AI licences and capability building for the tertiary sector

The Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) is seeking commercially licensed, enterprise- or education-grade general-purpose generative AI services for staff and students across New Zealand’s tertiary education institutions (TEIs), including universities, polytechnics and wānanga. The opportunity is based on potential access for up to approximately 420,000 staff and students. This figure is provided for evaluation and pricing purposes only and does not represent guaranteed uptake. The services must provide broad access to advanced generative AI capabilities for teaching, learning, research and organisational use. This includes conversational AI, advanced reasoning and research, document and data analysis, multimodal capabilities, and the creation or use of AI assistants or agents. Services should be designed for institution-wide deployment, with appropriate administration, identity, security, privacy, governance, usage management and support. Proposed services must provide materially greater capability, capacity and/or usage allowances than free, consumer or basic AI offerings. The procurement has two linked components: (1) licensing, access and consumption capacity; and (2) implementation and capability building. Commercial arrangements should be transparent and scalable, recognise aggregated sector demand, and support effective, responsible and sustained adoption across participating TEIs. We intend to establish arrangements with one or more suppliers while preserving institutional choice. Each eligible TEI will decide whether to participate and which provider, or providers, best meet its needs.