At KU's Falling into AI Summit, Speakers Put People and Context at the Center of AI

Two attendees talk beside an AWS information table, with one gesturing while the other listens. A laptop, pens, and other promotional materials are displayed on the table.

Second annual One KU summit brought Google, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce, Dell, Apple, and KU researchers to KU Lawrence and KU Medical Center, September 22 to 24, 2026

LAWRENCE, Kan. (Sept. 28, 2026) The University of Kansas hosted the second annual One KU Falling into AI summit September 22 to 24, drawing nearly 200 faculty, staff, students, and industry partners to KU Lawrence and the KU Medical Center. Across three days of keynotes, panels, breakouts, and lightning talks, speakers returned to a shared message: AI pays off when institutions invest first in people, well-designed processes, and high-quality information.

The program moved from teaching and learning at KU Lawrence on Tuesday, to research, innovation, and careers at KUMC on Wednesday, to a joint One KU AI Showcase Day on Thursday. Thursday featured 16 lightning talks, a vendor and community showcase, and a KU-KUMC research showcase. KU's FLITE Center, directed by Lisa Dieker, organized the summit in partnership with Dawn King, director of AI initiatives at the KU Medical Center. 

Speakers' messages converged on three themes.

People stay at the center

Zac Chase, Global Lead for Higher Education Communities at Google, opened the summit by pairing David Hawkins's 1974 "I, Thou, and It" triad with Richard Elmore's instructional core. In his framing, AI expands the "It," the subject and task, while the educator, the "I," remains the architect of intellectual friction, relational safety, and deep inquiry. He closed on a clear point: technology has permanently changed the "It," and the future of learning rests on the courage, care, and humanity of the educator.

His guiding principle for assignment design: when assignments demand authentic reflection and process transparency, cheating drops without surveillance.

Mary Strain, AI and Machine Learning Strategy Leader at Amazon Web Services, placed domain expertise at the center of a competency framework for business and higher education. Around its core sits AI literacy, data literacy, critical thinking and creativity, ethics and responsible AI use, digital and computational skills, collaboration and communication, and adaptability.

Context and data quality set the limits

Brad Patterson, an account executive at Salesforce, used a single student question, "Can I drop this class?", to show why institutional context matters more than raw model intelligence. A generic AI can explain that drop deadlines exist, and a retrieval AI can quote KU's published policy. A contextual AI knows the student's program, holds, financial aid consequences, and registration status, and an authorized agent can route the transaction once the institution decides what the agent may change.

Mary Strain's vision of agentic workflows for academic operations rests on the same foundation. In her model, agents for applications, communication, assessment, and registration draw on one shared data layer, with an observability layer tracking performance and keeping audit trails.

Build governance from the start

Mark Munsell, executive director of GeoSTL and former Chief AI Officer at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, set the tone in his opening keynote at KUMC. He argued that AI is software engineering, which means organizations need more software engineers as adoption grows. The call for deeper human expertise echoed across all three days.

Munsell urged teams to test and benchmark workflows before scaling them and to ask one question first: "What is the blast radius if it fails?" He stressed that people must stay involved to preserve human autonomy, either in the loop, approving decisions, or on the loop, monitoring and ready to step in. Integration precedes automation, he said, and the work should move from people to process to technology. AI can transform practice, but only when the underlying information is high quality.

Dr. Sushant Govindan, Chief Research AI Officer at KUMC, outlined the One KU Research Technology & AI strategy. The strategy pairs shared AI capacity, including the KAIROS research and operations platform, with a commitment to privacy, trust, and responsible use.

Across both campuses

Breakouts and lightning talks across the week covered topics from AI-powered robot tutors for elementary students and writing support to precision medicine and biosensors for teacher self-regulation. Both vendor and research showcases featured AWS, Google, Dell, Salesforce, and Tempus alongside KU and KUMC research centers.

"Falling into AI brought our two campuses and our industry partners into the same room to ask practical questions about how AI can serve teaching, research, and the people who do that work," said Dieker.

The FLITE website features photos from the summit, and more information is available at flite.ku.edu/falling-into-ai.