As noted, there's a ton about my job I can't use AI for, lest I be fired for FERPA and HIPAA violations along with Texas state law and university policy violations.
But, I do have one project going which is all publicly available data, and I'm musing about how that might look with AI agentic help. Here's the scenario and my thoughts so far.
I'm taking over a project from a QEP analyst that was begun and continues in Adobe Illustrator. It's program reviews for each degree/program we offer. Previously, gathering the data was like pulling teeth, this guy spent like a third of the working year pulling it from various sources. We now use a much friendlier SaaS product, which I have a license for, which can amalgamate the majority of the raw data I need much, much faster. What the guy did was gather the data, get it into a .csv file, merge that into an Adobe Illustrator template, and use that to spit out pdf's which were one-page reviews of each program.
I'm thinking of switching it over to Tableau, because something about using Illustrator for this seems clunky, and also I'm unfamiliar with it and would be much more comfortable in Tableau. Plus, that way I should be able to build one filterable dashboard the provost can access, instead of sending him a big batch of pdf's.
My thoughts on this are as follows, admitting up front I've not used a paid version of a good AI, and having virtually no experience using such a thing for real tasks (I've mostly used AI to help me get past coding problems I get stuck on or how to do certain things in a program I lack expertise in.....such as Adobe Illustrator).
I can readily believe that AI can tell me how to use Adobe Illustrator to help my learning curve, or that it can tell me how to build a new Tableau template. What I am skeptical of is that AI can actually
do this for me in an agentic fashion. That would require that AI could somehow access the SaaS we use to get the data. I can believe it could potentially "know" how to input all the various parameters for each program and find the data....but I have no idea as to how AI could interact with the SaaS platform in the first place. Then it would need to build an appropriate .csv file....ok, fine, no problem, that seems doable, but again, how would AI use Excel or Notepad++ or something like that to actually create a file for me? And then it would need to access Tableau and be able to interact with it extensively to build a dashboard template to my specifications, and then merge the .csv.
I guess when I think about it, it's probably an easy thing for an AI to make me a .csv file, if it has the data. But crawling through the SaaS product and Tableau, and using them? I have no idea how that works, and it doesn't seem plausible. But, I'm curious for the thoughts of early adopters/heavy users, like
@Honestbuckeye ....does this seem like something a paid version of AI can do right now?