AI Strategic Partner for Design Services

The vendor is required to provide AI solutions, focusing on 2-3 high impact use cases annually over a three to five-year period, across multiple divisions within the college, ensuring continuity, security, and compliance.
- Providers capable of delivering scalable, enterprise-level AI strategy, solutions, and support.
- Preference will be given to organizations that have:
•    Successfully delivered AI solutions across a college or education system
•    Demonstrated end-to-end capabilities—including AI strategic consulting and planning, engineering, curriculum design, technical deployment, and managed services
•    Experience working with diverse stakeholders in a multi-institutional environment
•    A history of deploying AI frameworks tailored for institutional effectiveness and measurable outcomes
•    Experience serving private industry with AI innovation and integration of private industry AI innovation in the higher education sector.
- Strategic partner to support its institutional efforts in responsibly adopting and operationalizing artificial intelligence (AI) across academic, administrative, and learner engagement.
- AI solutions (custom and off-the-shelf) with our mission-critical and strategic initiatives.
 - AI capabilities and services, including strategic consulting, design, development, implementation, and management.
1. AI strategic planning
•    Collaboratively develop a comprehensive AI strategy, beginning with a thorough assessment of current AI capabilities and aligning future opportunities with the institution's academic and administrative objectives. 
•    This partnership will also involve the co-creation of a robust governance framework and ethical AI policies, ensuring responsible innovation, data privacy, security, and algorithmic fairness within a higher education context. 
•    The partner will be instrumental in designing and implementing a comprehensive change management strategy, fostering AI literacy across faculty, staff, and administrators through dedicated training programs, and potentially establishing an AI center of excellence or GCC to support sustained growth. 
2. AI platform implementation and use cases 
•    The AI strategic partner will be responsible for the practical implementation of AI solutions, focusing on 2-3 high impact use cases annually over a three to five-year period, specifically tailored for the us higher education environment. 
•    Key application areas include developing personalized tutoring systems for 24/7 adaptive learning support and implementing AI-powered tools for personalized feedback and grading assistance to enhance faculty-student interactions. 
•    the partner will also deploy predictive analytics to identify and support at-risk students, leverage AI for content transformation through summarization, material enrichment, and real-time translation, and enhance the entire student journey from recruitment and enrollment to ongoing learner support via AI-powered virtual assistants and streamlined administrative processes.
3. Enterprise integration
•    Crucial to the success of AI implementation is seamless enterprise integration, requiring the AI strategic partner to demonstrate robust capabilities in connecting with charter oak’s existing technology ecosystem. 
•    This includes proven integration experience with blackboard ultra (LMS), Jenzabar (sis), and supporting single sign-on (SSO) for identity and access management, all while maintaining full compliance with LTI 1.3, IMS global, and WCAG 2.1 aa standards. 
•    Furthermore, the proposed solution must facilitate interoperability with a wide array of third-party learning and content systems, such as major publishers AI-powered assessment tools, and credentialing systems, underpinned by a secure and well-documented API architecture to ensure broad connectivity.
4. Ongoing management and support
•    The AI strategic partner must present a well-defined, phased implementation methodology complete with clear timelines, milestones, and a comprehensive staffing plan. 
•    This also necessitates a robust post-launch support strategy encompassing continuous monitoring, detailed success metrics, and established processes for content and model updates, alongside ongoing stakeholder training. 
•    Furthermore, the partner will be expected to outline proactive risk mitigation strategies and contingency planning to address potential issues such as data privacy breaches, system downtime, or AI model degradation. 
•    Key components of this ongoing management include providing intuitive dashboards for usage analytics and performance monitoring, establishing clear workflows for updating the AI system's knowledge base, and detailing a model for continuous technical and pedagogical support to all users.
5. Comprehensive educational technology and staffing services
•    AI strategy and educational transformation, the selected partner is expected to offer a comprehensive suite of educational technology and staffing services, reflecting a holistic understanding of instructional design and institutional effectiveness. 
•    This includes the capability to establish AI centers of excellence or global capability centers for ongoing AI solutioning, provide strategic AI and academic planning consultancy to ensure alignment with governance and accreditation, and offer expertise in course development and curriculum support, leveraging AI to enhance instructional design and automate tasks. 
•    The partner should also be adept at implementing AI-enabled content and assessment workflows, developing and fine-tuning custom AI models tailored to institutional needs, and managing multi-institution deployments with centralized control and localized customization. preference will be given to providers with proprietary, modular AI and curriculum platforms that prioritize configurability and data privacy. 

- Contract Period/Term: 5 years
- Questions/Inquires Deadline: September 23, 2025