ASU+GSV Summit

Recorded live at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, this session featured Ronit Levani Morad, Senior Director & Chief of Staff for Google Research at Google; Lydia Logan, Vice President for Global Education and Workforce Development at IBM Corporate Social Responsibility; Dan Schneider, Enterprise Platform Product Specialist at NVIDIA; Matthew Rascoff, Vice Provost at Stanford University; and Bridget Burns, CEO at University Innovation Alliance.

The speakers explored how AI is compressing the time between question and discovery, reshaping not only how research is conducted, but also who is prepared to participate in AI-enabled innovation. They examined how research is evolving, how researchers and students are being trained, and how universities and institutions must adapt as much of the traditional bench work can now be executed by algorithms.

The session discussed the new mandate facing institutions: attracting and developing AI-fluent talent across disciplines, equipping students with the skills to operate within agentic and AI-enabled workflows, and ensuring that breakthrough research moves efficiently from lab to real-world application. The panel also explored how the architecture of science is changing, how the distinction between builders and users is blurring, and how curricula, incentives, and talent pipelines must evolve to produce a workforce capable not only of generating knowledge, but of applying it responsibly while translating it into economic opportunity, workforce mobility, and broader societal impact.

Recorded live at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, this session featured Steve Shapiro, Founder and AI Advisor at FinetuneAI and Prometric; Drew Bent, Education Lead at Anthropic; Nate Ober, Generative AI Strategist at Amazon; Raman Malik, VP of Product at Perplexity; and Narine Hall, Leading AI Product Strategy at Instructure.

The speakers explored how autonomous AI agents have come to dominate the narrative around the next phase of automation, while real-world deployments have revealed a far more mixed story. They discussed how teams running agentic systems in production have encountered fragile reasoning chains, shallow contextual grounding, and rapidly escalating compute costs as these systems scale.

The session distinguished hype from reality by examining where AI agents are delivering durable value, where they are breaking down, and which design choices are determining the difference. Through this conversation, the panel provided practical insight into the current state of agentic systems and what truly matters as organizations move from experimentation to implementation.

Recorded live at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, this session featured Pat Yongpradit, General Manager, Global Education and Workforce Policy at Microsoft; Miriam Vogel, President & CEO at EqualAI; Kim Majerus, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector Global Education and U.S. State & Local Government at Amazon AWS; Larz May, Founder and Executive Director at #HalfTheStory and Co-founder & CEO at Ginko; Paul Gollash, SVP, Global Mobility Solutions at ETS; and Daphne Li, CEO at Common Sense Privacy.

The speakers explored how trust has become the defining barrier to meaningful AI adoption in education. They discussed how the sector remains early in the trust curve, where skepticism is high and concerns around hallucination, bias, overconfidence, and opaque data handling continue to fuel distrust among educators and families.

The session examined how trust can be built not through marketing, but through transparent governance, explainable decision pathways, and evidence that withstands scrutiny. The panel addressed critical questions around model selection, evaluation frequency, data storage, access controls, and measurable proof of improved outcomes. Through this conversation, the speakers highlighted how trust can be intentionally engineered into AI-powered products through transparent data policies, rigorous evaluation frameworks, and clear evidence of impact.

Recorded live at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, this session featured Brandon Busteed, CEO at Edconic; Frank Shushok, President and CEO at Roanoke College; Vanessa Kenon, Associate Vice President Technology Compliance and Community Engagement at University of Texas at San Antonio; Courtney Hills McBeth, Chief Academic Officer and Provost at Western Governors University; and Paul Fain, Editor at Work Shift.

Only 3 percent of U.S. learners participated in apprenticeships, even as employer trust in degrees declined and AI disrupted traditional “first jobs.” Workforce Pell, federal reforms, and renewed employer demand created a pivotal moment for scaling employer-aligned experiences for recent college graduates. This session convened university leaders, edtech builders, and policy architects to examine the fusion of work and study, the shift to competency-verified hiring, and the creation of durable industry ecosystems.

Panelists addressed structural barriers and outlined a practical roadmap for building career and work pathways that could move the labor market. The discussion explored how higher education could better align learning with employment, helping students navigate a rapidly changing workforce while building durable systems that support long-term economic mobility.

Recorded live at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, this session featured Matthew Winters, Artificial Intelligence Education Specialist at Utah State Board of Education; Mary Beck, President at Distinctive Schools; Sari Factor, Vice Chair & Chief Strategy Officer at Imagine Learning; and Amanda Bickerstaff, CEO at AI for Education.

The speakers discussed how the rapid spread of GenAI has brought schools to an unprecedented inflection point. While districts may not have had all the answers yet, the need to act was clear. The session explored how the education system could move beyond reactive measures toward intentional planning, policy, and practice that put student needs—not technology—first.

The conversation also delved into Beyond the AI Inflection Point: Shaping the Future of Education, a new report and toolkit designed to help schools navigate this complex journey. Emerging from a strategic convening of experts and students, the project chronicled the story of “Central Schools,” a fictional district whose three possible paths to 2030 illustrated how decisions made today could lead to vastly different outcomes for students, teachers, and the community.

Recorded live at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, this session featured Justin Lall, Principal at Gallup, and Stephanie Marken, Senior Partner at Gallup.

This session explored what happens when the generation with the most exposure to AI becomes less convinced of its value. New national research from Gallup in partnership with the Walton Family Foundation and GSV Ventures revealed a striking paradox: while Gen Z continued to engage with AI, confidence in its impact was slipping. Excitement and optimism were down, skepticism was rising, and many young people were increasingly questioning whether AI was helping or hurting their learning, creativity, and future readiness.

The speakers examined findings from one of the first national, longitudinal studies tracking Gen Z’s relationship with AI over time—offering a timely look at how attitudes, behaviors, and expectations were evolving as AI became more embedded in school, work, and everyday life. For leaders rethinking learning, workforce preparation, and student success, the implications were significant—and increasingly hard to ignore.

Recorded live at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, this session featured Matt Sigelman, President at Burning Glass Institute; Joseph Fuller, Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School; Allison Dulin Salisbury, CEO at Humanist Venture Studio; Shad Ahmed, Economic Mobility Lead at Anthropic; and Michael Horn, Author of Job Moves.

The speakers examined the growing labor divide emerging between cognitive work that AI can automate and tacit work that remains deeply human. They explored which jobs were already seeing real displacement and which were being transformed, challenging common assumptions from analysts, CEOs, and workers about AI’s role in the workforce.

The session also discussed how the geometry of organizations is changing as AI hollows out certain layers, what skills gain value as machines learn to reason, and who absorbs the transition costs of large-scale labor reallocation. Through this conversation, the panel unpacked how AI is reshaping work, organizational structures, and economic mobility in real time.

Recorded live at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, this session featured Brett Pollak, Executive Director at UC San Diego, and Courtney Giordano, Associate Chancellor at UC San Diego.

Higher-education leaders were navigating an increasingly noisy AI marketplace while seeking affordability, institutional autonomy, and demonstrated results across both enterprise operations and learning environments. In this fast-paced session, UC San Diego shared how TritonAI—the evolution of its award-winning TritonGPT platform—was becoming a full AI services hub built by universities, for universities.

The speakers explored how TritonGPT grew from a single chatbot into a platform serving more than 73,000 users at zero per-query cost, and where it was headed next. TritonAI extended the platform into an AI Tools Hub with an Agent Builder for low-code automation, shared enterprise connectors via the MCP Server Hub, a reusable Agent Skills Library, Developer APIs, and a pre-packaged tools pipeline that brought transcription, captioning, OCR, and campus-specific services into everyday operations.

The session demonstrated purpose-built AI services already in production, from contract review that reduced legal processing from hours to minutes, to AI-powered campus search, public-facing chatbot widgets, and instructional AI tools for faculty and students. Attendees also heard about UC San Diego’s pioneering work in agentic AI—multi-agent systems that plan, coordinate, and execute with human oversight. Operating as a turnkey SaaS platform, TritonAI was already powering AI across several institutions through shared infrastructure, championing the philosophy that universities should not have to navigate the AI landscape alone.

Recorded live at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, this session featured Preston Cooper, Senior Fellow at American Enterprise Institute; Dan Greenstein, Senior Vice President and Chief of Industry Transformation at Ellucian; Anne M. Kress, President at Northern Virginia Community College; Barbara Mistick, President at NAICU; and Phil Hill, Publisher of the On EdTech Newsletter at PH&A.

Federal higher education policy was shifting in unprecedented ways under OB3 (“Big Beautiful Bill”). Institutional Accountability represented the primary change affecting the majority of institutions participating in Federal Student Loan and Pell Grant programs—something entirely new in U.S. higher education. Other OB3 provisions, most notably new loan limits and the introduction of Workforce Pell, compounded the impacts of these changes. This session examined how higher education had entered a new era and why education leaders needed to prepare for both the opportunities and the risks.

The discussion outlined what was changing, what was not, and how these policy adjustments affected institutional program portfolios, enrollment planning, and financial exposure. Panelists explored the implications of expanded workforce funding alongside tighter graduate lending, with a focus on practical considerations for institutional leaders.

Recorded live at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, this session featured Carol Rava, Vice President – Education Grantmaking at Ascendium Education Group; Scott Pulsipher, President at Western Governors University; Carlos Carvalho, President at University of Austin; Pierre Dubuc, Cofounder and CEO at OpenClassrooms; and Stig Leschly, President at Postsecondary Commission.

Innovation was urgently needed in U.S. higher education, yet many incumbent institutions struggled to change. With 98% of college students attending institutions that were more than 20 years old, and 94% attending institutions that were more than 40 years old, the sector faced a significant challenge. Alongside efforts to improve existing colleges, this session examined why higher education also needed innovative, high-performing new institutions—designed to deliver strong economic outcomes for students and to compete for learners seeking better postsecondary options.

In this panel discussion, practitioners and advocates from across U.S. higher education explored the case for a new generation of colleges and universities and the practical requirements needed to make them viable, including changes to accreditation and oversight frameworks.