GCP – The University of Hawaii is helping the state retain top talent with Google AI

As the Hawaiian Islands’ primary higher education resource, the University of Hawaii (UH) System faces a unique challenge among U.S. universities: many graduates–including those with deep family roots in Hawaii – are soon confronted with a competitive job market, and struggle to land a fulfilling entry-level role and starting salary commensurate with Hawaii’s higher-than-average cost of living. This risks a continued outflow of skilled young grads from the Islands as they explore other career options on the mainland.

To bolster its mission of career readiness and workforce development, the UH System collaborated with Google Public Sector to rapidly prototype a new platform for Hawaii Career Pathways. Leveraging Google Cloud’s unified AI platform Vertex AI and BigQuery to analyze vast labor market data, this innovative AI-powered tool evaluates a student’s qualifications–including prior experience, current skills, education and certifications–along with their personal interests and career aspirations. The output is a customized student profile, which, with additional personalized guidance from Gemini, aligns their academic paths with tangible career opportunities within Hawaii. This human-centered approach empowers students to define their career possibilities along with key factors toward securing local jobs, charting a course for them to begin their careers in the state. It’s about fostering talent retention by enhancing student productivity and creating a direct bridge for Hawaii employers to connect with a prepared, local talent pool, directly preparing students for the demands of the greater market and Hawaii’s evolving economy.

Embracing the future: AI integration for education and beyond

In today’s increasingly AI-driven world, preparing students for the workforce requires more than just traditional curricula. UH is proactively integrating artificial intelligence across its educational curriculum and campus operations. Powered by Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Model Garden, with 200+ foundation models, including the latest Gemini models, this integration enhances learning experiences, streamlines administrative tasks, and fosters innovation. As part of this commitment, UH launched Google AI Essentials, a free course for students and employees that teaches foundational knowledge, prompting techniques, and responsible AI practices. This comprehensive AI integration ensures students are not only learning about AI but are also using AI-powered tools, preparing them for jobs of today and tomorrow.

Ensuring digital access across a unique Island culture

A core tenet of the UH community is ensuring accessibility across the Islands’ broad cultural makeup. Google’s commitment to digital inclusion in Hawaii and the Pacific, highlighted by the Grow with Google partnership, strongly aligns with UH’s mission. Accommodating the unique demographics of its student body, UH has begun to leverage Google Translate to communicate to Pacific Islander students in their native languages, including Hawaiian, Māori, Samoan, Tongan, Cook Islands Māori, Cantonese and Marshallese. This directly benefits the diverse population of Hawaii, making communication more accessible. For the UH System, with its extensive engagement with U.S. territories and Pacific Island nations, this enhancement facilitates better communication, supports cultural preservation efforts, and bolsters academic and outreach programs.

Building upon a history of university innovation

This latest collaboration marks the latest chapter of Google’s integral relationship with the UH System. As a longtime Google for Education customer, UH Information Technology Services (ITS) was among the first universities in the U.S. to adopt Google Workspace for Education in the late 2000s. Today, Google Workspace for Education is used by more than 80 of the top 100 universities, as ranked by US News & World Report 2025, making it a leading collaboration and productivity suite for students, faculty, and staff.

Following this initial success, our partnership with UH expanded to include intelligence-driven security with Google Security Operations to deliver a full-stack IT platform. Additionally, Google Cloud plays a central role in UH’s AI-optimized High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure, enabling supercomputing-class performance and AI-intensive workloads, to maintain UH’s ranking among world class research universities.

By further equipping students with leading-edge tools like Google Workspace, Gemini, Vertex AI Platform, Google Security Operations, BigQuery, Google Translate and resources for academic achievement, UH ensures they have the opportunity to build successful lives and careers in their island home, strengthening the state’s community and economy for generations to come.

Learn more from Google Public Sector

Join us to learn how public sector organizations are leveraging Google Cloud’s AI and security solutions to achieve their goals at the Google Public Sector Summit 2025 on October 29. Sign up to receive our Google Public Sector newsletter for the latest updates, customer stories, announcements, and more.