The Republican Centre for Technology Transfer (RCTT) continues to monitor global best practices in applying artificial intelligence to innovation, entrepreneurship support, and technology transfer. A notable example is the ZotGPT AI ecosystem at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and its use by the UCI ANTrepreneur Center.

UCI has developed ZotGPT, a secure generative AI platform running on Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS, available at no additional cost to students, faculty, and staff. ZotGPT includes several services: ZotGPT Chat for AI‑powered conversations, ZotGPT API for project integration, ZotGPT ClassChat for course‑specific learning environments, and ZotGPT Creator for building custom chatbots from institutional content.

Using ZotGPT Creator, the UCI ANTrepreneur Center team created and launched its own AI advisor, ZotGPT, in September 2025. ZotGPT provides students with a 24/7 "digital gateway" to the campus entrepreneurship ecosystem. Trained using internal documents, frequently asked questions, and basic entrepreneurship knowledge, the advisor answers questions about innovation programs, patents, licensing, and startup support. If ZotGPT cannot find the answer in its knowledge base while preparing a response to a question, it turns to generative AI to generate the answer  It operates in real time and is accessible to any website visitor.

Thus, ZotGPT is a specialized RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) assistant (an AI consultant connected to corporate knowledge sources) that, if an answer to a question is not available in its knowledge base, turns to generative AI to prepare an answer.

ZotGPT Creator empowers staff to build and manage such chatbots without writing code, configure tone and scope, upload and curate knowledge bases, and monitor usage through built‑in analytics. This approach reduces reliance on costly third‑party solutions, aligns with UCI’s data privacy and security requirements, and enables rapid experimentation with new formats of student and early‑stage team support.

Conclusion for RCTT. The experience of the UCI ANTrepreneur Center illustrates how a university‑wide AI platform can serve as a foundation for specialized digital consultants in entrepreneurship, education, and technology transfer. RCTT views such international cases as an important reference point for the continued development of AI‑driven support tools for Belarusian research, education, and business organizations.

ZotGPT confirms that the RAG assistant, trained using the organization's professional content, is becoming the standard across technology transfer center networks. Thus, the RCTT AI consultant, operational since April 23, 2025, is also a RAG assistant connected to the database of documents and materials on the RCTT internet portal https://www.ictt.by. Like ZotGPT, if an answer to a question is not found in its knowledge base, it turns to generative AI to generate a response.