At EDUCAUSE 2025, campus IT leaders framed a pragmatic agenda: adopt AI tools while tightening trust, governance and incident‑response readiness. Panelists forecasted AI’s role in personalized learning and workforce transformation and urged institutions to pair technical deployments with human‑centered policies and governance frameworks. Security leaders from Maricopa Community College District and Vanderbilt University shared refinements to incident‑response playbooks—cross‑unit coordination, tabletop exercises and clear escalation paths—arguing that stronger preparedness reduces downtime and reputational risk. EDUCAUSE sessions emphasized that trust in campus AI systems requires transparency, documentation and faculty‑aligned training. For CIOs and provosts, the takeaway was operational: accelerate AI pilots that augment teaching and research, but invest equally in governance, vendor due diligence and incident readiness to contain breaches and preserve academic continuity.