leaders to explore how AI is accelerating therapeutics, diagnostics, and medical imaging, with faculty innovation pitches and sessions on moving discovery toward real-world impact. Open to faculty, postdocs, students, and industry partners.

Self-paced options in the meantime:

• Take the AI Foundations course to learn core AI concepts and UC policies on AI tools.
• Watch the AI Webinar #6 recording — a practical walkthrough of TritonGPT’s first year, including MyDocuments, model switching, and chat sharing.
• Explore the Everyday I AI video series for short, practical prompting tips that work across TritonGPT and other AI tools.

TritonAI News

• First business data science bachelor’s degree in the UC system launches at UC San Diego — The Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing and the Rady School of Management have launched a new interdisciplinary Business Data Science major, the first program of its kind in the UC system. Students combine data science fundamentals with business strategy, preparing for roles where turning analysis into decisions is the actual job — the same convergence between technical depth and real-world use that the campus AI program keeps proving out.

• SDSC will test a new power architecture for AI data centers — The San Diego Supercomputer Center is the testbed for an $8.48 million California Energy Commission project that could change how AI data centers receive electricity. A bidirectional solid-state transformer converts medium-voltage grid power directly to the 800-volt DC that AI hardware needs — aiming to serve two megawatts of computing load while cutting the footprint of power equipment by more than 50% and achieving roughly 25% energy savings. The project pairs the hardware with AI workload-orchestration software so the data center can respond to grid conditions, and it includes a workforce pathway program connecting local residents to careers in data center and energy operations.

• Department of Energy Genesis Mission award funds an AI scientist for physics and quantum computing — UC San Diego researchers will lead one of the Department of Energy’s new Genesis Mission projects. A team led by physics professor Aobo Li will build SIDERIUS, an AI agent system that can analyze data, design AI models, and deploy them onto specialized chips for fundamental physics and quantum computing. UC San Diego researchers are also co-PIs on four additional Genesis projects, including ultra-fast AI tools for processing data from particle collisions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

What’s New in Your AI Tools

Zoom AI Companion

• Zoom’s My Notes bot can now cover meetings you can’t attend — Zoom AI can join Google Meet and Microsoft Teams calls on your behalf and deliver the AI notes, summary, and action items alongside your regular Zoom meeting notes. It requires calendar sync, and admins can enable or restrict the setting at the account, group, or user level. Useful for the recurring cross-platform meeting that never comes with notes. Also new on Zoom’s What’s New page: ZM+ for ZoomMate runs Anthropic models inside Zoom’s trust boundary, so select AI capabilities work without your data leaving Zoom.

Microsoft Copilot with Data Protection

• Copilot Chat adds text selection and shareable sessions — Microsoft’s August roundup rolled out two practical chat upgrades. You can now select a sentence, paragraph, or table inside a Copilot response and ask Copilot to work on just that content, with the selection previewed in the prompt before you send it. You can also share a full chat session or a single response through a link; recipients get a read-only view and can continue the conversation within organizational controls.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• Cowork gets effort levels and clearer cost controls — Copilot Cowork now lets you choose an effort level, from Light for simple tasks up to Max for deeper analysis, with the model and effort controls sitting together in the compose box. The /cost skill now shows credits used in the current session, the share of your monthly limit remaining, and when the limit resets. The Scheduled tab has been renamed Automations and now covers event-triggered tasks as well as scheduled ones. Also in August: Word gains hyperlinks, image understanding, and highlights; Excel adds chat history and a change-history skill; and Teams can generate meeting recaps in other languages.

Google Gemini & NotebookLM

• Custom instructions for Gemini now work across more Workspace apps — The persistent instructions feature that launched in Docs earlier this year now extends to Ask Gemini in Drive, Ask Gemini in Chat, and the Gemini side panel in Gmail, Sheets, and Slides. Set your tone, length, and formatting preferences once and Gemini applies them across all of those surfaces, so you can stop re-explaining your preferences in every prompt. The gradual rollout began September 2.

• Google Pics brings AI image creation and editing to Workspace — Google Pics is generally available as of September 4, adding AI image generation and object-based editing directly into Workspace creative workflows, so images for newsletters and decks no longer require a separate tool. Also new this week: Google Vids can turn Docs, PDFs, and Word files into narrated video summaries, with AI-generated scripts and custom visuals.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

• The Secret Life of LLMs: The Hidden World of Experts Shaping AI — Wednesday, September 16, 1–2 p.m. PT, virtual. The UC San Diego AI Alumni Council hosts leaders from Handshake AI and Databricks for a look at what happens after model training: who actually teaches and evaluates frontier models, and why human expertise has become one of AI’s most valuable inputs. Registration required.

• 2026 AI and Healthy Aging Symposium — Thursday, September 24, 9:30 a.m.–4 p.m. at Park & Market, hosted by the Stein Institute for Research on Aging. Keynotes from Noom’s chief medical officer and UC San Diego’s Amy Sitapati, plus expert panels on independent living, personalized healthcare, and using new technologies safely. Free to attend, but space is limited and registration is open now.

Self-paced options in the meantime:

• Take the AI Foundations course to learn core AI concepts and UC policies on AI tools.
• Watch the AI Webinar #6 recording — a practical walkthrough of TritonGPT’s first year, including MyDocuments, model switching, and chat sharing.
• Explore the Everyday I AI video series for short, practical prompting tips that work across TritonGPT and other AI tools.

TritonAI News

• TritonGPT 4.6.6 reaches production — TritonGPT was upgraded to version 4.6.6 in production this week. The default model now runs Muse Glimmer 30B, an open model hosted on UC San Diego infrastructure, and the lineup adds GPT-5.6 Terra, Gemini 3.7 Flash, and Claude Sonnet 5. Voice Mode lets you speak with an assistant and hear its responses, a coding sandbox runs code inside chat, and reasoning effort is adjustable per model. Read the release details on the TritonAI site.

• SCOUT is in production beta at UC Merced — UC Merced’s SCOUT assistant is in production beta, serving more than 100 faculty and staff users on the shared TritonAI platform, with the same hosting and governance controls as the UC San Diego deployment. The expansion sits alongside BearGPT at UC Berkeley, ANR AI at UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, and FredGPT at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

• UC San Diego will lead the new NSF NAIRR Operations Center — NSF awarded the San Diego Supercomputer Center $35 million over five years, with UT Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Center as partner, to establish and run the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Operations Center. The center transitions NAIRR from a successful pilot into sustained national infrastructure; the pilot has already connected roughly 900 research teams and educators across all 50 states with AI computing, data, and tools.

• First dual-use incubator cohort includes AI and autonomy founders — The Office of Innovation and Commercialization and Bow Capital selected six companies founded by UC San Diego students, faculty, and alumni for the inaugural summer incubator at the Design and Innovation Building. Each team receives $100,000 and three months of full-time support to build dual-use technologies spanning medical devices, advanced materials, artificial intelligence, and autonomous systems.

What’s New in Your AI Tools

Zoom AI Companion

• Zoom sets new migration dates for the new web experience — Zoom has published new migration dates for the redesigned Zoom web experience: September 30, 2026 for Enterprise (direct sales) and Release Track customers, and October 31, 2026 for indirect/channel accounts. Admins can move their organization over at any time before their segment’s date, and can roll back to the previous experience until then. After the deadline, the new experience is enforced and rollback is no longer available. If your team runs a departmental Zoom account, worth checking which segment you’re in before the fall.

Microsoft Copilot with Data Protection

• Copilot Chat now opens alongside Copilot Search — Copilot Chat is now available in the right-hand side pane while using Copilot Search in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, so you can act on search results without switching pages or losing context. Also in this update: email references now open directly inside Copilot Chat instead of launching a separate Outlook window, and the Copilot app has a refreshed design with a simplified chat home screen and navigation pane. Small changes individually, but they cut down on the app-switching that makes AI features feel like extra work.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• Outlook emails can now be added as references in Copilot Notebooks — Copilot Notebooks now accept Outlook emails as knowledge sources, alongside the files and documents already supported. That means the decisions and caveats that live in email threads can now ground a notebook’s outputs directly, rather than being re-summarized by hand first. The notebooks interface also got a streamlined navigation update in the same release.

Google Gemini & NotebookLM

• Ask Gemini in Chat starts rolling out — Google is introducing Ask Gemini in Google Chat, a unified command line for your work powered by Workspace Intelligence, with gradual rollout starting August 26, 2026. Through October 1, Workspace customers get promotional access to higher usage limits, so it’s a good window to try it before standard limits apply. If your team already works in Chat, this is the Gemini feature to test this quarter.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

No live trainings are scheduled in the next 14 days, but you can:

• Take the self-paced AI Foundations course to learn core AI concepts and UC policies on AI tools.
• Watch the AI Webinar #6 recording — a practical walkthrough of TritonGPT’s first year, including MyDocuments, model switching, and chat sharing.
• Explore the Everyday I AI video series for short, practical prompting tips that work across TritonGPT and other AI tools.

TritonAI News

• TritonAI publishes Citizen Developer Guide and updated data-protection guidance — TritonAI released a new Citizen Developer Guide to help staff, faculty, and researchers identify recurring work, choose a supported delivery path, and set data and human-review boundaries before building. The updated data-protection guidance clarifies that TritonGPT and the TritonAI Harness may be used with information up to P3 only within an approved service or setup, and that P4 data is not approved. If your team has been eyeing a workflow automation project, read this first.

• UC San Diego to Test Innovative Power Technology for AI Data Centers — The San Diego Supercomputer Center will serve as the testbed for an $8.48 million California Energy Commission-funded project to change how AI data centers receive and manage electricity, including a bidirectional solid-state transformer that converts medium-voltage AC directly to 800-volt DC. The project targets two megawatts of AI computing load, a 50%+ reduction in power equipment footprint, and roughly 25% projected energy savings, plus workforce pathways for under-resourced communities.

• NSF Funds New Center to Design Reliable, Self-Correcting Quantum Computers — A multidisciplinary team including UC San Diego computer scientists received a $37.5 million NSF grant for NSF PRACTIQAL, a center aimed at making quantum error correction practical. Yufei Ding, associate professor of computer science and engineering, leads a thrust on error-correction theory, scalable fault-tolerant architectures, and an open-source QEC software stack.

What’s New in Your AI Tools

Zoom AI Companion

• Zoom retires the “AI Companion” name — Zoom has dropped the “AI Companion” branding across its apps and settings. The features themselves (meeting summaries, chat compose, smart recording, etc.) are all still available — they’re now labeled simply as “AI” throughout Zoom Workplace. If you look for the old settings page, it’s been renamed accordingly. No action needed on your part.

Microsoft Copilot with Data Protection

• Domain Exclusion for Microsoft 365 Copilot rolled back — Microsoft has temporarily rolled back the Domain Exclusion feature, which let admins block specific websites from appearing in Copilot responses. If you were planning to configure domain exclusions for your department, hold off — Microsoft says it’s evaluating next steps and will share updates when ready.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• Copilot Notebooks now accepts Markdown, plain-text, and rich-text files — You can now add .md, .txt, and .rtf files as references in Copilot Notebooks, alongside the document types already supported. That means READMEs, wiki exports, system logs, meeting transcripts, and plain text files can be dropped directly into a notebook and queried without reformatting. Useful for pulling together project context that lives outside of polished Word docs.

Google Gemini & NotebookLM

• Google introduces Gemini 3.7 Flash — Google released Gemini 3.7 Flash, a faster model with stronger coding, document comprehension, and workflow automation than its predecessor (3.6 Flash). For everyday Gemini users, expect more accurate responses on complex documents and better follow-through on multi-step requests. The model is already powering Gemini Spark, Google’s personal agent, for Pro and Ultra subscribers.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

No live trainings are scheduled in the next 14 days, but you can:

• Take the self-paced AI Foundations course to learn core AI concepts and UC policies on AI tools.
• Watch the AI Webinar #6 recording — a practical walkthrough of TritonGPT’s first year, including MyDocuments, model switching, and chat sharing.
• Explore the Everyday I AI video series for short, practical prompting tips that work across TritonGPT and other AI tools.

TritonAI News

• UC San Diego Receives Department of Energy Genesis Mission Award to Fund New Scientific AI Tools — UC San Diego researchers will lead a DOE Genesis Mission project deploying intelligent AI agents to accelerate fundamental physics and quantum computing research. The team is building SIDERIUS, an LLM agent system designed to translate scientific challenges into AI-ready tasks.

• Researchers Use AI to Decode Key DNA Sequence in Gene Activation — A UC San Diego lab used machine learning on 500,000 DNA sequences to crack the “initiator” — the DNA pattern that kickstarts gene activation. The finding could help researchers predict disease-causing mutations and design synthetic gene controls.

• The New Frontier of Emotional Support: Artificial Intelligence — UC San Diego researchers examine the rise of AI chatbots for youth mental health and propose a five-pillar framework for the responsible evolution of AI-based emotional support, published in Nature Human Behaviour.

What’s New in Your AI Tools

Zoom AI Companion

• Zoom Voice Translator reaches general availability — Zoom’s real-time spoken-language translator is now generally available in meetings, letting participants who speak different languages communicate without manual interpretation. It supports English, Chinese, French, Japanese, and Spanish, and integrates with existing AI-powered translated captions. Also in this release: My Notes gains quick-capture on iOS via Home Screen widget and Control Center, and Zoom Phone calls can now activate real-time transcription with speaker-attributed captions that save automatically to the My Notes hub.

Microsoft Copilot with Data Protection

• Domain Exclusion gives admins more control over Copilot web grounding — Admins can now exclude specific domains from Copilot’s web-grounded responses, so certain sites will not be used as source material when Copilot pulls information from the web. This is useful when you want to block competitor sites, unreliable sources, or internal domains from influencing AI-generated answers. The feature was updated in early August with refinements based on early feedback.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• Copilot Notebooks now works with Markdown, plain-text, and rich-text files — You can now bring READMEs, wikis, logs, transcripts, and rich-text files into Copilot Notebooks alongside the documents you already use. This means more of your existing project material can serve as context for Copilot without reformatting. If your team keeps notes in Markdown or exports transcripts as plain text, those files now work directly in the notebook experience.

Google Gemini & NotebookLM

• New connected apps are coming to Gemini — Gemini is rolling out the ability to connect external services so you can plan, create, and manage tasks in one place. New integrations include productivity tools like Granola and Otter.ai for meeting summaries, Wix for website editing, OpenTable and Ticketmaster for bookings and events, iHeartRadio and Pandora for music, and Angi, Thumbtack, and Zocdoc for home and health services. Connecting is optional and can be turned on per service in Gemini settings. Also this week, Google announced Gemini 3.7 Flash, a new model with stronger coding and document-reasoning capabilities now available to Pro and Ultra subscribers in Gemini chat.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

• 📼 AI Webinar #6 — One Year of Innovation with TritonGPT: Past, Present, and Future — This recorded session reflects on TritonGPT’s launch and showcases features like MyDocuments, model switching, chat searching, and chat link sharing, plus strategies to stay engaged with AI topics on campus. Watch the recording on the TritonAI webinars page.
• 📼 AI Webinar #5 — Lean Six Sigma and Artificial Intelligence — This recording explores how AI tools like TritonGPT can complement Lean Six Sigma workflow optimization, with real-world examples and impact data from campus teams.
• 📌 AI Foundations in UC Learning — The self-paced AI Foundations course covers core AI concepts, UC policy, and where AI genuinely helps in higher education. Available to anyone on campus through UC Learning.

TritonAI News

• National Data Platform Receives NSF Category I Award to Expand AI-Ready Data Infrastructure — UC San Diego’s National Data Platform has received an NSF Category I award to expand AI-ready data infrastructure across the U.S. The project aims to make research data more accessible and usable for AI-driven discovery, strengthening the foundation that campus researchers rely on for machine learning and analytics work.
• Five UC San Diego Innovators Nominated for First UC Regents Innovation Awards — Five UC San Diego faculty and researchers are among the inaugural nominees for the UC Regents Innovation Awards, which recognize translational research with real-world impact. Several nominees’ work intersects with AI and computing, reflecting the campus’s growing role in turning AI research into deployed solutions.

Monday, August 10, 2026

What’s New in Your AI Tools

TritonGPT

• AI Contract Reviewer and Transcript Matcher now in production — Two human-supervised workflows are live. Contract Review compares language against approved positions and prepares redlines for a reviewer. Transcript Matching compares incoming transcripts with student records and routes uncertain cases to staff, with 99.86% accuracy across 3,700+ records in its published validation sample.

Zoom AI Companion

• AI Companion adds persistent memory and expanded workflow automation — AI Companion can now remember your work preferences and communication style across sessions, producing more personalized responses over time. Zoom also expanded its no-code workflow automation tools for recurring tasks.

Microsoft Copilot with Data Protection

• Domain Exclusion for Copilot web grounding has been rolled back — Microsoft pulled back the feature that let admins exclude specific domains from Copilot web search results. The capability is being reevaluated. Admins who configured domain exclusions should expect an update from Microsoft before the feature returns.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• Meeting recaps app comes to Teams — A new Meeting recaps app pins AI-generated meeting summaries in the Teams sidebar. You can filter by meeting, browse 30 days of recaps, and generate audio summaries to catch up on the go. Also new this month: Copilot in Excel can ground analysis in Power BI data, Copilot in Word supports Track Changes review workflows, and Copilot Notebooks now accept Markdown and TXT files as references.

TritonAI Developer API

• 13 new models added to the public Model Hub — This week’s catalog expansion adds Claude Opus 4.7, 4.8, and 5; Claude Sonnet 4.6; Gemini 3.5 Flash and 3.5 Flash Lite; Gemini 3.6 Flash; Kimi K2.5 and K2.6; MiniMax M2; DeepSeek V4 Flash; Gemma 4 31B; and a Bedrock-hosted Claude Opus 4.6 variant. Developers now have 28 public models to choose from, up from 15 last week.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

• No live webinars are scheduled in the next two weeks.
• Recent recording: AI Webinar #6 — One Year of Innovation with TritonGPT covers MyDocuments, model switching, chat search, and link sharing.
• Self-paced: AI Foundations in UC Learning covers core AI concepts, UC policy, and where AI helps in higher education. Open to all campus users.

TritonAI News

• Puppy Bots and Bot Tour Guides: Inside a Human-Robot Interaction Class at UC San Diego — A UC San Diego course gives students hands-on experience building and interacting with robots, exploring how humans and machines work together.
• With ARPA-H Award, UC San Diego Engineers Will Develop a Soft, Autonomous Robot for Stroke Care — Federal funding supports a new soft robot designed to assist with stroke rehabilitation autonomously.

What’s New in Your AI Tools

TritonGPT

• AI Contract Reviewer and Transcript Matcher now in production — Two new human-supervised workflows are live. Contract Review compares contract language with approved UC San Diego positions and prepares redlines for a reviewer. Transcript Matching compares incoming transcript documents with student records and routes uncertain cases to staff, with 99.86% accuracy across 3,700+ records in its validation sample.

Zoom AI Companion

• Zoom retires the “AI Companion” name and launches a refreshed Workplace interface — Zoom has dropped the “AI Companion” brand; the features are now labeled simply “AI” throughout Zoom Workplace. Starting August 3, a redesigned interface rolls out with a new AI panel that lets you ask questions about past meetings and during live meetings. Late joiners get an automatic AI catch-up prompt summarizing what they missed.

Microsoft Copilot with Data Protection

• New Domain Exclusion control for admins — Administrators can now specify up to 1,000 external domains to exclude from Copilot’s web grounding, giving organizations more precise control over which sources influence AI-generated responses. Configured via PowerShell; available now.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• July 2026 roundup: new models, Word workflows, and Excel brand kit — GPT-5.6 and Claude Sonnet 5 are now available as model choices in Copilot across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Cowork. Word gains Track Changes support for Copilot edits plus automatic table-of-contents management. Excel gets a brand-kit skill for applying approved organizational colors and fonts to charts and tables.

Google Gemini & NotebookLM

• NotebookLM is now Gemini Notebook with a new address and code execution — Google renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook on July 16. As of August 1, the app’s address moved from notebooklm.google.com to notebook.google.com (old links redirect automatically). The update also adds a “secure cloud computer” to each notebook, letting you run code for data analysis directly on your sources. Existing notebooks are unaffected.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

• AI Foundations — Self-paced course in UC Learning covering core AI concepts, UC policy, and where AI helps in higher education. Available to all campus users. Start AI Foundations
• Webinar Recordings — Past sessions including “One Year of Innovation with TritonGPT” and “Lean Six Sigma and AI” are available on the TritonAI webinars page. No upcoming live webinars are currently scheduled.

TritonAI News

• From Code to Care: UC San Diego Leading in AI for Health Care — UC San Diego Health’s AI strategy was featured at the 2026 U.S. News Healthcare of Tomorrow conference, highlighting AI-powered patient messaging that reduced colonoscopy cancellations from 10% to 3%, AI-supported sepsis prediction, and the health system’s framework for responsible AI evaluation.

What’s New in Your AI Tools

Zoom AI Companion

• Zoom adds natural-language workflow creation — Zoom’s July 20 release lets people describe a workflow in the conversational interface, answer follow-up questions, and review the workflow before running it. ZoomMate licensing and UC San Diego’s account settings determine availability.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

No live sessions are listed for the next two weeks. These resources are available any time:

• AI Webinars — Watch recordings on TritonGPT, prompting, and AI-supported campus work.
• Everyday I AI video series — See short examples of prompting with TritonGPT and other generative AI tools.

TritonAI News

• Mathematicians call for clear standards for AI research — UC San Diego mathematician Karthik Ganapathy helped write the Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics. It asks researchers and AI companies to protect scientific integrity, disclose how systems produce results, and keep research priorities with the mathematics community.
• Rahul Parhi receives the 2026 Popov Prize — The UC San Diego electrical engineering professor was recognized for research in approximation theory. His work examines what neural networks learn and when a trained model can perform well on new data.

Monday, July 13, 2026

What’s New in Your AI Tools

Zoom AI Companion

AI catch-up prompts help late joiners get up to speed — Participants joining a Zoom meeting late now see an automatic pop-up offering to use AI to summarize what they missed. When Meeting Questions is enabled, late arrivals get instant context without interrupting the meeting flow.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 is now available in Microsoft 365 Copilot — Rolling out in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Copilot Chat, and Copilot Cowork. GPT-5.6 brings stronger reasoning for multi-step tasks — cleaner drafts in Word, sharper analysis in Excel, richer presentations in PowerPoint. In Copilot Cowork, it powers end-to-end agentic workflows that move from instruction to completed deliverable.

Google Gemini & NotebookLM

NotebookLM adds video overviews and structured research outputs — NotebookLM can now generate AI-powered video summaries alongside Audio Overviews, and supports structured outputs like FAQs, timelines, tables, and flashcards. Combined with larger source limits and Gemini 3.5 capabilities, it’s a stronger research and analysis tool for campus workflows.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

No live sessions scheduled for the next two weeks, but past webinars are available on demand:

• AI Webinar #6 — One Year of Innovation with TritonGPT — Anniversary recap featuring My Documents, model switching, chat search, and link sharing.
• Everyday I AI video series — Practical prompting tips for TritonGPT and other generative AI tools.
• Self-Appraisal Prompting Guide — Use AI to articulate your impact for this year’s appraisal.

TritonAI News

Faculty Symposium highlights AI in higher ed teaching. UC San Diego faculty shared practical examples of AI integration in teaching — from classroom exercises to grading workflows. The event showcased how AI is strengthening, not replacing, the teaching process. Read more on Today@UCSD.

July 6, 2026

What’s New in Your AI Tools

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• Claude Sonnet 5 now available in Microsoft 365 Copilot — Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 5 is rolling out as a new model option inside Microsoft 365 Copilot. If you work in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Outlook, you can now choose Sonnet 5 alongside existing models to match the AI approach to your document or task. No extra setup needed—it appears automatically in the model picker.

Google Gemini & NotebookLM

• Gemini Spark arrives on Mac — Google launched Gemini Spark, a personal AI agent for macOS that works autonomously on your behalf. It can organize folders, build documents from your local files, and run multi-step workflows across Google Workspace—think of it as an assistant that doesn’t just answer questions but actually does work. Available now in the Gemini macOS app for Google AI Ultra subscribers.

TritonAI Developer API

No notable changes to the TritonAI model hub this week.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

No new live webinars are scheduled for the next two weeks, but you can catch up on previous sessions:

• AI Webinar #6 — One Year of Innovation with TritonGPT: Past, Present, and Future — Covers TritonGPT’s launch journey, new features like My Documents and model switching, and strategies for staying engaged with AI tools.

• Self-paced courses are always available: AI Foundations (UC Learning) and the Everyday I AI video series.

TritonAI News

SDSC helps prepare AI tourism assistant for World Cup crowds — UC San Diego’s San Diego Supercomputer Center worked with Mexico City’s innovation agency to load-test Xoli, an AI-powered tourism assistant designed to help visitors navigate the city during the FIFA World Cup. SDSC researchers demonstrated how to distribute AI model requests across multiple GPUs, ensuring the system can handle the surge of simultaneous users expected during the event. The same scalable AI infrastructure techniques apply to education, healthcare, and government services.

Read the full story

Have questions or want to suggest a topic? Email tritonai@ucsd.edu.

June 29, 2026

What’s New in Your AI Tools

Zoom AI Companion

• **[AI Companion name retired, features stay as “AI”] — Zoom’s June 2026 update drops the “AI Companion” branding, but don’t worry — Meeting Summaries, Chat Compose, Scheduling Assistance, and Smart Recording all remain under a simpler “AI” label. New this week: an AI catch-up prompt automatically offers late-joiners a summary of what they missed. Also new: Zoom Slides, Sheets, and Paper are now accessible from the Zoom mobile app navigation bar (view-only for Slides, editable for Sheets and Paper). And admins can now automatically disable AI features when certain restricted users join a meeting.

Microsoft Copilot with Data Protection

• Anthropic’s Claude now available in Copilot Chat — You can now select Claude as a model option in Copilot Chat for complex analysis, document understanding, and structured content generation. This gives you more flexibility to choose the AI model that best fits each task — Claude tends to excel at longer documents, detailed analysis, and multi-step planning. Available on all platforms (Android, Windows, iOS, Mac, Web).

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• Learning Agent is now generally available — Microsoft’s Learning Agent brings personalized AI upskilling directly into your workflow. It recommends tips and training based on your role, daily tasks, and work patterns — right inside Copilot, Teams, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. No more digging through course catalogs. Each day starts with an AI Tip of the Day tuned to what you actually do.

Google Gemini & NotebookLM

• Gemini Enterprise adds Confluence Data Center connector — You can now connect your Confluence Data Center instance directly to Gemini Enterprise. This means Gemini can search and reference your Confluence knowledge base when answering questions, summarizing content, or drafting responses. No more switching between tools to find that policy page or project doc. Also new this week: Agent Registry with governance for custom MCP servers and agents, plus observability dashboards for tracking agent performance.

TritonAI Developer API

• Cohere transcription model added to model hub — A new self-hosted Cohere audio transcription model (`api-cohere-transcribe`) is now available through the TritonAI API. This adds native audio transcription capability to the platform, running on UCSD’s own infrastructure. Developers can integrate speech-to-text into their applications without sending audio data to external services.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

• Catch up on past webinars — Missed a session? Webinar #6 (“One Year of Innovation with TritonGPT”) and Webinar #5 (“Lean Six Sigma vs. Artificial Intelligence”) are available to watch on demand, along with slide decks. Visit the AI Webinars page to access recordings.

• Self-paced learning — Enroll in Module 1 - AI Foundations on UC Learning for an introduction to AI concepts, UC policies, and practical applications in higher education.

• Everyday I AI video series — Short, practical videos on using generative AI tools effectively. Watch the full playlist on YouTube.

TritonAI News

• New model on the platform: Cohere transcription — The TritonAI API model hub added a self-hosted Cohere audio transcription model this week. It’s available now for any UCSD developer building speech-to-text into their applications.

June 22, 2026

What’s New in Your AI Tools

TritonGPT

• UC San Diego Assistant launches in the UC San Diego mobile app — The TritonGPT-powered UC San Diego Assistant is now available directly in the campus mobile app. Ask questions about campus resources, policies, and services on the go without opening a separate browser tab. Great for quick answers between meetings or while walking across campus.

Zoom AI Companion

• “AI Companion” is now just “AI” — and it’s faster on mobile — Zoom’s June 2026 update retires the “AI Companion” brand (the features stay the same — Meeting Summaries, Chat Compose, Scheduling Assistance, and Smart Recording all remain). The bigger news for mobile users: Zoom Slides, Sheets, and Paper are now available on your phone. View slides, edit sheets, and work with Paper docs from the Zoom mobile app navigation bar.

Microsoft Copilot with Data Protection

• Copilot Notebooks roll out to more users across your team — Copilot Notebooks — the shared workspace where you can gather project files, ask questions across documents, and create mind maps — is now rolling out to Copilot Chat users in addition to Microsoft 365 Copilot subscribers. If your team has mixed licenses, everyone can now collaborate in the same notebook. Access it in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app or OneNote on the web.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• Learning Agent is now generally available — Microsoft’s new Learning Agent brings personalized AI upskilling directly into the flow of work. It recommends tips and training based on your role, daily tasks, and work patterns — right inside Copilot, Teams, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. No more digging through course catalogs. Each day starts with an AI Tip of the Day tuned to what you actually do.

Google Gemini & NotebookLM

• NotebookLM gets its biggest update yet — powered by Gemini 3.5 — NotebookLM can now build its own source library from a conversation. Start a chat about a project and it will suggest relevant sources, search for material, and build your knowledge base. You can also export outputs in multiple formats — documents (PDF, DOCX), data visualizations, spreadsheets, structured data (CSV, JSON), and presentations. Available to Google AI Ultra users and Workspace business customers with AI access.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

• Catch up on past webinars — Missed a session? Webinar #6 (“One Year of Innovation with TritonGPT”) and Webinar #5 (“Lean Six Sigma vs. Artificial Intelligence”) are available to watch on demand, along with slide decks. Visit the AI Webinars page to access recordings.

• Self-paced learning — Enroll in Module 1 - AI Foundations on UC Learning for an introduction to AI concepts, UC policies, and practical applications in higher education.

• Everyday I AI video series — Short, practical videos on using generative AI tools effectively. Watch the full playlist on YouTube.

TritonAI News

• UC San Diego Assistant goes mobile — The campus AI assistant built on TritonGPT is now available in the official UC San Diego mobile app. Ask questions, find resources, and get help with campus services from your phone.

June 15, 2026

What’s New in Your AI Tools

TritonGPT

• UC San Diego Assistant launches in the UC San Diego mobile app – Now available in the official UC San Diego mobile app (iOS/Android), delivering AI-powered campus knowledge about resources, parking, dining, and library info.
• Platform update: Onyx 3.3 – Upgraded to Onyx v3.3, improving document search and retrieval for the UC San Diego Assistant, with behind-the-scenes hardening and observability improvements.

Zoom AI Companion

• Zoom Workplace 7.0 updates bring memory optimization and AI Companion onboarding improvements – Memory optimization for inactive tabs, Linux Contacts tab enhancements, and onboarding workflow improvements for AI Companion.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• Microsoft Copilot adds richer Copilot Chat, admin updates, and OneDrive actions – Outlook email grounding, opening PDFs in chat, new GPT-5.5 Instant and Thinking models, custom connector controls, and OneDrive Copilot actions.

Microsoft Copilot with Data Protection

• Claude Opus 4.7 brings stronger instruction following and visual understanding to Copilot – Claude Opus 4.7 helps complete complex, multi-step work more accurately with improved instruction following, tool selection, and higher resolution visual understanding.

Google Gemini & NotebookLM

• Gemini 3.5 Flash feature management toggle removed – Gemini 3.5 Flash feature management toggle is no longer available starting June 16, 2026.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

• AI Webinar #6 - One Year of Innovation with TritonGPT: Past, Present, and Future – Reflect on TritonGPT’s launch, new features like “MyDocuments” and model switching, and strategies to stay engaged with AI.

TritonAI News

• Beyond the Song Generator: How UC San Diego Students Are Rethinking AI and Music – Students and faculty explore AI’s role in music composition, accessibility, and creativity.
• UC San Diego Professor Daniel Kane Awarded Gödel Prize – Computer science and mathematics professor Daniel M. Kane receives the 2026 Gödel Prize for groundbreaking work in computational complexity.

What’s New in Your AI Tools

TritonGPT

• UC San Diego Assistant launches in the UC San Diego mobile app — Access AI-powered campus info (parking, dining, library) on iOS and Android.
• Platform update: Onyx 3.3 — Improved document search, retrieval, and system observability.

Microsoft Copilot with Data Protection

• New Copilot feature: Grounded web search with internal data — Securely access external business data without storing it in Microsoft 365.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• April 2026 Update: Real-time control for sensitive data in Copilot prompts — Prevents oversharing risks by blocking sensitive info in web search prompts while allowing internal data grounding.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

• No upcoming events in the next 14 days.
• Watch: AI Webinar #6 - One Year of Innovation with TritonGPT

TritonAI News

• AI-Powered CPR Coach Outperforms 911 Dispatchers — UC San Diego study finds AI guidance improves bystander CPR response.
• Free ‘Digital Twin’ for Wireless Testing Released — Simulate real-world network conditions for wireless apps without hardware.

Welcome to this week’s roundup of AI updates and tools—what’s new, what it means for your workflow, and what’s coming up.

What’s New in Your AI Tools

TritonGPT

• UC San Diego Assistant launches in the UC San Diego mobile app (May 27): The UC San Diego Assistant is now available in the official UC San Diego mobile app on iOS and Android. Students, faculty, and staff can ask questions about campus resources, parking availability, dining options, library information, and more — directly from their phone.

• Platform update: Onyx 3.3 (May 28): Upgraded to Onyx v3.3, bringing significant improvements to the platform that powers the UC San Diego Assistant’s document search and retrieval capabilities. Key new features include tabular file indexing (spreadsheets and CSVs are now indexed as structured data), smoother chat streaming with live LaTeX rendering, queued messaging, image extraction from PDFs, and connector improvements for Gong, HubSpot, Confluence, and Google Drive.

• TGPT Widget now shows live parking and busyness data: The TritonGPT widget (available on Blink) now displays real-time parking availability and current busyness levels at Geisel Library. The interface has also been redesigned for clearer AI response tracking.

Zoom AI Companion

• AI Companion side panel now contextual within Zoom Workplace: The AI Companion icon is being removed from the desktop app header. Instead, each product (Mail, Calendar, Chat, Canvas, Phone) will have its own AI Companion entry point for more relevant, in-context assistance. Rolling out to most customers by the end of May 2026.

Microsoft Copilot with Data Protection

• GPT-5.5 Instant now rolling out in Copilot Chat: OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 Instant model is now available in Copilot Chat, delivering faster response times and improved contextual understanding for enterprise workflows. Rolling out through May 2026.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• Federated Copilot connectors bring real-time enterprise data: New federated connectors from partners like Moody’s, HubSpot, LSEG, and Notion let Copilot pull real-time enterprise data directly into Word, Excel, and Teams. This means more informed document generation, data analysis, and decision-making—no more manual data entry or stale reports.

Google Gemini & NotebookLM

• Gemini Omni adds conversational video editing: Omni Flash, the new video generator in the Gemini app, now supports conversational editing. Describe changes like “make the background a rainy Tokyo street” or “give him a leather jacket,” and Gemini updates the clip without requiring a full re-prompt.

TritonAI Developer API

• New model families now available: TritonAI’s public model hub has added new models, including GPT-5.5 (now with web search support), Claude Opus 4.7 and Sonnet 4.6, and Amazon Nova Premier v1.0. These models offer improved reasoning, vision, and function-calling capabilities—review the public model hub for API parameters and cost details.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

No live trainings are scheduled in the next 14 days, but you can:

• Take the self-paced AI Foundations course to learn core concepts and UC policies on AI tools.
• Explore past TritonAI webinar recordings for practical demonstrations and tips.

TritonAI News

UCSD AI in the News

• UC San Diego awarded $4.85M to grow NEMAR into HPC hub for neuro-AI: A new $4.85 million NIH grant will expand NEMAR, a platform for sharing and analyzing neuroimaging data, into a high-performance computing hub—enabling scalable AI research for brain science and accelerating discoveries in neurological disorders.

• AI model links tumor mutations to treatment response: Researchers at UCSD developed an AI model that predicts how tumors with specific mutations respond to treatments, enabling personalized cancer therapy and reducing reliance on trial-and-error approaches in clinical oncology.

Questions? Reply to this email or reach out to the tritonai@ucsd.edu.

What’s New in Your AI Tools

TritonGPT

• TritonGPT Widget updates and live campus data (May 1 2026) – The AI widget now shows live parking availability and Geisel Library busyness, plus a redesigned response view that makes it easier to follow how the assistant generated its answer.

Zoom AI Companion

• Meeting summary with Zoom AI Companion (19 hours ago) – After each meeting Zoom automatically creates a concise summary you can share, so you spend less time writing notes.

Microsoft Copilot with Data Protection

• Microsoft 365 Copilot security updates (6 days ago) – New admin controls let you enforce data‑protection policies before deploying Copilot agents, reducing the risk of accidental data exposure.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• Move the Copilot button back to the Ribbon – You can now place the Copilot icon on the Word/Excel/PowerPoint ribbon where it’s easy to find, undoing the floating button that many users found confusing. The option is available from the Customize Ribbon settings in each app.

Google Gemini & NotebookLM

• Gemini app gets a new Neural Expressive design (1 day ago) – A refreshed UI with fluid animations and haptic feedback rolls out on desktop, iOS and Android, making the chat experience feel more natural.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

• AI Webinar #6 – One Year of Innovation with TritonGPT (recording) – Review the past year’s highlights, including the new “MyDocuments” feature and model‑switching tips.
• AI Webinar #5 – Lean Six Sigma vs. Artificial Intelligence (recording) – Learn how AI can complement Lean Six Sigma methods for workflow optimization.

TritonAI News

• AI can seem more human than real humans in a classic Turing test (study finds) – Researchers show that AI‑generated responses can be judged more human‑like than actual people in blind tests.
• AI‑Powered CPR Coach outperforms 911 dispatchers in guiding bystander resuscitation – A new AI assistant gives step‑by‑step CPR instructions that improve bystander performance compared with standard 911 guidance.

Monday, May 18, 2026

What’s New in Your AI Tools

TritonGPT

• TritonGPT Widget gets live campus data — The chat widget now shows real-time parking availability and Geisel Library busyness levels. Redesigned interface makes it easier to follow how the AI assembles answers.

Zoom AI Companion

• Zoom Workplace 6.31 update — Meeting summaries now available in 36 languages. AI Companion can also draft calendar invites directly from meeting discussion.

Microsoft Copilot with Data Protection

• Federated Copilot connectors now available — Connect Copilot to external data sources like HubSpot, Notion, and more. Ask questions using natural language instead of navigating dashboards.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• GPT-5.5 Instant now rolling out — Faster response times with improved reasoning. Write drafts in Word, analyze spreadsheets in Excel, and summarize emails in Outlook with less waiting.

• Agent Mode in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint — Copilot can now take actions on your behalf like formatting documents and applying Excel formulas. Less typing, more finishing.

Google Gemini & NotebookLM

• Gemini 3.1 Pro and Flash available — Gemini 3.1 brings improved code generation and multi-step reasoning. NotebookLM now generates interactive audio overviews with Q&A style narration.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

No upcoming live sessions this week. Catch up on past recordings:

• AI Webinar #6 — One Year of Innovation with TritonGPT — Covers “My Documents”, model switching, and chat features
• AI Webinar #5 — Lean Six Sigma vs. AI — How TritonGPT can support process improvement workflows

Self-paced: UC Learning Module 1 — AI Foundations

TritonAI News

• TritonAI model hub now contains 17 models: GPT-5.5, Claude Opus, Gemini 3.1, Llama 4 Scout, and Kimi K2.5 are available. Swap models in User Settings to find the right fit for your task.

• API model hub update: New self-hosted models added — api-gemma-4-26b for low-cost local inference and api-mistral-small-3.2-2506 for fast completions.

• UC San Diego Assistant now has live data tools — Ask about parking lot availability or library crowd levels and get current information, not stale articles.

Questions? Reply to this email. To subscribe, visit tritonai.ucsd.edu.

What’s New in Your AI Tools

TritonGPT

• TGPT Widget updates with live campus data (May 1): The TritonGPT widget on Blink now shows live parking availability and real-time busyness levels at Geisel Library. The interface has also been redesigned to make it easier to trace how the AI generates responses. Behind-the-scenes work improved system performance and reliability.

Zoom AI Companion

• No major updates this week.

Microsoft Copilot with Data Protection

• Federated Copilot connectors bring real-time enterprise data (May 5): Microsoft launched federated connectors that pull live data from external systems like HubSpot, Notion, and Moody’s directly into Copilot responses. For staff, this means getting current CRM records, stock ratings, or deal statuses without switching apps. Data stays in the source system and access is governed through your existing permissions.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• GPT-5.5 Instant now available in Microsoft 365 Copilot (May 7): OpenAI’s latest model is now available in Copilot Studio and rolling out to Copilot Chat. It’s designed for faster responses on everyday tasks while maintaining quality. You can select it from the model picker in supported Copilot experiences.

Google Gemini & NotebookLM

• No major updates this week.

TritonAI Developer API

• No changes to the model hub this week.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

No new live sessions are scheduled for the next two weeks. The TritonAI webinar series remains available on demand:

• AI Webinar #6 — One Year of Innovation with TritonGPT: A look at what’s changed since launch, including MyDocuments, model switching, and chat sharing.
• Everyday I AI video series: Short, practical prompting tips that work across TritonGPT and other AI tools.
• AI Foundations course (UC Learning): A self-paced intro to AI concepts and UC policy.

TritonAI News

• UC San Diego Launches First Course for New AI Major (April 28): The university launched its first course for the new AI major this spring. Students are getting hands-on experience with machine learning and neural networks. The program aims to build a pipeline of AI talent for research and industry.

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Week of May 4, 2026

What’s New in Your AI Tools

TritonGPT

• TGPT Widget updates with live campus data (May 1): The TritonGPT widget on Blink now shows live parking availability and real-time busyness levels at Geisel Library. The interface has also been redesigned to make it easier to follow how the AI generates responses. Behind-the-scenes improvements were made to boost system performance and reliability.

Microsoft Copilot with Data Protection

• No major updates this week.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• What’s New in Microsoft 365 Copilot — April 2026 (April 30): This month’s update includes a refreshed chat-first mobile app design, new Copilot Notebooks features like generating Word documents and PowerPoint presentations directly from notebook content, and Copilot in Excel now supporting Python for advanced data analysis. Plan mode in Excel helps you preview complex changes before they’re applied. Copilot in OneNote now understands images, tables, and note tags for richer responses.

Google Gemini & NotebookLM

• Notebooks in Gemini now available (April 30): The NotebookLM integration is now live in the main Gemini app. You can create notebooks to organize chats and files for complex projects, with everything syncing between Gemini and NotebookLM. Sources you add in one app automatically appear in the other, so you can start research in Gemini and generate Video Overviews in NotebookLM without switching contexts. Rolling out to Google AI Ultra, Pro, and Plus subscribers on the web now.

TritonAI Developer API

• New model added this week: `api-llama-4-maverick` appeared in the TritonAI Developer API model hub. This is a self-hosted model with vision and reasoning capabilities, adding to the growing lineup of on-premise options for sensitive workloads.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

No new live sessions are scheduled for the next two weeks. In the meantime, the TritonAI webinar series is available on demand:

• AI Webinar #6 — One Year of Innovation with TritonGPT: A look at what’s changed since launch, including MyDocuments, model switching, and chat sharing.
• Everyday I AI video series: Short, practical prompting tips that work across TritonGPT and other AI tools.
• AI Foundations course (UC Learning): A self-paced intro to AI concepts and UC policy — good starting point if you’re new to AI tools at work.

TritonAI News

• Students Get an Intro to AI in First AI Major Class at UC San Diego (April 28): UC San Diego launched its first course for the new AI major this spring, giving students hands-on experience with machine learning, neural networks, and real-world AI applications. The program aims to build a pipeline of AI talent for research and industry.

Week of April 27, 2026

What’s New in Your AI Tools

TritonGPT

• New LLMs, UCSD Assistant tools, and search improvements (April 14): TritonGPT now offers GPT 5.4, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Gemini 3.1 Flash, Claude Sonnet 4.6, and Gemma 4 26b as model choices — the older OpenAI 4 Series has been retired. The UC San Diego Assistant can now look up campus parking info and check how busy locations like dining halls and libraries are. The Internet Search Assistant also got a reliability upgrade, returning more current results with fewer errors.

Zoom AI Companion

• Zoom Workplace 7.0.3: Hub tab added to mobile app (April 21): A new dedicated Hub tab is now visible in the Zoom Workplace mobile app (iOS and Android), giving you one place to find your recordings, docs, and other Zoom assets without digging through menus. The update also fixes a bug with sharing PDFs in meetings on iOS.

Microsoft Copilot with Data Protection

• Microsoft 365 Copilot Readiness and Resiliency with SharePoint and M365 Backup (April 22): Microsoft published guidance on new content governance enhancements tied to SharePoint and M365 Backup — useful for IT and compliance teams managing data protection policies for Copilot deployments.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• Anthropic Claude Opus 4.7 now available in Microsoft 365 Copilot (April 16): Claude Opus 4.7 is now available as a model choice in Copilot Chat, Copilot Studio, and rolling out to Copilot in Excel. It’s designed for complex, multi-step tasks — following instructions more closely and checking its own outputs before responding. You can select it from the model picker in the Copilot app.

Google Gemini & NotebookLM

• April Gemini Drop: Notebooks integration, Mac app, and more (April 25): The April Gemini update brings NotebookLM’s research and organization features directly into the main Gemini app under a new Notebooks section — so you can manage chats and research without switching between tools. The update also adds a native Mac desktop app and the ability to create personalized images using connected Google account context.

TritonAI Developer API

• New model added this week: `gpt-5.5` appeared in the TritonAI Developer API model hub since the April 23 snapshot. It supports vision, web search, and reasoning, with a 1,050,000-token context window — the first model in the hub to surface native web search capability.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

No new live sessions are scheduled for the next two weeks. In the meantime, the TritonAI webinar series is available on demand:

• AI Webinar #6 — One Year of Innovation with TritonGPT: A look at what’s changed since launch, including MyDocuments, model switching, and chat sharing.
• Everyday I AI video series: Short, practical prompting tips that work across TritonGPT and other AI tools.
• AI Foundations course (UC Learning): A self-paced intro to AI concepts and UC policy — good starting point if you’re new to AI tools at work.

TritonAI News

• New conversational AI tool helps people decide when to seek medical care (April 21): UC San Diego researchers built an AI tool grounded in trusted clinical protocols that guides users through symptom questions and recommends whether to seek care — and when. It’s aimed at reducing both unnecessary ER visits and delayed care.
• AI-enhanced microscopy produces real-time video inside live cells (April 18): A UC San Diego team combined AI with advanced microscopy to capture high-resolution, real-time video inside living cells — a breakthrough that could accelerate research in drug development and biology.

What’s New in Your AI Tools

TritonGPT

• New LLMs, UCSD Assistant tools, and search improvements — TritonGPT added GPT 5.4, Gemini 3.1 Pro and Flash, Claude Sonnet 4.6, and Gemma 4 26b, plus new Parking and Busyness tools in the UC San Diego Assistant and better web search in the Internet Search Assistant. For staff, that means better model choice for different tasks and more useful campus-aware answers in one place.

Zoom AI Companion

• When action catches up to ideas: the next phase of work — Zoom says AI Companion is moving beyond summaries toward follow-up work like drafting next steps, pulling context from past conversations, and updating connected systems. For staff, the practical takeaway is less post-meeting cleanup and a better chance that action items actually get carried forward.

Microsoft Copilot with Data Protection

• Microsoft 365 Copilot readiness and resiliency with SharePoint and M365 Backup/Archive — Microsoft added more controls for oversharing, site access reviews, restricted content discovery, and backup and recovery planning around Copilot-connected content. For staff, this mostly shows up as safer access to work files and fewer surprises when Copilot pulls from shared content.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• Available today: Anthropic Claude Opus 4.7 in Microsoft 365 Copilot — Microsoft added Claude Opus 4.7 to parts of the Microsoft 365 Copilot experience, including Copilot in Excel rollout. For staff, that means another strong option for harder multi-step work when you need more careful analysis inside familiar Microsoft workflows.

Google Gemini & NotebookLM

• The Gemini app is now on Mac — Google released a native Gemini app for macOS with an Option + Space shortcut and window sharing for quick in-context help. For staff on Mac, that means faster access to summaries, drafting help, and spreadsheet support without bouncing between browser tabs.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

Upcoming Events

No events are listed in the next two weeks on the current training pages. See the full training catalog for later additions.

Recent Recordings

• 📼 AI Webinar #6 - One Year of Innovation with TritonGPT: Past, Present, and Future — A practical walkthrough of TritonGPT’s first year, including MyDocuments, model switching, chat search, and chat sharing.
• 📼 AI Webinar #5 - Lean Six Sigma vs. Artificial Intelligencence — A plain-language look at where AI helps with workflow improvement and where traditional process work still matters.

TritonAI News

• AI-enhanced Microscopy Produces Crisp, Real-time Video Inside Live Cells — UC San Diego researchers combined microscopy with AI to produce clearer live-cell video in real time, which could help scientists spot changes faster instead of waiting on slower image processing.

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What’s New in Your AI Tools

Zoom AI Companion

• When action catches up to ideas: the next phase of work — Zoom says it is pushing AI Companion beyond meeting summaries toward follow-up work like drafting next steps, pulling context from past conversations, and teeing up actions. For UC San Diego staff, that points to less manual cleanup after meetings and fewer dropped action items.

Microsoft Copilot with Data Protection

• Latest enhancements for Copilot security, management, and analytics — Microsoft added stronger admin controls around sensitive prompts, web search, oversharing risks, and adoption analytics. For staff using Copilot with Data Protection, this matters because campus IT gets better guardrails without taking the tool away from everyday work.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• Copilot in Word: New Capabilities for Document Workflows — Copilot in Word can now handle tracked changes, comments, tables of contents, headers, footers, and other formatting tasks directly in the document. That should make it more useful for policy drafts, reports, and other shared documents where review history and formatting matter.

Google Gemini & NotebookLM

• Try notebooks in Gemini to easily keep track of projects — Google introduced notebooks in Gemini that sync with NotebookLM, so chats, files, and project context stay together across both tools. For UC San Diego staff, that means an easier way to keep longer projects organized instead of rebuilding context every time you come back.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

Upcoming Events

No events scheduled in the next two weeks. See the full training catalog for later dates.

Recent Recordings

• 📼 AI Webinar #6 - One Year of Innovation with TritonGPT: Past, Present, and Future — A walkthrough of TritonGPT’s first year, including MyDocuments, model switching, chat search, chat sharing, and where the platform is headed next.
• 📼 AI Webinar #5 - Lean Six Sigma vs. Artificial Intelligencence — A practical comparison of process improvement methods and AI tools, with examples of how TritonGPT can help streamline day-to-day work.

TritonAI News

• New AI Approach Reveals Ocean Currents in Unprecedented Detail — Researchers used deep learning on existing weather satellite images to map ocean surface currents in much finer detail, which could improve climate research, search and rescue, and spill tracking.
• New Chip Design Could Boost Efficiency of Power Management in Data Centers — UC San Diego engineers developed a chip design that could help GPUs handle power conversion more efficiently, a practical step toward lower energy use in advanced computing and AI infrastructure.

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What’s New in Your AI Tools

Zoom AI Companion

• Enhancements to the onboarding workflow for AI Companion — Zoom’s March 24 Zoom Workplace release adds a clearer setup flow for AI Companion, including hosted meeting setup, calendar connection prompts, and summary delivery options. For UC San Diego staff, that should make it easier to get meeting summaries and related AI features turned on without hunting through settings.

Microsoft Copilot with Data Protection

• Latest enhancements for Copilot security, management, and analytics — Microsoft added stronger admin controls for sensitive prompts, oversharing cleanup, and Copilot usage reporting. That matters for staff because it supports safer day-to-day use of protected Copilot experiences while giving campus IT clearer visibility into adoption and risk.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

• Copilot in Word: New Capabilities for Document Workflows — Copilot in Word can now turn on Track Changes, work with comments, update tables of contents, and handle headers, footers, and page numbers in one flow. For staff who draft policies, contracts, reports, or committee documents, that means less cleanup after asking Copilot for help.

Google Gemini & NotebookLM

• The Gemini app can now generate interactive simulations and models. — Gemini can now turn a prompt into an interactive model or simulation inside the chat instead of only returning static text. That gives staff a faster way to explore concepts, test assumptions, or explain something visually without building slides or diagrams by hand.
• Try notebooks in Gemini to easily keep track of projects — Google added notebooks that sync between Gemini and NotebookLM, so chats, files, and source material stay organized in one place. For UC San Diego staff, this is useful for longer-running work like planning, research, training prep, or policy drafting where context needs to carry across sessions.

Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops

Upcoming Events

No events scheduled in the next two weeks. See the full training catalog for later dates.

Recent Recordings

• 📼 AI Webinar #6 - One Year of Innovation with TritonGPT: Past, Present, and Future — A practical look at TritonGPT’s first year, including MyDocuments, model switching, chat search, and chat sharing, with ideas for staying current as the tools keep changing.
• 📼 AI Webinar #5 - Lean Six Sigma vs. Artificial Intelligencence — A plain-language walkthrough of where AI helps with workflow improvement, where it does not, and how to think about using it alongside more traditional process improvement methods.

TritonAI News

• What Does It Mean To Learn With AI? — UC San Diego looks at how AI is starting to show up in teaching and learning, which is useful context for staff supporting courses, student services, or academic operations.

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