Bloom AI
UNSW Sydney
AI Adoption Report

The state of AI adoption at UNSW

By Gary Liang, Founder & CEOLast updated

UNSW is one of Australia's earliest structured adopters of generative AI in higher education. The university operates a graduated assessment framework, multiple deployed AI tools including Bloom, and an active research collaboration with Bloom dating back to 2023.

Bloom has been in use across UNSW Business School and the Faculty of Engineering, and is the longest-running AI tool at UNSW that remains in active deployment today.

Institutional position

UNSW frames generative AI use as "context- and task-dependent" rather than uniformly permitted or prohibited. The Levels of AI Assistance framework gives course convenors seven graduated categories: a No AI level, plus six tiers of permitted use that include Inspiration (AI for ideation only), Coach (student attempts the task first, then AI assists revision), Co-pilot, and Integral (AI use itself is part of the assessed learning outcomes).[1][2]

This is a more granular instrument than the University of Sydney's two-lane framework, which sorts assessments into one of two categories: secure (in-person, AI-prohibited) and open (AI permitted with acknowledgement).[3] UNSW's approach pushes more decisions to the course level; Sydney's pushes more decisions to the program level.

UNSW's Plagiarism Policy explicitly defines plagiarism to cover "presenting another person's work, ideas or generative artificial intelligence output as your own."[4] UNSW's broader institutional AI application strategy was scheduled to be finalised in Q2 2025, with implementation beginning Q3 2025, sitting within a stated GUIDE framework (Governance & Innovation for Digital Education) overseen by the Pro-Vice-Chancellor Education office.

This institutional posture sits within an active research environment. UNSW launched the UNSW AI Institute in September 2022, supporting more than 300 academics and over 50 research groups across all faculties. The Institute is led by Director Dr Sue Keay, with Scientia Professor Toby Walsh as Chief Scientist.[5]

Bloom at UNSW

Bloom has been deployed at UNSW since 2023, beginning in the UNSW Business School in courses across Economics, Accounting, Information Systems, and the MBA program. It has since extended into the Faculty of Engineering, including four Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications courses, Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, and Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Bloom was featured as an "Emerging Innovation" showcase at UNSW's Education Festival in November 2023, hosted by Gary Liang, Aleksandra Balyanova, and DJ Thornton from the School of Economics.[6]

In March 2025, Bloom and UNSW jointly received a $480,000 Australia's Economic Accelerator (AEA) Ignite grant for SPARK (Sovereign Pedagogical AI for Reinforcing Knowledge), focused on computing education.[7] The UNSW collaborators are Lorenzo Lee Solano, Jake Renzella, Sasha Vassar, Hammond Pearce, and Andrew Taylor from the School of Computer Science and Engineering.

UNSW Computer Science and Engineering academics with Bloom AI co-founders working on a debugging compiler interface at UNSW Sydney.
UNSW CSE collaborators on the AEA Ignite SPARK grant, working on the debugging compiler interface that prototypes pedagogical AI for computing education.[7]

In November 2025, Professor Vijay Sivaraman and Dr Minzhao Lyu of UNSW's School of Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications presented "Increasing Student Engagement with an AI Tutor" at UNSW Engineering's Culture & Curriculum education festival, describing the deployment of a Bloom course-specific AI tutor across four EE&T courses.[8] Their session described the tutor as "designed with a teaching persona that stimulates curiosity and reasoning rather than just giving away answers," contrasting it with generic AI assistants that recent research has linked to over-reliance and passive consumption.

Unlike commercial productivity AI, Bloom is purpose-built for pedagogy: Socratic guidance, calibrated feedback, and the deliberate withholding of direct answers.

Other AI tools at UNSW

Alongside Bloom, three other generative AI tools are in active institutional use at UNSW: an OpenAI ChatGPT Edu agreement for staff, a Microsoft Copilot deployment for staff and students, and Scout, a custom-built agent for student services.

ChatGPT

10,000 licences for fixed-term and permanent staff. The agreement is the largest education deal OpenAI has signed in Australia and the first in the Asia-Pacific region.[9][10]

Prompts and data are excluded from OpenAI's model training. UNSW will purchase carbon offsets to mitigate the emissions associated with the deployment.[9]

Microsoft Copilot

Institution-wide for staff and students. UNSW's recommended platform for generative AI use within coursework where convenors permit it.[1]

Scout

An in-house AI tool for student services, answering routine questions about enrolment, assessments, and policies. Built on Microsoft Azure OpenAI, Microsoft Copilot Studio, and Microsoft Power Platform, integrated with Moodle. Scout is administrative, not pedagogical.[11]

For UNSW staff

Whether you teach a course, lead a program, or support student learning at UNSW, Bloom can be deployed in a day, including custom course material ingestion, alignment with your assessment framework lane, and convenor-controlled student access. Existing UNSW deployments span Business and Engineering.

Get in touch

Sources

  1. 1.UNSW Current Students, Use of AI for assessments
  2. 2.UNSW Staff Teaching Gateway, Guidance on AI in assessment
  3. 3.University of Sydney, Teaching@Sydney, Two-lane approach to assessment in the age of AI
  4. 4.UNSW Governance, UNSW Plagiarism Policy and Procedure (2022)
  5. 5.UNSW, UNSW AI Institute
  6. 6.UNSW Education, UNSW Education Festival 2023, Detailed Program (Engaging Industry in Education) (November 2023)
  7. 7.Bloom AI, Bloom AI and UNSW Secure $480K Grant from Australia's Economic Accelerator (March 2025)
  8. 8.UNSW Engineering, UNSW Engineering Education Festival 2025, Culture & Curriculum, Detailed Program (November 2025)
  9. 9.UNSW Newsroom, UNSW Sydney inks Australia's biggest ChatGPT Edu deal with OpenAI (September 2025)
  10. 10.UNSW Newsroom, UNSW Sydney signs landmark agreement with OpenAI (December 2024)
  11. 11.Microsoft News, UNSW's Scout: Simplifying student life with agentic AI technology (August 2025)

If we've got something wrong. This page reflects publicly available information as of 29 April 2026. If you work at UNSW and there is something we should correct, please get in touch.