Case Study: The University of Auckland reduces research administration burden with IBM AI

Reducing the administrative burden of research with AI

The University of Auckland faced delays and frustration from complex funding, ethics, and regulatory requirements that researchers had to navigate before starting projects. To reduce the administrative burden, The University of Auckland partnered with IBM and used IBM watsonx.ai and IBM watsonx Assistant in a hackathon with Master of AI students to explore AI-driven support for grant, ethics, and export permit applications.

IBM helped develop proof-of-concept agentic AI solutions that provided context-aware feedback and streamlined application routing and review. The results included a 95% success rate in routing test applications to the correct committee and 85% accuracy in detecting known error types, with The University of Auckland and IBM continuing to work on scalable, low-cost solutions hosted on IBM Cloud.

The University of Auckland

Thomas Lacombe

Director of the MAI Program