M-Connectors link U-M’s AI tools with everyday services, giving them more context to support work, learning, and research
ANN ARBOR, Mich., Sept. 30, 2026 — The University of Michigan has launched the Michigan AI App Store, a new way for students, faculty and staff to connect the university’s AI tools with services they use every day, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Dropbox and Canvas.
The connections, called M-Connectors, bring information from those services into U-M GPT, the university’s conversational AI tool, and Maizey, which lets users create AI assistants based on data they provide. That means people can ask U-M GPT to draw on relevant information across connected services to help prepare a meeting brief, organize upcoming coursework or develop a first draft.
“U-M has been building AI tools for our community. M-Connectors is an important next step because it helps those tools work with the information people already use in their daily lives,” said Ravi Pendse, U-M vice president for information technology and chief information officer. “That added context can make AI more useful for learning, research and work, while people remain in control of how they use it.”
Canvas, the online learning management system used for U-M courses, is one of the services people can connect. For faculty, this creates new ways to work with course information. For students, it can help bring course schedules and assignments together with other connected information.
“M-Connectors has already proven useful to me in designing a new course. The ability to reason over multiple resources including Canvas is a game changer. I think it will also be extremely useful to students and staff, for myriad use cases,” said Nigel Melville, associate professor of technology and operations at U-M’s Ross School of Business.
The Michigan AI App Store is designed around human choice. People opt in and select which M-Connectors to use. For Canvas, instructors decide whether to enable access to full course materials for their course; that access is off by default.
“More information can make an AI response more useful, but it does not replace human judgment,” Pendse said. “People still need to ask good questions, think critically about what AI provides, and decide what to do next. Human-centered AI means keeping people at the center of those choices.”
More than 200 students, faculty members and staff participated in hands-on testing and feedback before launch. The service is built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard that allows AI applications to connect with external tools and information. U-M plans to add more M-Connectors and extend the capabilities to other university AI services.
M-Connectors via the Michigan AI App Store are now available to U-M students, faculty, and staff through U-M GPT and Maizey. Connector availability and capabilities vary by affiliation. More information and set-up instructions are available at mconnectors.umich.edu.
It was developed by the University of Michigan’s Information and Technology Services (ITS).
For more information, contact [email protected]