Colleges and universities increasingly seek to partner students with campus operations staff on real-world sustainability projects—but identifying good project ideas remains a persistent challenge. Operations staff often have deep institutional knowledge and unanswered questions, yet limited time, prior experience working with students, or clarity on what makes a project feasible and valuable in an academic context.
This session explores a new approach: using a custom-designed AI chatbot to help operations staff surface, refine, and translate their everyday challenges into strong, student-ready sustainability projects. The chatbot is intentionally designed around operations workflows, plain language prompts, and clear project criteria, lowering barriers to participation while maintaining rigor and relevance.
Presenters will briefly demonstrate how the chatbot works, including how it guides staff to articulate problems, define scope, flag constraints, and assess student fit. We will unpack what makes a “good” operations-based student project—examining factors such as decision relevance, data access, staff capacity, student learning value, and potential for implementation.
The majority of the session will be interactive. Participants will also be invited to test chatbot prompts and collectively refine criteria for high-quality campus-as-classroom projects.

In small groups, participants will brainstorm and share how they currently source project ideas from operations staff, what has and hasn’t worked, and where breakdowns tend to occur.
Attendees will leave with practical strategies for engaging operations staff more effectively, a clearer framework for evaluating project ideas, and inspiration for how AI tools can support—not replace—relationship-based, cross-campus collaboration.