By
Sean O’Brien - Associate Vice President, NET+, Internet2
What You Need to Know
Internet2 and Cal Poly created an intelligent solution that makes hundreds of documents, video recordings, presentations, and audio files searchable via natural-language queries. Dive into this article to understand the chatbot’s many facets. Then, head over to the site to try it out and leave feedback to help us improve.
A New Way to Access Community Knowledge
Internet2 is proud to announce a new community-driven tool designed to significantly improve access to our community’s shared knowledge: the I2Cloud Answers by Experts chatbot. Co-developed with the Cal Poly Cloud Innovation Center (CIC) as part of the AWS Cloud Innovation Centers (CIC) program, the chatbot was officially launched in May at the 2026 Higher Education Cloud Forum.
The launch of the Answers by Experts chatbot represents the latest step in Internet2’s overarching commitment to making actionable data and technical information readily transparent for NET+ subscribers and the wider research and higher education (R&E) community.
The Answer by Experts’ Origin
Multiple times each month, Internet2 brings together cloud architects, IT practitioners, and research computing professionals across the Cloud Infrastructure Community Program (CICP), NET+ subscriber institutions, and the higher ed cloud community. These town halls, tech jams, and webinars generate incredible real-world insights into how our peers are navigating cloud migrations, solving architectural challenges, and building cutting-edge research environments in the cloud.
The problem?
Before Answers by Experts existed, the knowledge exchanged at these meetings often remained locked inside hour-long video recordings or, worse, buried deep in presentation decks. Finding a quick answer to a specific cloud problem usually meant skimming transcripts, trying to remember who said what, and hoping to find the most valuable notes from a session several months past.
Instead of manually digging through community archives, spending countless hours and potentially days, cloud practitioners can now query Answers by Experts to quickly extract PDFs, MP4 videos, audio files, PowerPoints, Google Slides, and other peer-generated resources to save time and easily find answers in their day-to-day.
What the Chatbot Can Do
Key capabilities of this tool include:
- Direct presentation linking – The chatbot not only synthesizes text. It also points you to the specific webinar, town hall, or tech jam where topics were discussed, tying users back into the original source presentation.
- Tiered resource matching – Answers by Experts surfaces technical insights from across R&E – including resources generally available to the broader cloud community, as well as specialized materials curated for CICP participants and NET+ AWS & GCP subscribers.
This new AI-driven tool acts as a companion to our existing data initiatives:
- The Internet2 Cloud Scorecard – Our community-driven directory that enables institutions to discover, filter, and compare cloud and AI solutions based on standardized higher education requirements. Explore the tool via the Internet2 Cloud Scorecard Finder.
- The Cloud Data Benchmarking Service – A secure, self-service platform built to give NET+ AWS, NET+ GCP, and CICP subscribing institutions interactive Looker Studio dashboards. It uses row-level security to provide institutions with personalized views of their cloud usage trends, spend metrics, and Cloud Elevation Index (CEI) scores, enabling them to benchmark efficiency against peer averages.
By pairing financial and compliance benchmarking data with the conversational, peer-to-peer technical knowledge found in the Answers by Experts chatbot, we hope to give your institutional cloud teams a comprehensive toolkit to build faster and smarter.
Because certain materials are funded through the NET+ program, some proprietary vendor insights or subscriber-only resources remain exclusive to those institutions. However, Answers by Experts is resourceful and accessible to subscribers and non-subscribers alike.
Help Us Improve Answers by Experts
We are treating this initial release as an ongoing community experiment. It is a work in progress, and its ultimate success depends heavily on real-world use, feedback, and iterative updates from cloud practitioners like you.
Please log in, put the tool through its paces, tell us what works, and leave notes on what needs adjustment.
Follow these simple steps:
- Visit abe.internet2.edu
- Access the chatbot using your existing InCommon login credentials or by creating an Internet2 guest account.
- Send feedback to help@internet2.edu
Want to Learn More About the Chatbot?
About the Author(s)
Sean O’Brien leads Internet2’s NET+ cloud service program working with institutions on the collaborative development, evaluation, and management of cloud services for the research and education community. He has worked in a variety of roles in higher education and the private sector focusing on cloud enablement, institutional research, and project management.