Last week, we spent two insightful days at the Gregynog IT Technical & Learning Conference 2026, surrounded by brilliant technical, academic and operational minds from across the education sector.
It was great to have Sam Wray and Gemma James there representing Vizst Technology and Extreme Networks – and even better to spend time speaking with IT teams about what’s actually happening on the ground right now.
Collaboration was the biggest theme
One of the strongest themes throughout the conference was collaboration.
Not the kind that gets written into strategy documents and quietly forgotten about, but genuine collaboration between organisations, technical teams, academic staff and leadership teams. Bringing technical and faculty teams together created better conversations, more practical thinking and a clearer understanding of the challenges everyone is trying to solve together.
AI was naturally a major talking point throughout the event, but encouragingly, the discussions felt practical rather than driven by hype.
There were some genuinely positive examples of AI already being used to add value across education environments:
- Supporting students
- Improving internal processes
- Building bots and AI agents to reduce repetitive tasks
- Creating efficiencies for stretched IT and operational teams
AI in Education is becoming more practical
One college delivered a particularly interesting session around AI use amongst students. Their approach focused on making sure AI happens with education, not to it.
What stood out most was the balanced approach:
- Giving equal weighting to ethics, safety, innovation and efficiency
- Setting clear boundaries, including no AI for marking
- Taking a collaborative and accountable approach to adoption
They also shared how they are using an AI usage scale based on the work of Leon Furze, helping students and educators better understand where and how AI can appropriately support learning.
At the centre of the discussion were two simple but important questions:
- Is this still my work?
- Am I still learning?
That felt like a genuinely sensible framework for preparing students to use AI responsibly, whilst still protecting the integrity of the learning process itself.
Doing more with less in campus IT and cybersecurity
We also had the opportunity to deliver our own session around doing more with less when securing the campus.
It’s a challenge we’re hearing across almost every education organisation we speak with. Demand on IT teams continues to grow, but the resources behind them often are not. That means teams are having to rethink how they manage complexity, visibility and cybersecurity without simply adding more tools or increasing costs.
Our session focused on:
- Achieving more with the same budget
- Increasing efficiency from existing technology investments
- Getting better value from existing platforms and infrastructure
- Exploring collaborative approaches to improve procurement and buying efficiency
We also discussed the value of bringing trusted technology partners into those conversations earlier – not just for pricing, but to benefit from shared experience, technical expertise and creative approaches to solving operational challenges.
And sometimes, it’s simply about tackling the projects that have been sitting on the list for months.
As we joked during the session:
“Time to get a Round Tuit.”
But honestly, the best part of the event was the conversations afterwards. Open, honest and very real discussions about where things are working, where they are not, and what IT leaders and education teams are trying to prioritise next.
A huge thank you to everyone we spoke with over the two days, and to the organisers for putting together such a valuable event in such a fantastic setting.
Check out our cybersecurity services here: https://vizst.com/services/cyber-security/