Briefing the Board

In episode two of Thinking Out Loud, Sam Jay and Larry Sampler work through how they are preparing to brief the MSU Denver Board of Trustees on the university's AI readiness work.They open with a round of fact or fiction, testing each other on a set of recent AI stories that range from useful to alarming to flat-out strange. The point is not the trivia. It is the reality that President Davidson and every senior leader now has to make decisions inside an environment this noisy and this fast-moving.From there the conversation turns to the work itself. How do you build a governance structure that is flexible enough to keep up with AI without smothering the curiosity of a university full of smart people? Sam and Larry make the case for a task force model over a standing committee, walk through the four areas of emphasis shaping their plan (student readiness, faculty readiness and curriculum, operational innovation, and special projects), and get honest about the unglamorous truth that most of this work starts with documentation, not deployment.Along the way: why they are not flipping every switch in Workday yet, what the controller's office taught them about where AI agents actually add value, the difference between training and education, and why keeping a human in the loop is the whole game.Recorded as the team heads into board preparation and the summer planning stretch.Have a question you are stuck on? Email us at [email protected] and sources mentioned in this episode: The autonomous database deletion storyEmergence World multi-agent simulation