Across Arizona State University, artificial intelligence has moved beyond discussion. It is now designed, tailored and activated by the people who rely on it every day.
ASU launched CreateAI across the university in 2025 to place custom intelligence directly in the hands of faculty and staff. The flagship AI tool kit enables users to craft, refine and share experiences aligned with their courses, research and daily operations.
Today, more than 20,000 ASU employees have access to CreateAI, and they have already created over 7,000 experiences inside the platform, from simulated patients for medical training to conversational language tutors.
ASU positioned itself as an early leader in AI innovation, including partnerships with industry giants such as Amazon Web Services and OpenAI. Developing the in-house tool further helps the university meet the demands of AI at scale while addressing cost, privacy and capability.
Faculty from fashion to biochemistry leverage CreateAI
One of the key features of CreateAI is access to more than 50 large language models that power the experience, including industry leaders such as AWS Nova, OpenAI GPTs, Google Gemini, Meta Llama and others. Ready-made templates also help faculty customize their academic content.
One of the most widely adopted templates is Syllabot, an AI chatbot that helps students quickly find answers to common course questions, such as due dates, assignments and grading policies. To date, there are nearly 1,000 active Syllabots in use at ASU.
This semester, more than 300 W. P. Carey School of Business faculty members were trained and empowered to build their own Syllabots to implement in future courses.
“The reality is that AI must be embedded in everything we do,” says Ohad Kadan, Charles J. Robel Dean and W. P. Carey Distinguished Chair in Business. “Tools like AI bots are not just conveniences — they are transforming how we teach, learn and operate. By integrating AI into the educational experience, we are preparing our students for a business world where AI is ubiquitous and essential to how work gets done.”
Other notable CreateAI examples are underway across the university:
- Steve Salik, a clinical associate professor in the Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation, is building AI mentors for his students. These chatbots are embedded in his course to enable mentor-like discussions. “It casts the students into an internship role,” Salik said, adding that the goal is to practice their professional communication skills.
- Naomi Ellis is an instructor with ASU FIDM, a school within the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. Students enrolled in her AI in Fashion course spend the semester building their own AI experiences — from a brand bot to a sustainable shopping guide. Ellis notes her goal is to support AI-ready graduates. “This makes them more prepared than any other fashion student,” Ellis said.
- Neal Woodbury, vice president at ASU Knowledge Enterprise, is using CreateAI in his upper-level biochemistry course, taught in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Students developed code to analyze large datasets. Ultimately, they developed models to identify potential protein sites linked to side effects in well-known cancer treatments.
- The pioneering AI-powered Language Buddy, designed for students to practice conversational skills in a foreign language, was first introduced in German. Today, the AI experience is now available in Spanish.
Additional projects include an APA citation engine from the Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation, an AI writing assistant for technical accounting in the business school, and a conversational performance bot to guide staff self-evaluations for the Office of Human Resources.
ASU’s CreateAI custom roles and features
- ASU faculty, researchers and staff can use CreateAI Builder at no additional cost, starting from scratch or choosing from ready-made templates.
- Students can access and interact with AI experiences inside CreateAI Builder through faculty or staff sponsorship. This sponsorship enables students to both work with existing AI projects as part of their coursework and develop their own AI applications.
- CreateAI Compare helps users make informed decisions when selecting from over 50 large language models. The green-leaf icon identifies more energy-efficient models.
- CreateAI Platform enables ASU’s engineers and developers to build enterprise-level solutions.
- All data remains within ASU’s governed environment and is FERPA-compliant; it is not used to train external AI models.
Purpose-built AI experiences
The CreateAI Platform enables teams across the university to design enterprise-level AI solutions. For example, one team at the John Shufeldt School of Medicine and Medical Engineering is working to develop a series of AI avatars. Jordan Coulston, assistant dean of clinical education, is helping to lead the effort.
“We see AI as a tool we can use to expand the clinical education offered within our medical school,” Coulston said.
The AI avatars are designed to simulate patient-provider interactions. An agentic workflow called Case Creator is used to build the complex patient-case scenarios, with multiple agents working in sync to create a patient’s medical background, current condition and previous clinical appointments.
Once a patient case is created, the team uses multimodal AI systems across video and audio to develop realistic avatars that simulate standard patient encounters, including emotional responses. The system then uses AI to generate an evaluation that scores an interaction across 25 unique areas.
“Our goal is to leverage these avatars to give us a level of scale,” Coulston said. “The learner has a need, we prompt a patient into existence, and there they are, ready to help the student learn.”
On the horizon
What comes next may be even more ambitious. The team behind CreateAI — the AI Acceleration team within ASU Enterprise Technology — is developing the building blocks for a personalized AI experience with a single interface where a student could ask about an assignment, check on financial aid, find campus hours and email a professor, all without switching platforms or starting over.
On the longer horizon, that experience could become truly personal: a personalized AI companion that adapts to how each student learns and communicates, built around the individual and capable of autonomous task completion.