Project UPLIFT

An initiative to help facilitate university personnel to leverage Intelligent flow tools.

"When productivity gains originate closer to the work, workers gain tangible leverage over decisions, processes, and outcomes"

Quote from Time Magazine; Kumar S, R., Roberts, A., & Crymes, S. (2026, March 30). AI should belong to workers.
TIME. https://time.com/article/2026/03/30/ai-should-belong-to-workers/

Starting May 2026, the Department of Clinical Pharmacy (DCP) will be a leading partner department in a 12-month project to research and introduce intelligent flow tools for select administrative staff across the university. Project partner staff from the Zentraler Informatikdienst (ZID, management staff), the department for Digitale Medien und Lerntechnologien (DMLT, facilitation staff) and the Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy (research staff) will collaborate with the aim to help University Personnel Leverage Intelligent Flow Tools, hence the title, UPLIFT.

Project funding was generously provided by the Büro der Rektorin as part of the Innovationsfonds 2026 funding awards.

Task automation

Administrative staff often face repetitive tasks they wish could be automated but lack the resources to build new tools. Compounding this, most accessible optimisation tools exist only as external cloud services, raising concerns about data privacy, autonomy and sovereignty.

Embracing AI will never involve replacing the human touch in education; it means augmenting our abilities and optimising our processes. The department is committed to ensuring that AI integration serves as a safe and supportive augmentation that enables delivery in a sustainable manner. We believe that artificial intelligence has the potential to enrich many aspects of academic life and our objective is to inform and signpost staff, students, and researchers towards practical information and resources. 

In the context of task automation, department members across the institution are already invited to investigate the inclusion of AI to:

  • Reduce repetitive administrative tasks, freeing up time for more creative and strategic endeavours.
  • Improve the efficiency of data management, scheduling, and resource allocation across departments; and
  • Improve the quality of status monitoring of university systems, assets, or resources. 

Whilst the 'why' has been presented to staff, the 'if' and the 'how' is more nuanced and personal to the staff user seeking facilitation. 

Uplifting

Taking up position to facilitate elective staff users, the UPLIFT project aims to focus on the introduction of intelligent workflow tooling (shortened to just flow tooling) automation for administrative staff at the University of Innsbruck. The project adopts a human-first approach, where project staff collaborate directly with administrative workers to co-design time-saving automations using flow tooling and, where suitable, GDPR-compliant AI services. Each participating team will receive a dedicated standalone "AI-in-a-box" plug-in AI runner (currently an HP Z2 G1a with 128GB GPU VRAM) that will be setup to use during the project, then retained by the worker's local group afterward, for future automation and experimental AI use. As part of the project legacy plan, project staff will work with the ZID to investigate methods of adding the AI runners as standard Windows 11 devices, for optional use as local AI-accelerated user desktops.

While AI tools promise efficiency, early evidence shows they can also intensify work, not just reduce it (A Ranganathan, XM Ye; Research in-process. pre-publication editorial: https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it). Employees may expand their abilities, but also blur boundaries between work and rest, and manage multiple concurrent tasks, leading to cognitive fatigue without increased capacity. Over the project, sustainable adoption will be practiced. This involves the protection of focused work windows, the limitation of AI prompting to designated times, the encouragement of check-ins to identify role drift and prevent overextension, and the maintaining of regular reflective human dialogue for grounding.

Phase 1 (Month 1 - Month 6)

Phase one will include a short research sub-project conducted alongside human-factors experts. You can read more on the role of human-factors in effective design at https://productsofdesign.sva.edu/blog/human-factors-product-design. For the initial 6-month period, two initial problem cases have been identified:

Phase 1, User Case 1 

  • Who? Case 1 involves the uplifting a course admin staff member with their timetabling allotment automation.
  • How? Timetabling and session allotment in accordance with a number of variables is a complex task. This case involves the development of a flow to automate timetabling for a course administrator based in a busy faculty. Using data from supplied documents, a workflow will be developed to output the required results interactively, in the user's own desired format.

Phase 1, User Case 2

  • Who? Case 1 involves the uplifting a technical service owner with their need to document a large legacy code-base for refactoring for in-house code adoption.
  • How? The university ZID department has a number of legacy software projects that are due to be rewritten. This case involves the development of an agentic AI workflow software stack to analyse and refactor legacy code into a modern and secure format.
Phase 2 (Month 6 - Month 12)

Further cases starting over the trailing 6-month second phase will be identified for uplift over the first 6-month phase. Candidate admin workers wishing to apply to take part in Phase 2 are invited to contact the project manager (edward.watson@uibk.ac.at).

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