For more than four decades, the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS) has helped higher education professionals advance quality, strengthen programs, and improve student learning and development. CAS standards have long been trusted across the field, but the way those standards were delivered had not kept pace with how professionals work today.
CAS’s journey with artificial intelligence did not begin with a desire to adopt AI simply because it was new. It began with a much more fundamental question: How could CAS make its standards easier to access, understand, implement, and use while protecting the rigor and integrity that make CAS valuable?

The answer ultimately led CAS to rethink not only its technology, but its entire approach to delivering standards and supporting continuous improvement.

1. High-Level / Macro View: The Problem and the Goal

For years, CAS standards and Self-Assessment Guides were primarily delivered through static PDF documents. While PDFs served CAS well for decades, they increasingly represented an outdated delivery model for a profession accustomed to searchable information, digital collaboration, on-demand resources, and intuitive technology.

The challenge was not the quality of the CAS standards. The challenge was accessibility and usability.

CAS standards are intentionally comprehensive, but that comprehensiveness could also make them difficult for new or occasional users to navigate. Professionals needed to understand which standards applied to their work, how the General Standards related to Functional Area Standards, how to conduct a self-assessment, and how to translate the standards into meaningful institutional action.

In a PDF-only environment, users were largely responsible for making those connections themselves. They had to locate the right resources, interpret the framework, determine how to apply it, and often create their own processes for organizing an assessment. For experienced CAS users, this was manageable. For someone encountering CAS for the first time, however, the learning curve could be significant.

At the same time, higher education itself was changing. Institutions were facing increased expectations around assessment, accountability, efficiency, student success, resource allocation, and demonstrating institutional effectiveness. Campus professionals needed tools that could help them move from standards to action more efficiently.

CAS therefore faced two interconnected challenges: modernizing an outdated delivery model and ensuring its standards remained relevant and accessible to the next generation of higher education professionals.

The goal became clear: CAS needed to transform its standards from static documents into a dynamic, usable environment that could guide professionals through implementation while maintaining the integrity of the standards themselves.

AI provided an opportunity to help make that transformation possible.

2. Approach: Modernization Before Technology

CAS approached AI as a means to solve a problem, not as the objective itself.

That distinction became important throughout the project.

Rather than asking, “How can CAS use AI?” we began by asking, “What prevents people from using CAS standards effectively, and how can technology remove those barriers?”

This required CAS to examine the entire user experience.

We looked at how professionals find standards, how they understand them, how they conduct self-assessments, how multiple individuals or departments collaborate, and how the resulting work can be translated into continuous improvement.

We also recognized that simply placing existing PDFs inside a new digital platform would not constitute meaningful transformation. The content, structure, navigation, and user experience all had to evolve together.

That realization helped shape what ultimately became the CAS+ Portal.

The Portal was envisioned not as a replacement for CAS’s expertise, but as a way to make that expertise significantly more accessible and actionable. AI could help users navigate complex information, identify relevant standards, organize their work, and create structured outputs. The technology could reduce friction without reducing rigor.

Our approach was therefore grounded in several principles: preserve the integrity of CAS standards; make the user experience simpler and more intuitive; use AI to support rather than replace professional judgment; design for experienced and first-time CAS users alike; and create a platform capable of evolving as higher education and technology continue to change.

3. Actions and Activities: Building a New CAS Experience

Moving from concept to implementation required CAS to rethink both its standards and its infrastructure.

One of the most important steps was modernizing the standards themselves. CAS undertook significant work to revise the General Standards so they would be clearer, easier to understand, and easier to implement. This work was critical because technology cannot solve unnecessarily complicated content simply by putting it online.

At the same time, CAS began developing a digital environment that could support how professionals actually use standards.
The CAS+ Portal created a structured way for users to explore CAS standards rather than relying exclusively on individual PDF documents. Search, navigation, organization, and digital access make it easier for professionals to locate the information relevant to their work.
For users conducting assessment, the Portal goes further.

Through SAG Studio, users can move beyond simply reading standards and begin working with them. The environment supports the creation and use of custom Self-Assessment Guides, provides a workspace for assessment activity, and allows users to organize and export their work.

For institutions seeking broader implementation, the Portal also creates opportunities for multiple functional areas to work within a more consistent framework helping move CAS from an individual resource to an institutional improvement tool.

AI adds another important layer. Instead of expecting users to know exactly where to begin or how all the pieces fit together, intelligent tools can help users interact with CAS content and generate structured outputs based on the standards. This creates the potential for a much more guided experience while keeping proprietary CAS standards at the center of the process.

The journey was not without challenges.

CAS had to address questions about AI accuracy, hallucination risk, accessibility, data security, governance, intellectual property, sustainability, and user trust. We also had to determine where AI genuinely improved the experience and where traditional functionality was more appropriate.

Equally important was the organizational challenge. Digital transformation requires investment at a time when many nonprofit associations are facing financial pressure. CAS had to balance innovation with responsible stewardship and make difficult decisions about where limited resources could have the greatest long-term impact.

Throughout the process, feedback from users, association partners, Council representatives, assessment professionals, and other stakeholders helped refine the platform. The result was not simply a technology project. It became an organizational transformation project.

4. Results: From a Collection of Documents to a Platform for Improvement

CAS demonstrated early adoption and measurable engagement with the CAS+ Portal, with more than 200 active subscribers currently accessing CAS’s 50 standards, contextual statements, and supporting resources to create customized Self-Assessment Guides. This growing utilization provides an important early KPI for the new platform and demonstrates that CAS is moving successfully from simply distributing standards to enabling professionals to actively apply them. As adoption continues to grow, the Portal is becoming increasingly relevant to CAS’s broader mission—helping institutions use standards and assessment to strengthen programs, demonstrate effectiveness, and ultimately advance student learning and success.

The most significant result of CAS’s AI journey is not that CAS now uses artificial intelligence; it is that CAS has fundamentally changed how professionals can engage with its standards.

The CAS+ Portal moves CAS beyond a PDF-only model toward an interactive environment where standards can be explored, understood, applied, and used as part of an ongoing improvement process.
That shift has several important implications.

CAS standards can become more approachable for professionals who may not have extensive assessment experience. Experienced practitioners can work more efficiently. Institutions can envision a more coordinated approach to standards and assessment across functional areas. And CAS can continuously improve the user experience rather than waiting for the next edition of a static publication.
Perhaps most importantly, the Portal helps close the gap between having standards and actually using standards.

The CAS+ Portal is still evolving, and our work is far from finished. AI itself is evolving rapidly, which means CAS must continue addressing governance, accuracy, ethics, accessibility, security, and responsible use. We will continue listening to users and improving the platform based on how higher education professionals actually use it.

But the journey has already reinforced an important lesson.

Innovation does not mean abandoning what made an organization valuable. It means finding better ways to deliver that value.

CAS did not move toward AI because standards had become less important. We moved toward AI because standards are too important to remain difficult to access and implement.

The transition from PDFs to the CAS+ Portal represents more than a technology upgrade. It represents CAS’s commitment to ensuring that more than four decades of expertise can continue to serve a changing higher education landscape.

Our challenge was to take trusted, rigorous standards and make them easier to use.

Our opportunity was AI.

And our continuing goal is simple: make self-assessment and continuous improvement more accessible, actionable, and meaningful for the institutions and professionals we serve.