TLDR: AI readiness in higher education is misunderstood as a model question, a vendor question, or a budget question. It is actually a document question. Every R1 institution we have worked with has the same first problem: decades of institutional knowledge trapped in PDFs, scanned forms, policy archives, and accommodation letters that no AI agent can reason against. We call it the PDF Graveyard. Three Bettera-built agents (alumni, student, research) demonstrate what becomes

TLDR: FERPA and AI compliance in higher education sits at an underexamined intersection. FERPA was written for a paper-records world and last meaningfully amended in 2008. AI agents reading PDFs, combining classifications, shaping institutional decisions, and generating new records present four edge cases the statute does not directly address. This piece walks through each edge case using a real Bettera-built Student Agent processing a medical certificate as the worked exampl

TLDR: ServiceNow AI Control Tower for higher education is the technical instrument that makes governed agentic AI possible at an R1 institution. ServiceNow ships AI Control Tower as enterprise-generic. Higher ed deployment requires four layers of institutional configuration that ServiceNow does not provide out of the box: FERPA classification, state privacy law overlay, faculty governance integration, and accreditation reporting. This piece walks through what AI Control Tower

TLDR: Now Assist in higher education AI governance is the conversation every CIO at a ServiceNow institution needs to be having right now, whether or not their campus has formally deployed AI. As of the April 9, 2026 ServiceNow commercial model announcement, AI is bundled into every tier of every ServiceNow solution. The AI already arrived with the existing investment. The question is no longer whether to procure Now Assist. It is whether the institution has the governance po