University of Montana CIO Turned Vibe Coding Sessions Into an Institutional AI Adoption Engine

The higher education CIO who still operates as an infrastructure manager is running out of runway. As enrollment pipelines shrink and AI tools give every department the ability to build its own solutions, the technology leaders gaining ground are the ones who stopped waiting for a mandate and started partnering directly with admissions, student success, and the provost's office to drive measurable institutional outcomes.

Zach Rossmiller is Associate Vice President and CIO at the University of Montana, where he leads technology strategy across four campuses serving more than 15,000 students. He is Principal Investigator on multiple NSF awards totaling over $3.5 million and leads The Future Project, a university-wide framework for AI adoption across teaching, research, and operations. He also serves as an Affiliate Associate Professor, keeping his decisions grounded in the realities of the classroom.

"The days of IT organizations on campuses being more of a utility is yesterday's news. If you're not at the table leading the charge on how your campus adopts technology, then you're failing at your job," said Rossmiller. When Rossmiller took the CIO role, the university was in steep enrollment decline and IT was highly distributed. His team partnered with admissions to rebuild the entire CRM from scratch, led the strategy and implementation, and delivered. The result was more than 12 consecutive semesters of growth, bucking national trends.

• Pillars, not oceans: To avoid overreach, Rossmiller organized execution into pillars: marketing and enrollment, student success, operations, academic and research, and advancement. "We couldn't boil the whole ocean," he said. "We wanted to take small bites out of things." That structure evolved into a broader framework asking what the university teaches, how it teaches, how staff work, and what industry expects from graduates.

• The real payoff: Rossmiller invested in ADKAR-based change management training for roughly 10 IT staff. The results showed up immediately in smoother adoptions and fewer complaints. A current project consolidating all university accounts into a single identity required three years of groundwork. "When we start talking through use cases of here's what you're actually going through and this is how it benefits you, we get a much more positive reaction," he said. Structured communication outperformed technical rollouts every time.

Rossmiller spent a year talking about what AI could do for coding and development. His staff was not buying in. So he changed the approach.

• The legacy code breakthrough: Rossmiller blocked an entire afternoon and sat down with a sysadmin who had inherited a custom Java identity management application. The original developer was gone. Nobody on staff knew Java. Together, they used AI to reverse-engineer the entire codebase. "That was the lightbulb moment where he was like, 'Oh crap, I can use this for a lot of different things,'" Rossmiller said. That single session triggered a snowball effect.

• From IT to the provost's office: The pattern repeated across campus. Web developers walked through multi-agent code review workflows. The provost's office needed better summer enrollment predictions, so Rossmiller's team built a quick dashboard using existing data. "Now half the provost office is vibe coding," he said. Out of 85 IT staff, more than half were using AI in daily work. The key was solving real problems alongside people, not presenting slide decks about what AI could theoretically accomplish.

• Guardrails came with the territory: As adoption spread, Rossmiller's biggest concern was data flowing into open models without oversight. But the hands-on approach created an unexpected benefit. At a recent workshop with about 50 participants, the first question asked was: "What can and can't I do with my data?" People were thinking about governance on their own because the learning happened in context, not in a compliance briefing.

Rossmiller expanded the same playbook into Missoula's broader community, running workshops with local business leaders and community partners. In a state where opinions on AI and technology vary sharply by geography, the university positioned itself as a trusted bridge between emerging capability and practical understanding.

An earlier research project reinforced the foundation. Rossmiller ran every course syllabus through an AI literacy framework and found that more than 80% of existing coursework already taught basic AI fundamentals. The university just had not recognized it yet.

The CIO role in higher education is not just expanding. It is being redefined entirely. Rossmiller was clear about where it was heading. "Your traditional CIO of Chief Information Officer is kind of dead," he said. "The future is going to head more toward a chief strategy or chief digital role, where you're leading the digital transformation of the institution. And if you don't realize that, then you're already behind."