Overview

University of Florida Information Technology (UFIT) supports the technology ecosystem that enables UF to excel as a premier public R1 higher education institution. UFIT develops and executes strategic plans and initiatives to optimize the use of information technology in alignment with the institution's goals. The organization expands access to cutting-edge technologies that advance the university’s mission in research, teaching, learning and service, and oversees the development of IT policies, procedures and standards to safeguard enterprise IT assets and ensure the integrity, security and privacy of university information. UFIT operates a mature technology landscape with infrastructure and application uptime averaging 99.8% or higher per month while managing more than 170 enterprise services and 150-200 active projects at any given time. UFIT has approximately 680 IT professionals and oversees a more than $125 million expenditure portfolio.

Supernova Award Category

Tech Optimization and Modernization

The Problem

UF's "AI Across the Curriculum" initiative aims to develop an AI-ready workforce through a suite of interdisciplinary AI opportunities. The initiative was launched through a partnership with NVIDIA after the company and alumnus and NVIDIA co-founder Chris Malachowsky donated an AI supercomputer which propelled UF to be a national leader in AI in 2020. With support from NVIDIA, UF has continued building its AI expertise through faculty support, innovative teaching and learning solutions, world-class high-performance computing resources, and AI training opportunities open to all campus members. While the work since 2020 laid the foundation for UF to become the nation's first AI university, questions remained around the sustainability and adaptability of UF's culture and constituents, especially considering the rapid evolution of AI technologies. To achieve the objectives of this initiative and create sustainable, scalable opportunities with AI, the university had to democratize AI access and use across the entire institution.

The Solution

The democratization of AI at UF could only be achieved through the university's mature IT landscape. In addition to managing and expanding opportunities within UF's high-performance computing ecosystem, UFIT identified the need for self-service access to AI. This pathway had to support basic to advanced AI applications to fit the complex needs of the university and address varying levels of AI familiarity. UFIT released the first campuswide, self-service AI environment among U.S. higher education institutions. NaviGator AI empowers students, faculty and staff through its self-service capabilities by allowing direct interaction with AI models themselves. Since the initial launch of NaviGator AI, the suite has grown to nine distinct tools leveraging more than 70 large language models. The homegrown platform is supported by HiPerGator, UF's supercomputer, and allows for different user proficiency levels to engage with various data types in a secure environment. NaviGator AI's nine suite offerings include a chat web application, a tool to configure AI assistants, a gateway to generate API keys for custom and SaaS applications, an instructor-facing tool that integrates with Canvas, an interactive learning tutor chat application, an online note-taking tool powered by Google Labs, an alt-text generator, a comprehensive AI-powered feedback collection and analysis platform, and a web application that helps non‑technical staff, faculty and students create, evaluate and share high‑quality prompts for large language models.

The results

NaviGator AI unlocks the full potential of AI for UF faculty, students and staff, and creates a culture where AI literacy is actively urged. The continued expansion of NaviGator AI has streamlined AI access and use across the university enterprise. By virtue of being a member of the UF community, you have access to more than 70 large language models for all forms of AI applications. The platform is designed for privacy, allowing users to work with their own data in a trusted environment. Instead of university workflows and student academic experiences being limited to external vendor solutions, NaviGator AI provides equal AI access and a consistent user experience.

Metrics

The platform’s core services saw a peak of more than 27,000 unique chat users in 2026, 4,500 unique users generating API keys and 600 unique users for interactive tutoring as of June 16, 2026, proving sustained engagement. The average session length for NaviGator AI Tutor, released less than a year ago, was 26 minutes and 35 seconds, indicating deep user engagement with AI‑enhanced learning resources. NaviGator AI has an average of 1.6 billion tokens generated per day. UFIT created a web assistant with NaviGator AI for all public UF websites including more than 450,000 webpages actively indexed to allow web viewers to ask questions through an interactive widget.

The Technology

NaviGator AI leverages UF's supercomputer, HiPerGator, which is powered by NVIDIA's DGX B200 equipped with NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, for hosting AI models. The NaviGator AI suite is a collection of various technologies that UFIT staff integrated into a unified, comprehensive environment while maintaining a central AI governance model, ease of access through self-service and necessary data protections.

Disruptive Factor

Implementing and continuing the expansion of NaviGator AI required investment in staff and strategic planning conversations. NaviGator AI challenged the status quo by eliminating barriers to access private cloud AI models. UFIT must match the speed at which AI models continue to evolve to maintain the growth and productivity of NaviGator AI. UFIT's approach to expanding the NaviGator AI suite had to address all literacy levels among university constituents. In addition to the technical implementation and infrastructure maintenance of NaviGator AI, UFIT needed to build guardrails and training resources that would be beneficial for users of all AI experience levels.

Shining Moment

NaviGator AI is a testament to UFIT's ability to quickly make AI tools available to the enterprise without being restricted to one single vendor. NaviGator AI's exponential adoption represents success in democratizing AI access and establishing UF as the nation's leading AI university. Through NaviGator AI, UFIT enables students, staff and faculty to engage with AI tools at their own convenience and competency level. The commitment to self-service capabilities were critical to the design of NaviGator AI and moved the needle from ‘AI as a service’ to ‘AI as a practice’ at UF. Empowering users to easily adopt this intuitive platform further injects AI into the university’s daily business practices and prepares UF for the next cycle of digital transformation.