Non-Academic Usage - an ITS Guide

Generative AI offers powerful capabilities that extend well beyond the classroom. Faculty and staff across Franklin & Marshall College can leverage these tools to enhance productivity, streamline workflows, and improve the quality of their work in administrative and operational contexts.

As you explore these applications, remember to follow F&M's College policies, verify the accuracy of AI-generated content, and use F&M's institutionally protected AI tools (like Gemini and NotebookLM with your @fandm.edu account) when working with College-related information. 

Regardless of whether you use AI tools in your work, you remain fully responsible for the accuracy, quality, and integrity of everything you produce. AI-generated content must be carefully reviewed, fact-checked, and refined before use or submission.

➡️ Drafting and Refining Communications: Use AI to compose emails, memos, announcements, and other written communications. AI can help you find the right tone for different audiences, suggest clearer phrasing, condense lengthy messages, or expand brief notes into fully developed content. 

➡️ Research and Information Synthesis: AI tools can help you quickly gather and synthesize information on unfamiliar topics, compare different approaches or solutions, or summarize lengthy documents and reports. AI can be used to to extract key points, identify trends, and understand complex subjects more efficiently. This can be especially valuable when you need to get up to speed quickly on a new project, vendor, or policy area.

➡️ Brainstorming and Ideation: When you're stuck or need fresh perspectives, AI can serve as a brainstorming partner to generate ideas for events, projects, campaigns, or problem-solving approaches. You can iterate on ideas conversationally, ask for variations on themes, or explore different angles you might not have considered. AI excels at providing diverse options and creative alternatives that can spark your own thinking.

➡️ Task Planning and Organization: AI can help break down complex projects into manageable steps, create timelines, draft project plans, or organize information into structured formats. Whether you're planning a campus event, managing a department initiative, or coordinating a multi-phase project, AI can help you think through the logistics, identify potential challenges, and create actionable task lists and schedules.

➡️ Data Analysis and Explanation: AI tools can help interpret data sets, explain statistical concepts, generate visualizations, or identify patterns and trends in your data. You can ask AI to explain what certain metrics mean, suggest appropriate ways to visualize information for different audiences, or help you understand the implications of your findings. 

➡️ Comparative Research and Analysis: NotebookLM excels at helping you analyze and compare information across multiple documents. Upload related sources such as vendor proposals, policy documents from peer institutions, budget reports from different years, or research articles on a specific topic, and ask NotebookLM to identify similarities, differences, trends, or gaps. Because NotebookLM grounds its responses in your specific uploaded materials and provides citations back to source documents, it's particularly valuable for conducting thorough comparative analysis without losing track of where information originated. This makes it ideal for tasks like evaluating RFP responses, benchmarking against peer institutions, or synthesizing findings from multiple reports.