“Your Data Is Broken”: A CIO’s Honest Playbook for AI Readiness in Higher Education

Sathish: “You’ve been director of IT services at Huntington for twelve, thirteen years, and you also worked in K-12. What drew you to higher-education technology, and did that K-12 background help?”

Adam: “Yes, it has. Education is a very different sector from many others, but K-12 and higher ed are similar in a lot of ways. What we’re trying to do is meet students where they are, allow them to grow, find their calling, and pursue that wholeheartedly. Whether that’s K-12 or higher ed, that mission is still very central.”

Sathish: “As a CIO, what challenges do you face with so much changing around us?”

Adam: “Probably the biggest challenge is that our environment is very much changing. The workforce is changing. Some of the programs we’re running now, we weren’t running ten years ago. And that pace is changing.” Many of the careers his students will fill, he added, “are probably not even there yet.” So the job is not only to teach a specific skill. It is to teach students “how to adapt and be agile” for roles that do not exist yet.

Sathish: “With AI gaining momentum after ChatGPT took off, what opportunities do you see for higher education?”

Adam: “What we’re finding is that many organizations, especially small to medium-sized businesses, are really in the same space we are when it comes to AI: how we’re adapting to it, how we’re bringing it to our employees, our customers, our students.”

Adam: “The workplace has usually been a little ahead of where education is, or education has sometimes been a little ahead. The fact that we’re at the same place, in both our knowledge and how we’re using and moving forward with it, is very different. It allows for partnerships we’re not used to.”

Sathish: “How’s adoption going with your workforce? Are they okay with it, or do they see it as a threat?”

Adam: “That’s a great question. I’d say it’s mixed, not really pro-AI or anti-AI.” From focus groups and conversations with their own faculty, four distinct groups emerged.

Adam: “Our employees on the operational side span the same spectrum, but those individuals are working with more sensitive data, and therefore they’re a little more trepidatious about the risk that comes along with these tools.”

Sathish: “Can student experience be improved significantly with AI, or do you think that won’t be the case?”

Adam: “Many institutions are going to have to decide where we use it and where we don’t. Where does it make sense and where does it not?” For Huntington, two foundational principles settle most arguments: any AI use “must align with the mission of our institution, and it must serve human formation.”

Adam: “Does this AI use truly allow us to form the whole person? Or does it detract? Where does human agency and human intervention need to be paramount and not lost?”

Sathish: “You connect with a lot of higher-ed CIOs. What concerns or opportunities keep coming back?”

Adam: “A lot of use right now is on the operational side. Many existing tools already have AI infused in them, so we evaluate whether that helps or detracts.” From there, some institutions move to specific academic use cases in curriculum and assessment. A recurring goal is freeing people up.

Adam: “Where can we help our faculty support our students in ways where right now they’re bogged down with administrative work that isn’t enhancing the student experience, so faculty can spend more time on the activities they don’t currently have time for?”

Sathish: “Students now start their college search on ChatGPT, not a brochure. On enrollment, is there a strong need for tools there, and what are you working on?”

Adam: “The core of any AI use, as you move forward, is the data systems you have. If the data’s bad, the results you’re going to get are going to coincide with that. You can’t just use a tool with bad data, unclean data, or data that isn’t governed well.”

Adam: “The core of any use of any AI tool is the data that sits behind it. If the data’s bad, the results you’re going to get are going to coincide with that. You can’t just use a tool with bad data, unclean data, or data that isn’t governed well.”

Sathish: “Many institutions run outdated ERPs that aren’t in the cloud and can’t connect to AI. How can those institutions scale?”

Adam: “Your core data systems are really where you have to start. If they’re not where they need to be, implementing an AI tool in that environment is going to be less productive and probably more costly, and it’ll introduce additional risks around transparency, data privacy, and security.” His own Huntington playbook ran in order: infrastructure first (hardware, the data center), then modern CRMs and a new ERP on top. “Getting those core infrastructure pieces in place creates a launching-off point where you can innovate more readily, more easily, and more securely and reliably.”

Sathish: “So it depends on the use case, build or buy?”

Adam: “Right. It’s not going to be one size fits all.” Many existing tools already have AI built in, including their analytics platform’s natural-language reporting.

Sathish: “All this data modernization and cleanup carries significant cost. How are institutions budgeting for it?”

Adam: “You’re right, it’s a significant spend.” Indiana institutions have an unusual tailwind. The Lilly Endowment, he explained, has “infused half a billion dollars over the next two to three years in the state of Indiana to help higher-education institutions prepare their faculty and their students.”

Adam: “We’re looking to receive probably in the neighborhood of about five million dollars over the next three years, if everything goes well.” Initial planning-grant funding already helped them develop their AI strategy and the guiding principles that govern their use cases, and assess where their students, employees, and region stand. His instinct, again, was partnership: “What’s going to be key is not just institutions doing this on their own, but partnerships.”

Sathish: “Entry-level jobs are getting replaced by AI. How are you preparing students for a market that wants different skills?”

Adam: “There’s been this gap between competency and understanding. People are using tools without fully understanding the underlying pieces that produced the outcome.”

Adam: We’re not just assessing them on their outputs. We’re helping students understand their critical thinking, what goes into it, and how to present that and speak to it when those things are questioned.” In the real world, someone will eventually push back: “Tell me about the results. Why are you seeing it this way? You have to understand what went into it, what the core data is.”

Adam: “Those skills aren’t tool-specific. Explainability, transparency, awareness of safety and security: they’re general skills that help students adapt as the tools change.”

Sathish: “More students want online education over coming to campus. Do you see that, and are you preparing for that shift?”

Adam: “Many institutions aren’t necessarily looking at doing an AI program. They’re looking at how AI gets infused into existing things, how we further enhance existing programs and make them more readily accessible.”

Adam: “Are students wanting to wait for a four-year degree to say they’re credentialed? There’s going to have to be credentialing throughout the process, showing ‘I’ve gained this knowledge, I’ve gained this skill,’ and being able to present that to employers.”

Sathish: “On student retention, are you using any tools to predict when a student might be at risk of falling out?”

Adam: “Yes, we’re implementing a retention suite. We’re doing regular pulse surveys, gauging students’ level of engagement, how they’re feeling, how they think they’re doing, any emotional stressors that come into play.” The aim is to surface support at the right moment by pulling signals from the learning management system and other engagement tools, “so that we’re not too far along when the student needs the resource before they receive it, or before they even know a resource is available to them.”

Sathish: “You’re on Huntington’s risk management committee. How do you handle risk and data governance with so many third-party tools?”

Adam: “Vendor risk management is a big thing when it comes to AI, because there are so many tools.” His solution leans collaborative. Through the Independent Colleges of Indiana, schools that share many of the same vendors pool their assessments: “Rather than each of us doing vendor risk on the same vendor twenty different times, let’s do it once and share that information.”

Sathish: “And data governance? With hallucination, a tool can sometimes surface data to everyone. Who should have access?”

Sathish: “What’s your advice for someone thinking about implementing AI at their institution?”

Adam: “The first thing they have to set aside is: what is your strategy overall as an organization with AI? And that can’t be a purely IT exercise. It has to be an institutional exercise with buy-in.”

Adam: An AI strategy isn’t just an IT strategy. It sits between organizational strategy and IT strategy. You need a good cross-functional group across the institution to decide on your strategic AI principles.”

Sathish: “So is a top-down approach best?”

Adam: “I don’t know that it’s necessarily top-down. In a university you’ve got healthcare experts, agriculture experts; you need them to feed up. The innovation has to come from the bottom up. But as an organization, we have to decide the parameters: where does this fall in, does it align with our mission?”

Sathish: “Does the workforce need to be trained for these new things?”

Adam: “Human capacity and change management is probably the number one pillar for us. How do we bring our people forward? Because we can’t bring students forward where our people aren’t.”

Sathish: “If your people are at different levels and see tools in the market, do you recommend they subscribe, or should it be reviewed at the organization level given the risks?”

Adam: “We’re implementing a product called BoodleBox. It’s kind of an AI aggregator. There’s not a single AI tool that’s perfect for every use case.” It brings ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others into one platform, helps users pick the right tool, and is pre-built for higher ed with security and compliance built in: “a tool they can really start running with.”

Sathish: “How do you keep up with so many changes and new launches every day?”

Adam: “You could spend every waking second just feeding yourself full of AI.” His answer is community over solo effort, leaning on consortiums like HESS (a higher-education systems and software consortium), the Independent Colleges of Indiana, the Council of Independent Colleges, and EDUCAUSE, while watching the major labs (Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI) directly. “Something often starts with a particular vendor or thought leader and then ends up becoming a core tenet across the space.”

Sathish: “What big pain points does higher ed still face that AI tools might solve in the future?”

Adam: Adam named two. First, sustainability: “Especially when you’re receiving grant funding, how do we keep that sustainable over time?” Second, and more human, cognitive overload: “We used to say, ‘here’s a new tool, great for this use case.’ Now we’ve got tools with a multitude of use cases, and it’s almost an overload of ‘I don’t even know where to start.'” The job, he said, is not just teaching the tool. “It’s showing them how to handle that cognitive overload, the stress and emotional impact, so they can say, ‘I’m competent in what it’s producing and I can speak to it.”

Sathish: “Final question: what’s your prediction for higher education over the next two to three years?”

Adam: “Five years is probably a bit long. If we’ve seen how the pace has changed in the last two years alone, it’s been exponential.” His bet for the next three to five years is a surge in partnership between industry and higher education.

Sathish: “Any final word for the audience thinking about AI?”

Adam: Whatever you do with AI, stay true and core to your mission as an organization. Set those guiding principles in place out of the gate, so it doesn’t compromise who you are. Higher education’s real business is forming humans. It’s a critical age and time for our students, and it’s key that we don’t lose that.”