#222: How ASU, UCSB & Tanium Are Making AI Actually Connect to the Mission

#222: How ASU, UCSB & Tanium Are Making AI Actually Connect to the Mission

Quick Summary

ASU Deputy CIO Kyle Bowen built the Create AI platform across 50 large language models and funded 700 innovation projects — turning the entire campus into a source of ideas worth building on.

UCSB Deputy CIO Joe Sabado developed an eight-pillar responsible AI framework and co-founded a 340-person community of practice that welcomes skeptics, with security embedded from day one.

Tanium’s Doug Thompson helped UT Arlington identify and remediate 24,000 CVEs after years of architectural blind spots — a reminder that endpoint visibility is the foundation AI readiness sits on.

Featuring

Kyle Bowen is the Deputy Chief Information Officer at Arizona State University leading AI strategy across one of America’s largest and most digitally active universities — overseeing the Create AI platform, an AI Innovation Challenge that has funded 700 projects, and ASU’s first Agentic AI and Student Experience conference drawing 600 attendees from around the world.

Click here to see Kyle’s 2024 EDUCAUSE

Joe Sabado is the Deputy CIO at UC Santa Barbara leading a team of 65 across student and financial information systems, data governance, and an AI community of practice he co-founded — and outside of UCSB he runs Campus AI Exchange and has built an eight-pillar responsible AI framework that higher ed institutions are already using as a practical guide.

Doug Thompson is the Chief Education Architect at Tanium bringing 15+ years of higher ed experience to help institutions get real-time visibility into the endpoint complexity that underpins both cybersecurity and AI readiness — with a front-row view of how higher ed IT is slowly but genuinely shifting toward enterprise-scale thinking.

Click here to see Doug’s 2024 EDUCAUSE

Timestamps

(02:00) Show me the evidence — Joe on why “AI first” without a business problem is a fast track to wasted budget, and how UCSB anchors adoption to student outcomes from the start

(04:45) The eight-pillar Campus AI Framework — how Joe built a practical structure for responsible AI adoption covering everything from mission alignment to change management, with security woven in throughout

(09:30) Endpoint explosion in higher ed — Doug on why real-time device visibility matters more than a quarterly scan, and how Tanium helps IT teams make decisions on data that’s minutes old, not months old

(13:00) A community of practice that welcomes skeptics — how Joe built a 340-person space at UCSB where faculty, staff, and students work through AI ethics, security, and hands-on use cases together

(17:30) What Create AI actually does — Kyle on why ASU built its own AI platform spanning 50 LLMs, and how it lets the campus blend enterprise data with AI securely without betting on a single model provider

(23:00) 24,000 CVEs and a 2013 vulnerability — how Doug’s team helped UT Arlington find what years of architectural gaps had hidden, and fix it at speed and scale once they finally had visibility

(26:00) Human flourishing over efficiency — Joe’s argument for why efficiency alone is the wrong end goal, and how he’s personally modeling what it looks like to reclaim time through AI

(28:30) Filtering the noise — Kyle’s approach to balancing experimental projects with enterprise priorities, and the questions he asks when 500 use cases are competing for attention

(31:30) 700 projects and a 70% repeat rate — how ASU’s AI Innovation Challenge became a structured learning engine, not just an idea contest, and what other institutions can take from the model

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