UC San Diego AI Weekly · September 21, 2026

What's New in Your AI Tools

Zoom's agentic search now spans ten enterprise connectors — Zoom's What's New page currently features a batch of agentic AI updates: AI Companion can answer enterprise-level questions across Salesforce, Google Drive, ServiceNow, Box, Workday, Confluence, SharePoint, Zendesk, and more, with ten connectors now live (requires the Custom AI Companion add-on). Agentic retrieval also now pulls Gmail and Outlook messages into AI Companion 3.0 on the web as context for questions and summaries, and a new MCP integration lets Claude Cowork and Claude Code use Zoom's meeting intelligence to power context-aware workflows. If your team lives in both Zoom and Claude, that pairing is worth a look.

Brand Kit and Skills arrive in Copilot in PowerPoint — Announced September 14: Copilot in PowerPoint gains Brand Kit, which applies your organization's visual identity to AI-generated slides, and Skills, which carry reusable instructions so Copilot's output stays consistent deck after deck. The goal is spending less time formatting slides to match organizational branding and more time shaping the story. For departments that produce a lot of leadership decks, this closes the gap between "AI made these slides" and "these slides look like ours."

Managing apps built in Copilot Studio — App creation is on by default for all users in both Copilot Studio and Copilot Cowork, and Microsoft's September 15 post walks through how to keep the resulting app estate under control. Published apps are inventoried in the Microsoft 365 admin center, and the "Choose where people can make apps" setting (under Apps > Overview) lets admins decide which creation paths stay open. Worth a read if you track governance: the default is open, so if your unit wants to constrain citizen-built apps, this is the control to set.

Gemini in Workspace can now connect to third-party tools — Rolled out September 15: third-party connectors let Gemini in Workspace work with content beyond Google's own apps. Users reach connectors through the Gemini side panel in Docs, Sheets, and Slides, as well as in Google Chat. Note for admins: the feature is ON by default for users with Gemini for Google Workspace, managed at the domain, OU, or group level under Apps > Google Workspace > Gemini for Workspace > Third-Party Connectors.

Workspace Studio flows can now move Drive files, reply to emails, and post in Chat — Four new automation steps in Workspace Studio Flows — Move Drive file, Copy Drive file, Send a Chat reply, and Reply to email — completed their rollout this month, with the Gmail step finishing September 14. Together they enable end-to-end automated flows for intake triage, template generation, and project-folder organization without scripts or third-party tools. The steps are available by default wherever Gemini for Google Workspace steps are allowed.

2026 AI and Healthy Aging Symposium — Thursday, September 24, 9:30 a.m.–4 p.m. at Park & Market, hosted by the Stein Institute for Research on Aging. Keynotes from Noom's chief medical officer and UC San Diego's Amy Sitapati, plus expert panels on independent living, personalized healthcare, and using new technologies safely. Free to attend, but space is limited and registration is open now.

Bridging Biomedical Breakthroughs Summit: AI in Biomedical Innovation — Wednesday, November 4, 1–6:30 p.m. on the UC San Diego campus. The School of Biological Sciences' fourth summit brings together faculty innovators, entrepreneurs, investors, and healthcare leaders to explore how AI is accelerating therapeutics, diagnostics, and medical imaging, with faculty innovation pitches and sessions on moving discovery toward real-world impact. Open to faculty, postdocs, students, and industry partners.

Self-paced options in the meantime:

Take the AI Foundations course to learn core AI concepts and UC policies on AI tools.
Watch the AI Webinar #6 recording — a practical walkthrough of TritonGPT's first year, including MyDocuments, model switching, and chat sharing.
Explore the Everyday I AI video series for short, practical prompting tips that work across TritonGPT and other AI tools.

SDSC wins $10M NSF award to deploy Expanse2 — The NSF has awarded $10 million to the San Diego Supercomputer Center to deploy NSF Expanse2, a next-generation supercomputer supporting scientific discovery, engineering innovation, and AI-driven research nationwide when it enters production in 2027. The machine is architected for AI and machine learning workloads, with latest-generation GPUs and an all-NVMe file system, and will serve the NAIRR research community alongside traditional computational science.

Virtual cells built from 4D AI models and digital twins could speed up drug discovery — UC San Diego researchers published two Cell studies showing how "virtual cells" — digital models that mimic the dynamic processes of real cells — can predict how mitochondria within human cells will respond to drug treatment. One approach trained a deep-learning model on 40,000 4D movies of drug-treated cells; the other built a physics-based "digital twin" of a living cell that reproduced real drug responses without changing a single parameter. Together, the studies could reduce dependence on time-consuming lab experiments and accelerate drug discovery for diseases including cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer's.

SDSC will lead the new NSF NAIRR Operations Center — The NSF has awarded $35 million over five years to SDSC, in collaboration with the Texas Advanced Computing Center, to establish and run the NAIRR Operations Center — the operational backbone that transitions the National AI Research Resource from a successful pilot into sustained national infrastructure. The center will coordinate private-sector, federal, and academic resource providers, build and operate a unified national NAIRR portal, and lead training and workforce development, building on a pilot that connected roughly 900 research teams across all 50 states.

Scripps researchers diagnose why AI weather forecasts miss extreme events — A CW3E study led by Yanbo Nie, published in Geophysical Research Letters, introduces fast, interpretable methods for investigating why AI weather forecasts miss specific extreme events and how remote atmospheric processes shape them — directly relevant to atmospheric river forecasting in California. The work was funded by the Office of Naval Research and the California Department of Water Resources Atmospheric River Program.

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