Leaving Las Vegas: Reflections on Slate Summit 2025

Erin Gore, vice president for client technology 

It’s hard to believe that we’re just over a month out from the largest ever Slate Summit, where our combined SIG + RHB Slate teams took the stage seven times alongside clients. During these presentations we showcased how institutions can strategically advance their missions in admissions, student success and advancement. While the events may be over, the excitement, curiosity, innovation and inspiration from Summit still resonate.

We’ve taken time to reflect on our Summit experience—from features that inspired us to the mission-driven values of the Slate community to the satisfaction we felt creating lightbulb moments for close to 50 institutions at the fourth pre-Summit RHB Academy training program. A key takeaway for me was Technolutions’ cautious and deliberate approach to developing and expanding AI in Slate.

Does this mean the robots will do everything in Slate?! Will it guarantee higher yield rates and boost annual giving? Well, not exactly. As I noted in an Insights post leading up to the 2024 Summit: “Humans haven’t disappeared and the value of human judgment, empathy and thinking haven’t either.” Slate’s AI tools will do exactly what you ask them to do. That’s why clear, concise and intentional AI prompting is essential to getting accurate and meaningful results.

It’s time for campuses to educate their teams, develop AI policies, and invest in upskilling and reskilling staff. The future between AI and humans is collaborative–and it’s already here.

·  ·  ·

Dom Rozzi, Senior Technology Consultant

The glow of Slate Summit may be fading, but the memories and lessons from late June linger. Technolutions, true to form, threw an incredible event—complete with a mobile shark and custom Slate poker chips. Yet, beyond the impressive spectacle, the real magic lay in the three (or four, including pre-Summit events) days brimming with idea exchange, collaborative learning, networking, and, my personal favorite, community building.

This year’s Summit felt particularly vibrant, perhaps due to the venue or the novelty of being on the West Coast, there was an enthusiasm I haven’t experienced in years. From “Forums Live” to diverse affinity and regional user group discussions, the palpable sense of community was clearly evident each day. It was truly inspiring to witness and participate in the creativity, knowledge-sharing, problem-solving and collaboration that define the Slate community. Simply outstanding!

A highlight for me was co-presenting to a full house (on Friday afternoon, no less!) alongside my colleague from Southern Utah University. We discussed innovative uses of content blocks and a ‘for loop’ to dynamically generate personalized FAQs for students, tailored to their unique attributes and stage in their journey. Joined on stage with colleagues from Loyola Chicago and the University of Colorado at Boulder, we demonstrated how translation tables and content blocks can streamline complex manual processes, empowering teams to focus on more impactful work.

Leaving Las Vegas, I was filled with anticipation for Slate’s new to be released features, which should prove to be huge quality of life improvements for the users of Slate, and the collaborative innovations we’ll achieve in 2026. I trust you share the same enthusiasm!

·  ·  ·

Alisa Chambers, associate director of design and development

Watching the opening session—literally steeped in illusion and mystery—I couldn’t help but cast a few wary thoughts. One wrong word, and suddenly the AI inserts a block of code in your email or portal where it doesn’t belong. You test. You re-prompt. You test again. Frustration creeps in: “What am I doing wrong?” And just like that, a simple task—adding a new content area—spirals into wasted time with nothing to show for it.

Yet, there’s no denying the excitement. The promise of efficiency and empowerment for Slate users is real. The idea that you could generate a working framework, complete with required and relevant components, in moments is compelling. It opens the door for more creativity and innovation on the human side of the equation.

Still, we shouldn’t rush in blindly. It’s critical to understand what’s happening under the hood of the source code being generated. Alexander’s demo included prompts like use my brand color, follow best-practice UX/UI methods, make it mobile-friendly and accessible. But do you know what those requests actually entail? More importantly, do you know what to look for when testing and refining the results?

Before I learned about WCAG and ADA compliance, I used to strip attributes from my HTML that I mistakenly assumed were just “bloat.” Don’t repeat my mistakes—check the AI’s work. Make sure the code it generates is accessible by conducting your own testing. You may need to brush up on HTML, CSS, accessibility standards, mobile-first development or even prompt engineering.

As we move forward, let’s stay curious but critical: test thoroughly, understand what’s being generated, give feedback early and always bring a human eye to AI-assisted work.

·  ·  ·

Jolene Monson, senior technology consultant

It was a wonderful reset to return to Summit this year. I was particularly appreciative of all of the new features that became immediately available in our Slate Databases, and how quickly the Slate community has come together to add fast improvements to them. While this isn’t an exhaustive list of the new abilities in Slate, these are what I’ve been able to utilize in my projects so far: 

• Materialized Views: This is so useful for repetitive calculations that you have to do to present data throughout Slate! I already have a handful running overnight to calculate applicant counts and award dollars spent, which takes a data table in a portal and a portal report from barely running at all to loading in a few seconds. But it’s not just reporting  – now that you can independently join into your materialized views, you can use the data on dashboards or even query libraries so that your end-users can pull the calculations without pulling the full calculation subquery that would make their whole query slower (and would allow them to edit the calculation). Also, the new materialized view query base shows up automatically on your CJs user permission settings for both base and join access, so you can add/remove them from specific roles/users easily.
• Rich HTML editor and full-screen HTML view: This has already been a game-changer when working with content in so many different places in Slate, from portal builds to emails to form content. It’s becoming my default click whenever I open up any text editor throughout Slate.
• AI query analysis: I haven’t used too much of Slate’s AI helper abilities yet, but an excellent use is simply pulling up the Slate AI and asking it questions about a query you just ran. What’s the average GPA of all these applicants? How many science majors are there and what’s their average GPA? List the applicants who haven’t filled in the enrollment form yet. I could see this being so useful for Slate managers when working with end-users who automatically want/need to download queries in order to assess their results or ask a simple question or two. This could be a way to avoid downloading application data so often.

·  ·  ·

Joshua Henry, director of technology support and training 

For the fourth year in a row, our week at Summit began with RHB Academy. We introduced the pre-Summit training event for Slate users in 2022, in Nashville, and it has become an annual part of the Summit experience since. This year, attendees convened in Las Vegas from 48 different institutions, choosing from 12 different course offerings to create personalized training experiences and level up their Slate skills in configurable joins, portals, reporting, datasets and entities, communications and more.

Engaging with our RHB Academy attendees and showcasing what’s possible in Slate is always a personal highlight of the Summit experience for me. The instruction we provide and strategies we share hopefully empower our audience to identify opportunities and create new solutions for their institutions. It’s a learning opportunity for us as well. While co-leading a course on building sustainable communications with my colleague Megan Miller, Megan demonstrated two capabilities with content blocks in Slate, back-to-back, that I had no idea were possible. I’ve been using Slate since 2017, and have a comprehensive knowledge of the system at this point. And yet, there’s still plenty left for me to learn.

And that’s what Summit is about—sharing solutions, learning new techniques, finding inspiration and engaging with the Slate community. RHB Academy has become such a special part of Summit for us because it allows us to accomplish all of the above before we even acquire our Slate-printed badges. I’m already looking forward to planning next year’s RHB Academy, back in Nashville, thinking through what will be the most pressing challenges in Slate on the road ahead (effective uses of AI?), and how we can provide the training and support the Slate community needs.