Summary | | What if users could simply tell ILIAS what they want to achieve, and an AI agent could turn that request into real, controlled actions inside the platform?
“Create a course, add these users and prepare the initial structure.”
“Show me which participants have not completed the training.”
“Run this administrative task every Monday morning.”
With ILIAS Activities and AI agents, scenarios like these are becoming technically realistic.
Activities provide clearly defined and reusable actions for reading information, modifying content and executing processes in ILIAS. They are currently becoming an important foundation of the new ILIAS REST interface. However, their potential reaches far beyond connecting external applications.
In this presentation, we will show how Activities can also become the action layer for AI inside ILIAS.
Our AI infrastructure is integrated directly into ILIAS and consists of a chatbot and an AI agent. The agent can be used interactively through the chatbot, executed on a schedule or made available as a service to other ILIAS plugins. Through dedicated tools, it can support administrative and course-related processes such as creating courses, retrieving information, managing users or preparing recurring workflows.
For the presentation, we will connect ILIAS Activities directly to the AI agent as callable tools. From the agent’s perspective, this creates a standardized catalogue of ILIAS capabilities, similar to connecting external tools through the Model Context Protocol, but available directly within the ILIAS application.
The live demonstration will show the complete process:
A user describes a task in natural language.
The AI agent interprets the request.
It selects the appropriate Activities.
ILIAS executes the requested actions through clearly defined operations.
This is not about giving an AI unrestricted access to ILIAS. Activities provide the opportunity to expose specific capabilities in a structured, reusable and controllable way. The same Activity could be used by the REST API, an external integration, an internal plugin, an automation process or an AI agent.
The contribution is directly related to the ongoing Feature Wiki work around the REST API and the Activities concept. Its strategic relevance goes beyond the API itself: a comprehensive Activity layer could become a shared foundation for future integrations and AI-supported workflows across ILIAS.
The goal of the presentation is to demonstrate that Activities are not merely technical endpoints. Combined with AI, they can make ILIAS processes more accessible, more automatable and easier to integrate into new workflows.
Participants will see a practical prototype, gain insight into technical architecture and leave with concrete ideas for using Activities and AI in administration, course management and future ILIAS development. |
