Higher Ed: Welcome to Higher Ed Conversations, the go-to podcast for higher ed marketers, sponsored by EdTechConnect. In each episode, we bring you expert insights and explore the latest trends in marketing, advancement, and student success, all with a focus on driving real results. And leading the conversation is someone who's walked in your shoes. With years of experience as a community college PIO, now the founder of a higher ed marketing agency, and a passionate advocate for student success, please welcome your host, Cheryl Broom. 

Cheryl: Hi everyone, and welcome to Higher Ed Conversations, sponsored by EdTechConnect. I'm Cheryl Broom, and today's episode is all about one of the biggest forces reshaping higher education, you guessed it, artificial intelligence. To help us tackle this important topic, I'm thrilled to welcome two incredible leaders from American University, David Marchik and Angela Virtu. David serves as the Dean of the Kogut School of Business, where he's driving transformative initiatives in AI, sustainability, and entrepreneurship. Under his leadership, Kogod has launched what Poets and Fonts calls the most consequential AI transformation in business education,

while also welcoming its largest-ever incoming class. David also brings deep global experience, having served as Chief Operating Officer of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and as a long-time Managing Director at the Carlyle Group. Angela Virtu is the Associate Director of the Institute for Applied Artificial Intelligence and Professorial Lecturer at AU. She brings a rich interdisciplinary background in AI innovation, organizational culture, and ethical transformation, working to ensure that AI is not just accessible, but equitable and empowering for all learners. Together, we dig into the opportunities and the challenges AI presents across academic innovation, enrollment, marketing, change management, and ethics. There's so much practical wisdom packed into this conversation. You're gonna love it. Let's dive in. So Angela and Dave, thank you so much for being here today on the podcast. I am so excited to have you here. 

Dave: Thanks for having us. 

Cheryl: This AI is like the topic of conversation at every conference I go to. Every higher education leader and marketer is just questioning how to bring it to their campus, if they should bring it to their campus, how to integrate it into their teachings, and how to use it for marketing. I think it's by far the most popular topic of conversation right now. And I am so excited to talk about what you've been doing at American University and advice you might have for other colleges and universities. So before we get going into the deep conversations, tell me a little bit about how the university has invested in AI, what you're doing and what has made it so special at American.

Dave: So this is something that we started by listening, which I think may be a rare trait in today's world. We had two speakers. One was the president of Google, who basically said, AI is going to be as profound as fire or electricity. And then we had a speaker named Brett Wilson, who was the CEO of venture capital firm called Swift Ventures. And a student, a sophomore, raised his hand. This was maybe two and a half years ago, and I said, "Am I going to be replaced by AI?" And Brett said, You won't be replaced by AI, or you likely won't. But you could be replaced by someone who knows AI if you don't. And so a light bulb went off in my head, saying we need to incorporate AI throughout our curriculum. Unlike Angela, who actually knows what she's talking about when she's talking about AI, I didn't know anything about AI. So I went to our AI experts on faculty and said, Let's develop a plan to incorporate AI into everything we do. And so Angela and another faculty member named Eran Carmel, Gwanhoo Lee, they put together a series of recommendations basically to incorporate AI into our undergraduate and graduate curriculum in every subject in first-year classes and the most advanced classes to drive it throughout each of our subject areas. And we now have more than 45 classes that incorporate AI. When a student comes to our business school after graduating high school and the first day of their orientation, they're told you're going to use AI every day. And most of them say, well, we were told in high school not to use AI. So are you sure we're not going to get in trouble? And after about the fourth day, when they come up to professors and say, I'm not going to get in trouble for using this, they start to love it. And so we really have driven it throughout our everything we do. It's in our DNA. We were one of the first schools in the country to have perplexity’s highest-end software on every student's laptop, desktop, and mobile device. And it's really changed the way we teach and the way we learn. 

Cheryl: That's fantastic. It's funny because just last night, my son was working, my son was in 11th grade, and he was working on a project, and he interviewed someone and then transcribed it in AI and asked it to organize it. And I said the same thing. Are you allowed to do that? Is this cheating? 

Dave: What did he say? 

Cheryl: He said, “No, I did the interview. It's just helping me organize my thoughts into something, you know, that I could use.” So we're scared that it's not our original thought or that we're having a machine, you know, our kids are having machines do it for them. 

Dave: Yes. And Angela can talk about how we're approaching that issue. 

Cheryl: Exactly. I was going to ask, ask Angela that, like, how do you strike that balance? And how has the faculty's response been to teaching with these tools? 

Angela: We're still figuring it out, right? Because I think in the education space in particular, there's this balance of we want to have the students learn what AI is, how it works, and how it applies to their individual interest areas, right? Marketing, finance, accounting, whatever it might be. But we also need to make sure that the AI isn't just doing all the work for them and that learning is now too easy, that we're not just doing anything, right? And so there's been this balancing act that we're trying to do as teachers. So some of us have started to change some of our pedagogy, where, for example, in one of my more technical programming classes, I'll give the students a two-tiered homework assignment. So one of it is take home, go use AI, use AI to help you write the code, get all the right outputs. But then when you come to class, I'm going to give you a little quiz because I want you to understand what this code's actually doing and the processes involved. Because the more that you understand those processes, the better you can then go back to the AI to write out all of the code for you and orchestrate these larger coding systems. And so that's one way how I've kind of started to balance this using AI to help in some cases, but make sure that it's still rigorous enough for the active learning to happen. And with our writing center, we're actively working on building out an AI writing tutor. So it'll be available 24-7. Students can upload one of their papers that they have for a business writing, and it'll give them a critique of like, hey, you can work on your bottom line on top, or you can work on your concision, concisiveness. I don't know what the right word is there, but you get the point. And then at the end of it, it'll give them the recommendations to improve their style of writing maybe or their business acumen. But it's not going to give them the answer. It's not going to do all the revisions for them, but it'll guide them and steer them into how to properly organize and write that writing. So it's still a work in progress, but I think the more active learning and active engagement of using AI to get that feedback is going to be the path forward for now.

Cheryl: It seems that you're kind of using it as a teaching tool, not so much as encouraging students to use AI to make it easier to learn, but rather to use it to make learning better. I don't know if I've summarized that correctly, but as I hear you talk about editing and giving them feedback on improvements, I mean, it's really kind of a teaching assistant or a way to help a student learn more. 

Angela: It's definitely a part of that. And I think because of that, we can push them further and deeper and harder into these individual subject areas and have them start using their own curiosity to explore this content further and deeper than in a traditional non-AI setting.

Cheryl: And how are the students responding to this? Do they like it? Do they embrace it? 

Dave: I think they love it. I just had a student in my office who was looking for a job. She's a graduating MBA student, and it's a tough job market, as you know. And she has an interview on Tuesday of next week, and she was asking me about it. I said, well, let's go to perplexity and let's ask perplexity how you should prepare. Give background in the company. Give background on the, she was interviewing with the CEO, was a mid-sized kind of growth company. Give you questions to prepare for. And then give you some questions you should ask the CEO about the CEO's experience, background, and strategy for the company. And we use that to help her prepare. So if you think about what students learn in business school, ranging from undergrads to grad students in the most sophisticated, you know, programming or IT area that Angela is a faculty member in. We teach students how to use AI to underwrite an investment, how to read a balance sheet, how to understand risk factors that are disclosed in a company's 10K or 10Q. We teach them in your field how to use AI to undertake fundamental consumer research or market research on companies or on institutions. And we teach them to use AI to design and improve marketing campaigns. So for text, for imagery, for sequencing of marketing outreach efforts. Right now, AI is really a collaborator. But soon it's going to be an agent where you can send it off to do whatever you want. And then after that, it's going to actually be something you can use to delegate entire tasks. So you can have AI go off and write an entire website in your voice. So if you're taking a company public to write an S1 and you're offering documents. So our basic view is that once our students go into the workforce, they're going to be using AI every day. And we want them to have the fluency and the comfort and the knowledge so they can succeed in whatever job they pursue after graduation. 

Cheryl: Something you said I just wrote down. I was just thinking, I've owned my own business for years now. But every time I look at my balance sheet, I'm like, what's unearned income? Like, I have all these questions. I'm like, I need to take a Coursera class on my balance sheet. But I was like, I just can't ask AI to tell me what my logic means. 

Dave: It can analyze it. It can tell you what you should be worried about, what you should be happy about. It's an incredible tool. Again, as Angela said, you have to understand the basics, you know. But it's a tool in the same way that, you know, when the calculator became ubiquitous, I'm sure there were math professors that said, “Don't use a calculator because you're not going to understand math.” Or I'm dating myself. But when I was in high school, I had spelling tests. I can't spell anymore because the computer corrects all my spelling. So, you know, is spelling a skill that one needs to master? Or is it a skill that you should rely on your computer to help you with if you make a mistake? That's the issue we're grappling with. 

Cheryl: This might be a question for Angela that I've pondered a lot, especially with marketing. And you brought up marketing as an example. Are other faculty or other programs worried? Like, are there disciplines that have expressed a lot of concern, especially your teaching AI? And what's this going to do to their discipline? Like, is graphic design going to go out the window? Or is the writing department, is the English department going to get affected? Like, how in a university setting do you balance teaching these tools that we know are out there and people are using with other disciplines that are more traditional?

Angela: It's a tough question because AI is going to fundamentally change everything, every industry, every foundational area. And I think one thing that we've done really well is have open conversations with all of our faculty within our department, across departments, across campus. And we've been able to bring in external practitioners in each of those areas. We brought someone from marketing. We brought someone from finance. We brought someone from management entrepreneurship to come on our campus and just talk about how they're currently using AI within their own businesses. And by giving all of our faculty in these different areas, whether it's marketing or all the other areas you've mentioned, that real demo of this is me and this company and this organization. Here's how I use AI every single day to help me with XYZ task. And here's how I'm using it. I think that was the light bulb moment for a lot of our faculty of like, okay, so like we can be scared about this. We can be nervous or, you know, uneasy about what this means for my, you know, career thus far. But here's where we're going, right? And so I think giving that directional path has been able to kind of calm some of those nerves. And I think by focusing the students on those AI foundations and incorporating it across all of our departments, that's also been able to help bridge the gap a little bit because we're kind of rising all tides and rising all programs. Even if it means the way that we market today is going to be different than how we did 10 years ago or even last year. 

Cheryl: Yeah, I know, but the School of Business, you know, has embraced it. And you recently got an award, right? For, I don't remember what it was for, but it was a national award, like best use of AI in education or something like that. And then Angela, your position, then do you help other departments integrate it into their curriculum? Do faculty come to you for advice? I mean, I'm imagining, I remember I had this faculty member at UC Santa Barbara. He must have been 80 years old. We all thought he drank vodka out of his water bottle. Like I'm imagining a faculty member like that trying to get AI into the curriculum. Like I'm imagining some really need some assistance, right? Need some help in moving this direction. 

Angela: We've done a lot of extensive training and a lot of extensive community building around AI and AI literacy from our faculty and staff perspective. Because at the end of the day, if our faculty and staff aren't bought in and using AI, it doesn't matter what we're trying to get the students to do because it's not going to be embedded within the curriculum. So over the past year, we've had monthly AI Second Friday discussions. And that is a gathering place where all of our faculty and staff can kind of just pop in, bring a coffee, and just talk about AI in some capacity. What's working really well, what we've tried, what we've experimented with, and I think we've had a very like AI-first mindset of, hey, we're going to try some stuff. Some things are going to be awesome. Some things are going to absolutely fail. And the more we can communicate and understand how all of our different approaches are, the faster we're going to be able to build and incorporate this even deeper. And then on top of that, as I said, we're bringing in industry practitioners probably once a quarter, if not more frequently, just to talk about AI and how they're using it and how it's disrupting their industries. So we get that real-world touch to incorporate and give context. And then just last week, we did a training with Perplexity to give a whole orientation over what Perplexity is, how it's different from all the other AI tools out there. And then some of the creative ways that our faculty and staff have already started building AI spaces to either embed in their classrooms, embed in student services, or embed in their staff workflows. And so I think just having that collaborative environment has really been what's the difference maker in having us go deep with AI integration.

Cheryl: I want to talk to Dave about marketing specifically. So Angela, you talked a little bit about integrating it with faculty, and this idea of this monthly like Second Friday. What a great way just to have informal discussions and explore different tools. And I'm really interested in learning how the university might be using AI in its own marketing and communications. Is it something that you've been doing, Dave, for the School of Business? How can we integrate it more effectively to get students interested in coming to a university or a college? 

Dave: So the answer is yes. I would say we're all in on using it in everything we do. Let me just give you a few examples. At the top line, our work has fortunately been featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal in Axios for the AI Institute that we created, which Angela is helping to lead. There's a publication called Poets and Quants, which is the main business school publication. And they gave us an award which said that we had undertaken the most consequential AI transformation of any business school in the world, really. 

Cheryl: That was the award that I remember. 

Dave: That was pretty good. Yeah. We took that sentence and we put full page ads in the Wall Street Journal. We've had some speakers here, like the president of Microsoft, who said that we're way ahead of other universities anywhere in the world. And so obviously, when someone says something like that, we broadcast it. So it has had a very positive impact on our reputation. Our applications were up 22 percent last year and 40 percent this year. Then we're also using it, our marketing team is using it for all of their workflows. I'll give you an example. So your son is going to be applying to college soon. When he applies, he usually applies say in October, November. Then he gets a decision somewhere between January and March or April and then has to make a decision by May 1st. So let's take someone who applies early action so they get their acceptance January 15th, and they don't need to decide until May 1st. You can imagine, given your background as a marketer, that that is the time when you want to influence their decision to come to do whatever you want. So we want our admitted students to choose AU, and there's a lot of wonderful schools out there from which they can choose. You know, the average GPA was 3.8, and they had a 1470 SAT. So if you're, I couldn't get into AU today. But if you are, if you have that type of grades and GPA, you have a lot of great options. So we had a series of 50 communications, which range from emails to Instagram posts to TikToks that we were planning between January 15th and May 1st. And our marketing team asked AI to develop the collateral, the messaging, the sequencing. We gave them some previous marketing materials, our voice, our messaging, and then fed the AI with, you know, kind of brand attributes and what we offer students. And it took AI about 30 seconds to come up with a draft. Then maybe 70 or 80 percent of what we finally used was human. We have our great marketing team. Then put their finishing touches, made adjustments. And we had a campaign that normally would have taken say three to four weeks to develop. And it took three or four days. Then we're developing other tools. For example, when students are accepted, you know, 80 percent of the questions they have are the same questions over and over again. Financial aid. Internships. Alumni. Sequence of classes. What's the core curriculum? And so we now can feed all of those questions into an AI tool so that applicants or accepted students can go to a chat bot and ask those questions, which creates accessible answers for them since they can do it at two in the morning. And it creates efficiency for our admissions team so they could focus on higher value, more complex questions. So we're using it in everything we do. And I think that we're just getting started. Angela and another professor, Kelly Frias, organized a session with the CEO of a technology firm a couple weeks ago, who was really pushing us to put AI in different workflows. And so we're coming up with tools to do that over the summer. I would say, you know, we're ahead of most schools, but we are still in, if you want to take a baseball metaphor, we're still in the third inning. We have a lot of work to do and a lot of opportunity. 

Cheryl: There is so much opportunity. So we've talked a lot about faculty. We've talked about students. We've talked about marketing. And I want to take a quick break. But when we come back, I want to talk a little bit broader about leadership and higher education in general, and where you see this heading. So let's take a quick break. Listen to our sponsor, and we'll be right back. 

Sponsor Message: How do higher education decision makers find the right solution when technology evolves at light speed? Well, we usually start with our network. EdTech Connect is the network that's democratizing the higher ed technology conversation. EdTech Connect is free. So anyone with a .edu email address can sign up and list the software and services they use in their role at their school. Once you're in, you can find out what solutions similar schools are doing all over the country. Whether you're looking to find the hot new AI tool or maybe learn options you have to upgrade your campus search engine or even get to your short list of marketing solution vendors, EdTech Connect is the place to go. So visit edtechconnect.com and set up your free profile to get a pulse for what's happening with higher ed technology today. 

Cheryl: All right. So before our break, we were talking about marketing departments, and I wrote down that your applications are up 22%, which is amazing. 40% this year. 40%. Yeah. Over 22% last year. Oh, wow. Okay. So 22% increase, a 40% increase, which my clients would like cry over. I mean, they're looking for 5% to 10% most cases. So that's amazing. So clearly, AI and curriculum is a selling point for students, clearly. I mean, the way that you're teaching, but also how you're using it to get the work done, has been fantastic as well. How is leadership seeing this? Like your leadership clearly is embracing it, or it wouldn't be happening as broadly as it is on your campus. How do you see AI fitting in overall university leadership? Have you heard conversations outside of AU? Like what's happening out there, away from your department and away from your college? 

Dave: So let's start at a macro level. I think that in many ways, educational institutions are facing existential challenges to their existence. First of all, in the United States, we have what's called the demographic cliff, which is that in 2008, right at the time of the Great Recession, Americans started having fewer children. And so 2008 plus 18 years, we're right in that. And so the number of college first year students, freshmen, dropped like 4% last year. So you have declining demand, declining supply of students. On top of that, there's great question about the value for the dollar. So in my view, educational institutions need to reinvent themselves and look very hard in the mirror at the value proposition and how they can better prepare their students for the world they will enter when they graduate, either undergraduate or graduate. AI is part of that. When I talk to employers and I'm on the boards of corporations and nonprofits, everybody's driving AI into everything they do. And so I feel like it's our responsibility to make sure that our students are fluent in AI applications when they graduate. Even if and we're kind of technology agnostic, we have a partnership with Perplexity, which is wonderful. But if you're a first year student, you take your son, by the time he graduates college, who knows which AI applications are going to be the winners and losers. He needs to know the fundamentals of how AI works and then be fluent in whatever task he wants to pursue, because we don't know what applications are going to be there. We're getting a lot of calls from around the country. In fact, we're hosting, Angela's leading a session tomorrow with 55 business schools around the country, from Stanford to public universities. We actually have a couple from Europe and Australia, and New Zealand. Some are moving quite fast. I received a call from a dean of a major Midwestern public university who said, I'm pushing my faculty to adopt AI. But I only have one faculty member that's willing to thrive forward with it. Otherwise, they're stuck in the mud. How do you do it? And so I think there's very mixed adoption. Some are moving fast. Some are not moving. And some are moving slow. I think that those that are moving slow are doing it to their peril and to their students' peril because the world is moving fast, whether the academy or academia wants it to move or not. So you can't bury your head in the sand. And we feel like it's our responsibility to move. Fortunately, we have faculty like Angela Virtue who are experts in this. And they know what they're doing. And we've also hired six other faculty. So we're investing a lot of money to be state-of-the-art. And, you know, so far so good. But we have a lot of work to do.

Cheryl: Yeah, Angela, I mean, you're leading this conversation tomorrow. How do you see it with higher ed? I've worked in higher ed now, like 15 years. And we move slow. I mean, it's really slow. And this is such a missed opportunity for those institutions, I think, who are moving at a snail's pace or who want collegial input and studies, and discussions. Like, how do you balance the need to move fast with such a changing industry and the culture of academia being, you know, just so, like, almost inclusive sometimes to our own peril. Like, where is that balance? How do you get people moving, excited and inspired and willing?

Angela: I think the thing that really allowed us to go fast is that we did a top-down and bottom-up approach, right? So independent of Dave, you know, saying, hey, everybody, let's get our heads together. And let's move really fast on this. And go move at lightning speed to go incorporate AI into this. You had individual faculty on our campus who are already super either plugged into AI or interested in it or curious about how they could use it to their benefit either in their research or in their classroom or in their own, you know, corporate activities. That mixture of having these individuals who are kind of going, experimenting, doing their own things, while also having the top-down leadership from Dave, that blend is what I think allowed us to go really, really quickly. Because then, as the little hurdles or the little academia bureaucracies pop up, it's like, yeah, no, okay, like, we'll figure it out. We'll go over here. We'll work on this thing for a little bit. Come back over here, right? Or figure out what we can do that's a quick fix versus a long-term thing, right? So one of the things that we're rolling out in the fall are going to be AI badges that we can tack on for all of our students to basically showcase to our employers, hey, we have this competency of AI literacy or we have this competency in these different AI skill sets that employers are going to be demanding in the next year or so. So that's a really quick fix that we can add on for every single student within Kogod, regardless of their major, regardless of their minor. And simultaneously, we're working on having an AI undergraduate major, right? But that, as you've discussed, is a lot more bureaucracy, a lot more paperwork. We've passed it through the first few rounds of stuff, and now we have to go kick it over here and kick the tires and go do these other things, right? So I think from that bottom-up and top-down approach, we're able to kind of navigate and come up with little quick wins that will get the job done while we also work on these much longer horizon activities. 

Cheryl: I love this idea of AI badges. We actually do a lot of higher ed trade shows, and we give out stickers. Our booth is the most popular booth because of the stickers we have, and we give out badges, like sticker badges, like merit badges. So it's a little different than yours. These are actually tangible. You know what our most popular badge is? Is it said it's one that says, I watched my idea die in committee. And people come up and just crack up at that badge because that's what we're up against sometimes, is discussion. I mean, in higher ed, we want to discuss. We want to understand. We want to question. We want to challenge. And that's great. But when you're working with the technology, moving as fast, and students who are looking for something cutting edge, it can be detrimental. So I love this idea of using badges as a way, you know, to sell it to faculty and students, really, and employers. I mean, and I think your advice on top down and bottom up is spot on. Anything else, Dave, that you would add? Like if you were talking to a college president, we have a lot of presidents listening to the podcast, and maybe they're excited about integrating some of these tools or ideas you've shared. How would you encourage them to bring it to campus? How can people get started if they're a little bit behind? 

Dave: So I think creating incentives and creating a culture of experimentation of the two things that I would advise. So, incentives, we basically said this is our mission. We said that we're going to reward faculty who adopt AI and incorporate it, and that we encourage faculty to essentially get retrained to use AI in their field. So we had a lot of faculty, for example, last summer, that went to seminars, went to classes, went to conferences, went to industry shows to learn how AI is going to be applied in their industry. And then second is find someone like Angela Virtue to help drive culture. So she has created a faculty training program that really went person by person, subject by subject, and helped our faculty figure out how to apply AI concepts in their classes and in their research. So on the research side, AI can help scholars be more productive. And it can also help scholars get the word out about their research. So let me just give you one example. We're training our faculty and our staff to think of AI as an audience, not just a tool. Because right now, when you, let's, I'm 58, this is 59 pretty soon. When people my age want to find information, they go to Google. When people that are 20, they go to open AI or perplexity. Okay. So we are teaching our faculty and staff to see LLMs as the audience, so that when someone searches a question about research or about American University, stat GPT kicks out an answer that has American in it or our scholars research in it. So that's a huge change of strategy from a psychological and orientation. You know you, you do this in your business. You've been training your clients to pursue SEO optimization for 20 years. 

Cheryl: Oh, yeah. 

Dave: Now it's really AI optimization. How do you ensure that if you do a search for which schools has, have the best AI programs that American University shows up in that search? And so that requires a very different orientation. So, but all of this is really about incentives and culture. And we've fortunately, thanks to Angela and Professor Lee and others, we've created a culture of experimentation and a culture where it's okay to fail. Like, you know, we're making this up as we go along. And if it's something doesn't work in a class, it's fine. It's fine. 

Cheryl: So interesting. And you just gave me two new ideas for business offerings as you were talking. So I would wrap up and go research on AI, some things that I think I can sell to clients. But before we wrap up, just a quick note on searching an AI. My mom is 69 years old and has had a very successful real estate career in North San Diego County. And she's on the verge of retirement. She's just taking on clients here and there. And she got a call a couple weeks ago from an executive at Google that is looking for a high-end home on the beach. And he asked AI to give them the top three real estate agents in North San Diego County. And my mom was one of them. And the other two were her main competitors. I mean, there's thousands of real estate agents here. And I was like, well, that's amazing. You've had such a successful career. It must be pulling from maybe your past listings or other clients you've had.

Dave: But it's pulling from Reddit. It's pulling from comments. It's pulling from Twitter and LinkedIn. That's great. 

Cheryl: Yeah. And so, I mean, people are using it. They're using it to search. They've used it to find my company. And so it's an amazing tool. So many applications. And it's really just been so fantastic to talk with both of you. I could ask you a million more questions. And I hope that maybe we can have another conversation sometime in the future. And I really appreciate both of your time and your expertise. Great stuff you're doing at AU. 

Dave: Thanks for having us. 

Higher Ed: That's a wrap on this episode of Higher Education Conversations. Thanks for listening. We hope you found value in today's conversation and maybe even walked away with a fresh idea or two. Want more episodes like this? Be sure to follow Higher Education Conversations so you never miss a story. And please consider leaving a five-star review on your platform of choice. Until next time.