University of Technology Sydney (UTS)
UTS builds a future-ready AI assistant ecosystem that transforms learning and administration unlocking the power of data to elevate education.
About The University of Technology Sydney (UTS)
The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) is recognised as Australia’s #1 young university, located in the heart of Sydney. It evolved from a technical college into a leading technology university, focusing on practical skills and industry connections to prepare students for real-world challenges.
Founded in its current form in 1988, UTS is a member of the Australian Technology Network and has consistently ranked among the top 100 universities globally.
The Challenge
Scaling AI adoption without scaling risk.
UTS had been experimenting with AI assistants since 2017 to improve access to learning materials, administrative services and academic support. As demand increased, the limitations of the original approach became structural rather than technical.
Each assistant required its own deployment and bespoke configuration. Secure data segmentation across faculties and subjects was difficult to enforce. Prototyping new assistants could take months. Most importantly, the model could not support decentralised innovation without introducing governance and privacy risk.
With more than 40,000 students and a highly distributed academic and operational structure, UTS needed a fundamentally different model.
The university’s ambition was clear.
AI needed to become a shared institutional capability, not a series of disconnected tools.
Just as importantly, UTS wanted to enable staff to safely build and publish assistants themselves, without relying on central IT for every new use case.
Our Solution
A unified platform for governed AI assistants
Agile Insights worked with UTS to design and deliver Recast as a single, enterprise grade platform that supports many AI assistants within one operating model.
Rather than treating each assistant as a separate application, Recast introduces a shared platform layer that standardises how assistants are created, governed, secured and operated.
This approach allows UTS to scale AI usage across faculties and business units while maintaining a single control framework for access, content and approval.
Recast supports three core user groups across the university community:
students
professional and academic staff
content owners and assistant builders
Staff can create and manage assistants through guided, no-code workflows. Each assistant is scoped to approved content and delivers responses with citations back to trusted sources, ensuring transparency and confidence in the answers provided.
Agile Insights and UTS delivered Recast through a structured, multi-month program focused on:
Embedding governance, privacy and ethical controls directly into the platform architecture
Designing a scalable operating model that decentralises assistant creation while maintaining central oversight
Iterative engineering to improve ingestion, retrieval accuracy, response quality and performance
Ensuring accessibility and compliance through close collaboration with UTS specialists
Building internal capability so that faculties and business units could create assistants without relying on central IT
The Impact
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