In this episode of Thinking Out Loud, recorded on-site at the Ai4 Conference in Las Vegas, Sam and Larry sit down with Kevin Taylor, Chief Information Officer, and Mike Hart, Chief Information Security Officer, at MSU Denver. Together, we explore what it means to lead institutional IT and cybersecurity at a moment when advanced AI has moved out of the labs and into daily campus life. Kevin and Mike share how their thinking has shifted, where the real tensions sit between innovation and governance, and what it takes to balance faculty, staff, and student demand for AI access with the realities of maintaining a complex enterprise environment.

Links mentioned during the interview:

• Colorado Higher Ed Computing Organization (CHECO)
• Terms of Service, Didn't Read

In episode three of Thinking Out Loud, Sam Jay and Larry Sampler recap their presentation to the MSU Denver Board of Trustees, subsequent discussion, and the work to be done over the summer as faculty, staff, and students prepare for a new academic year.

Have any question, comments, ideas, or feedback? Email us at ai@msudenver.edu.

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 ai@msudenver.edu.

Links and sources mentioned in this episode:

• The autonomous database deletion story
• Emergence World multi-agent simulation