Admissions, registrar, advising, financial aid, and student success — one platform, one governance layer, FERPA-aligned by architecture, with the source code in the institution's repository.
Higher education administration is the most distributed buyer in the AI conversation. Admissions wants prospect engagement. The registrar wants degree-audit automation. Financial aid wants application triage. Advising wants student-success agents. Student affairs wants 24/7 service. Each office buys its own tool, on its own contract, with its own data flow.
The result is a sprawl of single-purpose SaaS AI products, each carrying student data into a different vendor's perimeter, each producing audit evidence in a different format, and each generating a separate FERPA conversation with general counsel.
ibl.ai is the platform layer that lets one institutional AI deployment serve every administrative office — with FERPA-aligned routing per workload, audit evidence unified in the institutional SIEM, and source-code ownership the institution can defend in the next budget cycle.
Each administrative office procures its own AI tool with its own contract, identity flow, and data-handling commitments — multiplying the per-seat cost and the FERPA surface across the institution.
Stacked per-seat AI commonly lands at $60-80 per user per month across 4-5 SaaS toolsEach per-office tool processes student data on a different vendor's infrastructure. Data-residency commitments to students and state regulators get harder to document with each addition.
A typical multi-office AI deployment routes student data through 5-8 distinct vendor perimetersAudit evidence for AI sessions lives in each vendor's dashboard, in the vendor's format. Producing a defensible institutional view of AI use across the administrative surface is manual and brittle.
Vendor dashboards rarely export in the institution's audit-of-record formatFaculty and staff use personal accounts on some AI tools, sanctioned accounts on others. Shadow usage is invisible to the central audit chain.
Most institutions have no defensible inventory of staff and faculty AI use across administrative officesWhen provost, CIO, or president changes, the patchwork of per-office AI tools is hard to defend and harder to extend. Re-procurement under pressure is the common path.
Higher-ed AI vendor turnover within 18 months of leadership change is commonAdmissions, registrar, advising, financial aid, student affairs, IT — one platform, one identity flow, one audit chain, one set of vendor relationships to maintain.
Workloads that touch student educational records route to a local open-weights model running on institutional GPUs. Non-FERPA workloads route to BAA/contract-covered frontier models. Audit evidence captures the routing decision.
Every prompt, response, and model invocation captured in the institution's SIEM in the institution's format, on the institution's retention schedule. FERPA evidence production is a SIEM query, not a vendor ticket.
Every AI session bound to a named member of the institutional community through Shibboleth, Azure AD, Okta, Ping — via SAML 2.0, OIDC, or SCIM. No personal accounts for institutional work.
Canvas, Brightspace D2L, Moodle, Blackboard via LTI 1.3. Banner, Workday Student, PeopleSoft, Jenzabar via REST/Ethos. Slate, EAB Navigate, Salesforce Education Cloud. Inline AI within the systems the workforce already uses.
The institution receives the complete platform code under a perpetual license. New leadership, new priorities, and new regulatory expectations are implemented inside the institutional platform — not negotiated with a SaaS vendor.
Provost, CIO, CISO, Registrar, General Counsel, Finance, and one academic-affairs lead align on the deployment topology, FERPA posture, first workload, and success metrics. Governance committee chartered.
Production-grade platform installed in institutional infrastructure. Identity federation via SAML/OIDC to the institutional IdP. Audit-of-record SIEM integration live. First LMS and SIS integrations wired.
First administrative workload (e.g., admissions inquiry triage, advising-augmentation, registrar degree-audit assist) live with faculty and staff in the loop. Weekly review of audit logs and workflow metrics.
Two additional administrative workloads launched. Governance posture proven across multiple offices. Forward-deployed engineering pairs with institutional engineering to set the team up to run the platform independently.
Per-office SaaS contracts negotiated independently, each with separate identity, data-handling, and audit terms.
One institutional platform deployment serves every administrative office under one set of governance commitments.
Student data routed to multiple external vendors, each with its own perimeter and residency commitment.
FERPA workloads stay inside the institution on a local model; non-FERPA workloads route to BAA/contract-covered frontier APIs with audit capture.
Vendor dashboards in vendor formats; FERPA evidence production is brittle.
Institutional SIEM in institutional format with retention defined by the institution.
Mixed personal accounts, shared service accounts, and unbound API keys across administrative tools.
Every AI session identity-bound through the institutional IdP.
Cabinet changes trigger re-procurement of stacked SaaS contracts.
Source-code ownership and per-workload routing keep continuity inside the institution.
The core platform whose multi-office deployment, FERPA-aligned routing, and audit-of-record integration make institution-wide administrative AI a single deployment rather than office-by-office sprawl.
The engineering team that lands the first deployment with full governance posture and pairs with institutional engineering during scale-up across administrative offices.
Training, change-management, and faculty-facing onboarding that extends the administrative-AI deployment into the teaching surface without disrupting governance.
See how ibl.ai deploys AI agents you own and control—on your infrastructure, integrated with your systems.