There is no achievement without challenge and, as United States Senator Jack Reed ’10H acknowledged to the faculty, industry experts, instructional designers, and academic leaders gathered for the second annual AI Summit, the issue before the group was enormous.
“The age of AI is upon us, and we need your professional judgment and expertise to help navigate it,” Reed declared, noting that — from wrestling with the ethical implications of AI adoption to preparing the next generation for success in an AI-driven world — colleges and universities are on the front lines of the AI revolution.
And like all revolutions, this one requires solidarity. Reed praised the collaboration taking place at the summit, which was jointly organized by Bryant University and Rhode Island College, and noted that he hoped it was just the beginning of efforts “to work together to ensure that AI is a force for good, for deep learning, and for building human capacity.”
The AI Summit, a three-day conference devoted to exploring AI’s impact on pedagogy, curriculum design, ethics, and the evolving needs of employers and society, comes at a pivotal moment, noted Bryant Provost and Chief Academic Officer Rupendra Paliwal, Ph.D.
“AI is no longer a future issue for higher education, it's already here,” he stated. “It's in our students’ work, in the labor market, in the tools that faculty are experimenting with, and the questions we are all asking about assessment, about integrity, about privacy, about sustainability, equity, and human judgment.”
The rise of AI does not make formal education irrelevant, said Paliwal; it is more important than ever. “We believe in the enduring value of higher education: It's about ethical reasoning, creativity, communication, collaboration, and adaptivity,” he said.
Yet even when our goals and values are clear, it can still be difficult for educators to navigate the fog surrounding a still-new breakthrough like artificial intelligence, suggested keynote speaker Lance Eaton, Ph.D., senior associate director of Northeastern University’s Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning through Research.
“This is less about a race than finding our bearings on a map,” he said.
Active engagement, and active conversation where new ideas, experiments, successes, and even failures are shared and explored, argued Eaton, will be the key for educators going forward. In a time of uncertainty, he urged them to lean in to examining the “gray areas” regarding AI with one another and alongside their students.
“We have a say in what emerges,” he reminded the audience. “We have an opportunity to have an impact on education and what it could be."
AI in the classroom
Throughout the summit, attendees shared how they, and their fields, are adapting to the AI moment. During a conversation on AI and the humanities, panelists — including History, Literature, and the Arts lecturers David Liao, Ph.D., and Jennifer Horan, Ph.D. — discussed how AI is changing what it means to read closely, interpret deeply, and struggle with texts. Communication and Language Studies Lecturer Mary Ann Gallo and First-Year Writing Curriculum Coordinator and History, Literature, and the Arts Lecturer Carrie Kell, Ed.D., spoke about implementing AI during the drafting and revision processes.
Faculty members also provided insight into the many creative and experimental ways they are using AI in the classroom. For Biological and Biomedical Sciences Professor Brian Blais, Ph.D., this involves sharing the local models — machine learning models trained on a user’s personal device or local data — he’s used as teaching aides in his “AI in Healthcare” course. Information Systems and Analytics Assistant Professor ML Tlachac, Ph.D., explained how they used AI to make complex material more digestible for students by turning textbook chapters into short podcasts. Assistant professor of Management Erim Ergene, Ph.D. developed AI personas for students to roleplay with and hone their business strategy skills.
A pair of panels walked their audience through Bryant’s development of AI-powered tutors. From the initial creation of the award-winning “Strategy Guru” and its offshoot “Finance Guru” to a second stage of development supported by a Davis Educational Foundation grant to an upcoming third wave, the presenters discussed how they ensured that the tool reinforced learning instead of replacing it.
That work, they noted, has touched on some of the most pressing questions surrounding AI’s role in education, including finding ways to reward curiosity and encourage critical thinking rather than simply supplying the right answer and short circuiting the learning process. They also wrestled with the balance between one-on-one mentoring — a Bryant hallmark — and providing an virtual option that was accessible at all times.
Digital Marketing major Nick Goyette ’29, whose team won a Bryant-Babson-Bentley Build-a-thon, and Applied Mathematics and Statistics major Quinn Arnold ’26, who has developed four AI-powered apps, provided students’ perspectives on AI adoption and emphasized the importance of faculty making space for experimentation and discovery.
“Anybody has the capability to build anything in this day and age,” said Arnold. "I think that actually using these tools is the greatest thing anybody can do to learn how to make the most of them and about their capabilities."
The beginning of something incredible
“I have never, in my 30 years or so of working with technology, been through a revolution like this,” Rhode Island Foundation Chair and Bryant Trustee Ann Marie Harrington ’86 in her keynote speech. To adapt to the meteoric changes now underway, Harrington, who provides technology consultation for startups and nonprofits, advised AI users to begin by developing an AI use policy as a foundation, then layering on data, AI tools, and a defined workflow.
“On top of that is us: real people who are making the judgments, approving the AI, so that the output is accountable and [represents] the judgment of a human, not the AI.” Her advice to the educators in the audience: “Teach critical thinking, how to have a problem-solving model, and to understand at a fundamental level what you're trying to solve for.”
When utilized correctly, AI doesn’t represent the death of expertise but rather an enhancement of knowledge, Harrington said — but only if users have the necessary knowhow and judgment.
Alumni participants representing a broad range of fields — including finance, marketing, technology consulting, and media — shared how artificial intelligence is currently shaping their work, from navigating industry shifts to the importance of finding and using good data.
As the world changes at an increasingly rapid pace, Louis DiBlasi '22, senior product solutions associate at JP Morgan Chase & Co., said that his company values intellectual curiosity and keeping up to date with current events over subject matter knowledge when evaluating AI-adjacent job candidates, “because we're in a world where the conversation we're having about AI now will be so different in six months.”
Paul Reynolds ‘91, partner and chief research officer at ISG, noted that curiosity is something that AI doesn’t have, and possibly never will — requiring humans to fill in the gaps.
“The ability to think about the type of questions you want to ask is an all-important skill, especially in the age of AI, because you need to think about your workflows and processes and challenges so you can find the friction and hopefully remove as much of that [with AI] as you can,” he said.
John Boccuzzi, Jr. ’91, P’25, president of ISG Research, provided an inside look into how the rise of artificial intelligence is shaping workforce trends. Powered by their familiarity with artificial intelligence, “students are going to be more capable than they’ve ever been before coming out of college, which is important because employers are going to be looking for that capability,” he stated.
The market is already mandating AI use, said Boccuzzi, and the next step will be managing multiple AI agents at once, which will require skills like critical thinking, project management, and risk assessment. It will be the job of higher education, he said, to provide real world-focused learning opportunities that allow students to hone their judgment, resilience, and curiosity by working through problems, pursuing passion projects, and learning from failures.
If we can prepare the next generation to rise to the AI moment, Bocuzzi concluded, tremendous things are possible. “What a huge opportunity we have in front of us,” he reflected. “This is the beginning of something incredible.”