UC Riverside, a public research university, has soft-launched The Grove, a secure campus AI platform built on Gemini Enterprise, moving Google’s agent platform from enterprise positioning into a live higher education deployment.
The April 29 rollout gives early adopters access to Gemini chat, NotebookLM and agents that can draw on UCR information systems while operating inside existing campus account permissions.
The Grove is available only to the UCR community. UCR Information Technology Solutions describes it as a closed, campus-connected assistant that centralizes access to institutional knowledge, automates processes and provides personalized help using university data rather than only public web information.
Integrating institutional data
UCR says The Grove is directly connected to its information systems and aligns responses and actions to each user’s permissions, meaning it can reference only the emails, calendars and resources that user can already access.
The access process also makes the agent model explicit. Early users must sign in with a UCR account, authenticate through Duo and authorize The Grove to connect to their UCR Google account. UCR ITS says that authorization allows The Grove to view data the user can access and perform tasks on the user’s behalf.
Enterprise platform and specialized workflows
Google Cloud describes Gemini Enterprise as a secure platform for employees to discover, create, share and run AI agents. Its agent page says the platform provides centralized visibility and control over agents built by Google, third parties or an organization’s own teams.
UCR’s deployment shows how that platform is being adapted inside an institution with sensitive data, complex campus systems and multiple user groups. Inside UCR reported in March that The Grove is built on Gemini Enterprise and designed to securely gather information from UCR resources such as Google Workspace and ServiceNow.
The same report described specialized agents for multi-step workflows, including student scheduling and staff financial tasks.
The university appears to be phasing those capabilities rather than opening the full workflow set at once. Alexandra Chrystal, communications and training manager for UCR ITS, told Inside UCR that The Grove would start with only a few data-connected “trees,” with a longer-term goal of connecting relevant UCR information systems into a centralized resource.
Data privacy and security boundaries
Inside UCR reported that UCR’s enterprise agreement with Google keeps uploaded information private and prevents it from being used to train large language models or stored for other purposes.
UCR’s own AI guidance also warns that information entered into non-UCR-supported AI tools is no longer within the university’s control or protection.
UCR’s AI tools page draws further boundaries around sensitive data. Standard ChatGPT, including paid versions, does not meet UCR privacy requirements and may be used only with P1 public data, while any AI tool interacting with P4 highly sensitive data or systems requires ITS approval.
Alignment with federal agentic AI guidance
The Grove’s launch also landed alongside new government guidance on agentic AI. NSA, CISA and allied cyber agencies warned organizations to deploy agentic systems incrementally, limit them to low-risk tasks, enforce strict privilege controls, maintain continuous monitoring and align agent security with existing cybersecurity models.
UCR’s public materials address several controls that appear in the allied guidance: campus-only access, Duo authentication, existing account permissions, a soft launch and feedback-led expansion.
The guidance also recommends more technical controls for agentic systems, including distinct agent identities, trusted registries, per-request authorization and independent monitoring.
UCR’s workshop series includes a May 13 session on data management and AI best practices and a May 27 session on no-code agent building, where users are expected to learn how to create agents that perform specific tasks without coding.