Enterprise AI Innovators AI Becomes a Campus-Wide Builder with Arizona State University CIO Lev Gonick
On the 63rd episode of Enterprise AI Innovators, hosts Evan Reiser (co-founder and CEO, Abnormal AI) and Saam Motamedi (General Partner, Greylock Partners) talk with Lev Gonick, Chief Information Officer at Arizona State University (ASU). ASU treats AI like a product and a platform: build internal capacity, run structured grant cycles to surface real workflows, and ship a “builder” that can support tens of thousands of users. Gonick also lays out why student agency matters, and why universities that wait for vendors risk becoming “nothing but vendor management.”
Quick hits from Lev:
On building an internal AI acceleration team: “We literally took, initially 20 and now it's 40 people dedicated from morning till night working on platform technology, security, compliance, tooling, building tools to support what we knew that needed to grow up to be, again, a low code, no code kind of environment.”
On scaling demand through structured internal grants: “We thought there be, you know, 40 or 50 great ideas, you know, as we speak today. Now we're through through four full rounds of engagements. We have over 600 projects in-flight, right now.”
On fixing the friction-filled student journey with AI: “Focus in on transforming the ways in which students have to navigate incredibly, difficult, friction-filled, journey. Applying for, getting into, having to do financial aid, landing in a dorm room, [solving] some of the back office through again tools that they're using in their consumer life.”
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Enterprise AI Innovators is a show where top technology executives share how AI is transforming the enterprise. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog/.
Enterprise AI Innovators is produced by Abnormal Studios.