[00:00:00] Narrator: Welcome to Higher Ed Conversations, the Go-to podcast
for higher ed marketers sponsored by EdTech Connect. In each episode, we
bring you expert insights and explore the latest trends in marketing,
advancement, and student success. All with a focus on driving real results and
leading the conversation is someone who's walked in your shoes with years of
experience as a community college PIO, now the founder of a higher ed
marketing agency and a passionate advocate for student success... please
welcome your host, Cheryl Broom.
[00:00:36] Cheryl Broom: Hi everyone, and welcome to Higher Ed
Conversations sponsored by EdTech Connect. I'm Cheryl Broom, and today's
episode is all about one of the biggest forces reshaping higher education. You
guessed it... artificial intelligence. To help us tackle this important topic, I'm
thrilled to welcome two incredible leaders from American University, David
Marchick and Angela Virtu.
David serves as the dean of the Kogod School of Business, where he's driving
transformative initiatives and AI sustainability and entrepreneurship. Under his
leadership, Kogod has launched what Poets&Quants calls the most
consequential AI transformation in business education, while also welcoming its
largest ever incoming class.
David also brings deep global experience having served as chief operating
officer of the US International Development Finance Corporation, and as a
longtime managing director at the Carlisle Group. Angela Virtu is the associate
director of the Institute for Applied Artificial Intelligence and professorial
lecturer at AU. She brings a rich, interdisciplinary background in AI innovation,
organizational culture, and ethical transformation, working to ensure that AI is
not just accessible, but equitable and empowering for all learners. Together we
dig in to the opportunities and the challenges AI presents across academic
innovation, enrollment, marketing, change management, and ethics.
There's so much practical wisdom packed into this conversation. You're gonna
love it. Let's dive in.
So Angela and Dave, thank you so much for being here today on the podcast. I
am so excited to have you here.
[00:02:24] David Marchick: Thanks for having us.
[00:02:25] Cheryl Broom: This AI is like the topic of conversation at every
conference I go to.Every higher education leader and marketer is just questioning how to bring it
to their campus, if they should bring it to their campus, how to integrate it into
their teachings, how to use it for marketing. I think it's by far the most popular
topic of conversation right now, and I'm so excited to talk about what you've
been doing at American University and advice you might have for other
colleges and universities.
So. Before we get going into the deep conversations, tell me a little bit about
how the university has invested in AI, what you're doing and what has made it
so special at American.
[00:03:05] David Marchick: So this is something that we started by listening,
which I think may be a rare trait in today's world. We had two speakers.
One was the president of Google who basically said AI is gonna be as profound
as fire or electricity. Then we had a speaker named Brett Wilson, who was the
CEO of a venture capital firm called Swift Ventures. And a student, a
sophomore, raised his hand, this was maybe two and a half years ago, and said,
am I gonna be replaced by AI?
And Brett said, you won't be replaced by AI or you likely won't, but you could
be replaced by someone who knows AI if you don't. And so a light bulb went
off in my head saying, we need to incorporate AI throughout our curriculum.
Unlike Angela, who actually knows what she's talking about when she's talking
about AI.
I didn't know anything about AI, so I went to our AI experts on faculty and said,
let's develop a plan. To incorporate AI into everything we do. And so Angela
and another faculty member named Iran Farmel and Guan Ho Lee, they put
together a series of recommendations basically to incorporate AI into our
undergraduate and graduate curriculum in every subject in first year classes and
the most advanced classes to drive it throughout each of our subject areas.
We now have more than 45 classes that incorporate AI. When a student comes
to our business school after graduating high school on the first day of their
orientation, they're told you're gonna use AI every day. And most of them say,
well, we were told in high school not to use AI, so are you sure we're not gonna
get in trouble?
And after about the fourth day when they come up to professors and say, I'm not
gonna get in trouble for using this, they start to love it. So we really have driven
it throughout everything we do. It's in our DNA. We were one of the firstschools in the country to have perplexities highest end software on every
student's laptop, desktop, and mobile device.
And it's really changed the way we teach and the way we learn.
[00:05:26] Cheryl Broom: That's fantastic. It's funny because just last night my
son was working, my son is in 11th grade and he was working on a project and
he interviewed someone and then transcribed it in AI and asked it to organize it,
and I said the same thing are you allowed to do that? Is this cheating?
[00:05:42] David Marchick: What did he say?
[00:05:43] Cheryl Broom: He said, no, I did the interview. It's just helping me
organize. My thoughts into something, you know, that I could use. So we're
scared that it's not our original thought or that we're having a machine, you
know, our kids are having machines do it for them.
[00:05:58] David Marchick: Yes. And Angela can talk about how we're
approaching that issue.
[00:06:01] Cheryl Broom: Exactly. I was gonna ask, ask Angela that, like how
do you strike that balance and how, how has the faculty's response been to
teaching with these tools?
[00:06:11] Angela Virtu: We're still figuring it out, right? Because I think in
the education space in particular, there's this balance of we want to have the
students learn what AI is, how it works, and how it applies to their individual
interest areas, right?
Marketing, finance, accounting, whatever it might be. But we also need to make
sure that, that the AI isn't just doing all the work for them, and that learning is
now too easy, that we're not just... doing anything, right? And so there's been
this balancing act that we're trying to do as teachers. So some of us have started
to change some of our pedagogy where, for example, in one of my more
technical programming classes, I'll give the students a two tiered homework
assignment.
So one of it is. Take home. Go use AI. Use AI to help you write the code, get all
the right outputs. But then when you come to class, I'm gonna give you a little
quiz because I want you to understand what this code's actually doing and the
processes involved. Because the more that you understand those processes, thebetter you can then go back to the AI to write out all of the code for you and
orchestrate these larger coding systems.
And so that's one way how I've kind of started to balance this. Using AI to help
in some cases, but make sure that it's still rigorous enough for, for the active
learning to happen. And with our writing center, we're actively working on
building out an AI writing tutor, so it'll be available 24 7.
Students can upload one of their papers that they have for a business writing and
it'll give them a critique of like, Hey, you can work on your bottom line on top,
or you can work on your concise, concise, concision, conciseness? I dunno what
the right word is there, but you get the point. And then at the end of it, it'll give
them the recommendations to improve their, their style of writing maybe, or
their business acumen.
It's not gonna give them the answer. It's not gonna do all the revisions for them,
but it'll guide them and steer them into how to properly organize and write that
writing. So it's still a work in progress, but I think the more active learning and
active engagement of using AI to get that feedback is gonna be the path forward
for now.
[00:08:15] Cheryl Broom: It seems that you're kind of using it as a teaching
tool, not so much as encouraging students to use AI to make it easier to learn,
but rather to use it to make learning better. I dunno if I've summarized that
correctly, but as I hear you talk about editing and giving them feedback on
improvements, I mean that's really kind of a teaching assistant or a way to help
a student learn more.
[00:08:43] Angela Virtu: It's definitely a part of that. And I think because of
that, we can push them further and deeper and harder into these individual
subject areas and have them start using their own curiosity to explore this
content further and deeper than in a traditional non-AI setting.
[00:08:58] Cheryl Broom: And how are the students responding to this? Are
they, do they like it? Do they embrace it?
[00:09:03] David Marchick: I think they love it. I just had a student in my
office who was looking for a job, she's a graduating MBA student. It's a tough
job market, as you know, and she has an interview on Tuesday of next week,
and she was asking me about it. I said, well, let's go to Perplexity and let's ask
Perplexity how you should prepare, give background in the company, givebackground on the, she was interviewing with the CEO as a mid-size kind of
growth company.
Give you questions to prepare for, and then give you some questions you should
ask the CEO about the CEO's experience, background, and strategy for the
company, and we use that to help her prepare. So if you think about what
students learn in business school, ranging from undergrads to grad students in
the most sophisticated, you know, programming or IT area that Angela is a
faculty member in.
We teach students how to use AI to underwrite an investment, how to read a
balance sheet, how to understand risk factors that are disclosed in a company's
10 K or 10 Q. We teach them in your field how to use AI to undertake
fundamental consumer research or market research on companies or on
institutions, and we teach them to use AI to design and improve marketing
campaigns.
So for text, for imagery, for sequencing of marketing outreach efforts. Right
now, AI is really a collaborator, but soon it's gonna be an agent where you can
send it off to do whatever you want, and then after that, it's gonna actually be
something, something you can use to delegate entire tasks. So you can have AI
go off and write an entire website in your voice.
So if you're taking a company public to write an S1 in you're offering
documents. So our basic view is that once our students go into the workforce.
They're gonna be using AI every day, and we want them to have the fluency and
the comfort and the knowledge so they can succeed in whatever job they pursue
after graduation.
[00:11:36] Cheryl Broom: Something you said. I just wrote down. I was just
thinking a second. I've owned my own business for years now, but every time I
look at my balance sheet, I'm like, what does unearned income like? I have all
these questions. I'm like, I need to take a Coursera class on my balance sheet.
But I was like, I just need ask AI to tell me what my sheet means.
[00:11:54] David Marchick: It can analyze it. It can tell you what you should,
what you should be worried about, or what you should be happy about. It's an
incredible tool. Again, as Angela said, you have to understand the basics, you
know, but it's a tool in the same way that you know, when the calculator became
ubiquitous, I'm sure there were math professors that said, don't use a calculator
because you're not gonna understand math, or I'm dating myself, but when I wasin high school, I had spelling tests I can't spell anymore because the computer
corrects all my spelling.
So, you know, is spelling a skill that one needs to master or is it a skill that you
should rely on your computer to help you with if you make a mistake? That's,
that's the issue we're grappling with.
[00:12:48] Cheryl Broom: This might be a question for Angela that I've
pondered a lot, especially with marketing, and you brought up marketing as the,
as an example, are other faculty or other programs worried like, are there
disciplines that have expressed a lot of concern, especially your teaching AI and
what's this gonna do to their discipline? Like, is graphic design going to go out
the window or, or is the writing department, is the English department gonna
get affected? Like how, how in a university setting do you balance teaching
these tools that we know are out there and people are using with other
disciplines that are more traditional?
[00:13:28] Angela Virtu: It's a tough question because AI is gonna
fundamentally change everything, every industry, every foundational area. And
I think one thing that we've done really well is have open conversations with all
of our faculty within our department, across departments, across campus. We've
been able to bring in external practitioners in each of those areas.
We brought someone from marketing, we brought someone from finance, we
brought someone from management entrepreneurship to come on our campus
and just talk about how they're currently using AI within their own businesses
and by giving all of our faculty in these different areas, whether it's marketing
or all the other areas you've mentioned, that real demo of this is me and this
company and this organization. Here's how I use AI every single day to help me
with X, Y, Z task, and here's how I'm using it. I think that was a light bulb
moment for a lot of our faculty of like, okay, so like we can be scared about
this. We can be nervous, or, you know, uneasy about what this means for my,
you know, career thus far, but.
Here's where we're going. Right? And so I think giving that directional path has
been able to kind of calm some of those nerves. And I think by focusing the
students on those AI foundations and incorporating it across all of our
departments, that's also been able to help bridge the gap a little bit because we're
kind of rising all tides and rising all programs, even if it means the way that we
market today is gonna be different than how we did 10 years ago or even last
year.[00:15:10] Cheryl Broom: I know, but the school of business, you know, has
embraced it. And you recently got an award, right? For, I don't remember what
it was for, but it was a national award, like best use of AI and education or
something like that. And then Angela, is your position then, do you help other
departments integrate it into their curriculum?
Do faculty come to you for advice? I mean, I'm imagining, like I remember I
have this faculty member at UC Santa Barbara. He must have been 80 years old
and we all thought he drank vodka out of his water bottle. Like I'm imagining
faculty member like that trying to get AI into the curriculum. Like I'm
imagining some really need some assistance, right?
Some need some help in moving this direction.
[00:15:51] Angela Virtu: We've done a lot of extensive training and a lot of
extensive community building around AI and AI literacy from our faculty and
staff perspective. Because at the end of the day, if our faculty and staff aren't
bought in and using AI, it doesn't matter what we're trying to get the students to
do 'cause it's not gonna be embedded within the curriculum.
So over the past year, we've had monthly AI second Friday discussions, and that
is a gathering place where all our faculty and staff can kind of just pop in, bring
a coffee and just talk about AI in some capacity. What's working really well,
what we've tried, what we've experimented with. And I think we've had a very
like AI first mindset of, hey, we're gonna try some stuff.
Some things are gonna be awesome, some things are gonna absolutely fail. And
the more we can communicate and understand how all of our different
approaches are, the faster we're gonna be able to build and, and incorporate this
even deeper. And then on top of that, as I said, we're bringing in industry
practitioners probably once a quarter, if not more frequently, just to talk about
AI and how they're using it and how it's disrupting their industries.
So we get that real world touch to incorporate and give context. Then just last
week we did a training with Perplexity to give a whole orientation over what
perplexity is, how it's different from all the other AI tools out there. And then
some of the creative ways that our faculty and staff have already started
building AI spaces to either embed in their classrooms, embed in student
services, or embed in their, their staff workflows.
And so I think just having that, that collaborative environment has really been
what's the difference maker in having us go deep with the AI integration.[00:17:31] Cheryl Broom: I wanna talk to Dave about marketing specifically.
So Angela, you talked a little bit about integrating it with faculty and this idea
of this monthly, like second Friday.
What a great way just to have informal discussions and explore different tools.
And I'm really interested in learning how the university might be using AI in its
own marketing and communications. Is it something that you've... you've been
doing, Dave, for the school of business? Like how, how can we integrate it
more effectively to get students interested in coming, coming to a university or
a college?
[00:18:09] David Marchick: So the answer is yes. I would say we're all in on
using it in everything we do. Let me just give you a few examples. At the top
line, our work has fortunately been featured on the front page of the Wall Street
Journal and Axios for the AI Institute that we created, which Angela is helping
to lead. There's a publication called Poets&Quants, which is the main business
school publication, and they gave us an award, which said that we had
undertaken the most consequential AI transformation of any business school in
the in the world really.
[00:18:44] Cheryl Broom: That was the award that I remembered.
[00:18:47] David Marchick: That was pretty good. yeah. We took that
sentence and we put full page ads in the Wall Street Journal. We've had some
speakers here, like the president of Microsoft who said that we're way ahead of
other universities anywhere in the world, and so obviously when someone says
something like that, we broadcast it.
So it has had a very positive impact on our reputation. Our applications were up
22% last year and 40% this year. Then we're also using it, our marketing team is
using it for all of their workflows. So I'll give you an example. So your son is
gonna be applying to college soon. When he applies, he usually applies say in
October, November.
Then he gets a decision somewhere between January and March or April, and
then has to make a decision by May 1st. So let's take someone who applies early
action so they get their acceptance January 15th, and they don't need to decide
until May 1st. You can imagine given your background as a marketer, that that
is the time when you want to influence their decision to come to, to do whatever
you want.So we want our admitted students to choose AU and there's a lot of wonderful
schools out there from which they can choose, you know, the average GPA was
3.8 and they had a 1470 SAT. So if you're, I couldn't get into AU today, but if
you are, if you have that type of grades in GPA, you have a lot of great options.
So we had a series of 50 communications, which range from emails to
Instagram posts to TikTok that we were planning between January 15th and
May 1st. Our marketing team asked AI to develop the collateral, the messaging,
the sequencing. We gave them some previous marketing materials, our voice,
our messaging, and then fed the AI with, you know, kind of brand attributes and
what we offer students.
And it took AI about 30 seconds to come up with a draft. Maybe 70 or 80% of
what we finally used. A human, we have our great marketing team, then put
their finishing touches, made adjustments, and we had a campaign that normally
would've taken say, three to four weeks to develop and it took three or four
days.
Then we're developing other tools. For example, when students are accepted,
80% of the questions they have are the same questions over and over again.
Financial aid, internships, alumni, sequence of classes, what's the core
curriculum? And so we now can feed all of those questions into an AI tool so
that applicants or accepted students can go to a chat bot and ask those questions,
which creates accessible answers for them since they can do it at two in the
morning. And it creates efficiency for our, for our admissions team so they
could focus on higher value, more complex questions. So we're using it in
everything we do and I think that we are just getting started. Angela and another
professor, Kelly Frias organized a session with a CEO of a of a technology firm
a couple weeks ago who's really pushing us to put AI in different workflows and
so we're coming up with tools to do that over the summer. I would say, you
know, we're ahead of most schools, but we are still in, if you wanna take a
baseball metaphor, we're still in the third inning. We have a lot of work to do
and a lot of opportunity.
[00:22:44] Cheryl Broom: There is so much opportunity.
So we've talked a lot about. Faculty, we've talked about students, we've talked
about marketing, and I wanna take a quick break, but when we come back, I
wanna talk a little bit broader about leadership and higher education in general
and where you see this heading. So let's take a quick break, listen to our sponsor
and we'll be right back.How do higher education decision makers find the right solution when
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Alright, so before our break, we were talking about marketing departments and I
wrote down that your applications are up 22%, which is amazing. My clients
[00:24:11] David Marchick: 40% this year. Over 22% last year.
[00:24:14] Cheryl Broom: Oh, wow. Okay. So 22% increase. Now 40%
increase. Which my clients would like cry over. I mean, they're looking for five
to 10% most cases. So that's amazing. So clearly AI and curriculum is a selling
point for students. Clearly. I mean, the way that you're teaching, but also how
you're using it to get the work done has been fantastic as well.
How is leadership seeing this? Like your leadership clearly is embracing it or it
wouldn't be happening as broadly as it is on your campus, and how do you see
AI fitting in overall university leadership? Have you heard conversations
outside of AU? Like what's happening out there away from your department and
away from your college?
[00:25:03] David Marchick: So let's start at a macro level. I think that in many
ways educational institutions are facing existential challenges to their existence.
First of all, in the, in the United States, we have what's called the demographic
cliff, which is that in 2008, right at the time of the Great Recession, Americans
started having fewer children.
And so 2008 plus 18 years... we're right in that. And so the number of college
first year students, freshmen dropped like 4% last year. So you have declining
demand declining supply of students. On top of that, there's great question about
the value for the dollar. So in my view, educational institutions need to reinventthemselves and look very hard in the mirror at the value proposition and how
they can better prepare their students for the world they will enter when they
graduate, either undergraduate or graduate. AI is part of that. When I talk to
employers and I'm on the boards of, of corporations and nonprofits, everybody's
driving AI into everything they do, and so I feel like it's our responsibility to
make sure that our students are fluent in AI applications when they graduate.
Even if, and, and we're kind of technology agnostic, we have a partnership with
Perplexity, which is wonderful, but if you're a first year student, you take your
son... by the time he graduates college, who knows which AI applications are
gonna be the winners and losers. He needs to know the fundamentals of how AI
works and then be fluent in whatever task he wants to pursue because we don't
know what applications are gonna be there.
We're getting a lot of calls from around the country. In fact, we're hosting
Angela's leading a, a session tomorrow with 55 business schools around the
country, from Stanford to public universities. We actually have a couple from
Europe and Australia and New Zealand. Some are moving quite fast. I received
a call from a dean of a major Midwestern public university who said, I'm
pushing my faculty to adopt AI, but I only have one faculty member that's
willing to drive forward with it, otherwise they're stuck in the mud. How do you
do it? And so I think there's very mixed adoption. Some are moving fast, some
are not moving and some are moving slow. I think that those that are moving
slow or doing it to their peril and their students' peril because the world is
moving fast whether the academy or academia wants it to move or not, so you
can't bury your hand in the sand and your head in the sand and you know, we
feel like it's our responsibility to move. Fortunately, we have faculty like Angela
Virtu who are experts in this and they know what they're doing. We've also
hired six other faculty, so we're investing a lot of money to be state of the art
and so far so good, but we have a lot of work to do.
[00:28:23] Cheryl Broom: Yeah. Angela, I mean, you're leading this
conversation tomorrow. How do you see it with higher ed? I, I've worked in
higher ed now, like 15 years, and we move slow. I mean, it's really slow and this
is as such a missed opportunity for those institutions, I think, who.
Who are moving at a snail's pace or who want collegial input and studies and
discussions, like how do you balance the need to move fast with such a
changing, changing industry and the, the culture of academia being... you know,
just so like almost inclusive sometimes to our own peril. Like where is that
balance? How, how do you get people moving and excited and inspired and
willing?[00:29:16] Angela Virtu: I think the thing that really allowed us to go fast is
that we did a top down and bottom up approach, right? So independent of Dave,
you know, saying, hey everybody, let's get our heads together and let's move
really fast on this and go move at lightning speed to going corporate AI into
this.
You had individual faculty on our campus who are already super either plugged
into AI or interested in it. Or curious about how they could use it to their
benefit, either in their research or in their classroom or in their own, you know,
corporate activities. That mixture of having these individuals who are kind of
going, experimenting, doing their own things, while also having the top down
leadership from Dave.
That blend is what I think allowed us to go really, really quickly. Because then
as the little hurdles or the little academia bureaucracies pop up, it's like, yeah,
no. Okay. Like, we'll figure it out. We'll go over here. We'll work on this thing
for a little bit. Come back over here. Right? Or figure out what we, what we can
do.
That's a quick fix versus a long-term thing. Right? So one of the things that
we're rolling out in the fall are gonna be AI badges. We can tack on for all of
our students to basically showcase to our employers, hey, we have, we have this
competency of AI literacy, or we have this competency in these different AI
skillset that employers are gonna be demanding in the next year or so.
That's a really quick fix that we can then add on for every single stint within
Kogod, regardless of their major, regardless of their minor, and simultaneously
we're working on having an AI undergraduate major, right? But that as you,
you, you've just discussed is a lot more bureaucracy. A lot more paperwork.
We've, we've passed it through the first few rounds of stuff and now we have to
go kick it over here and kick the tires and go do these other things, right? So I
think from that bottom up and top down approach, we're able to kind of
navigate and come up with little quick wins that will get the job done while we
also work on these much longer horizon activities.
[00:31:21] Cheryl Broom: I love this idea of AI badges. We, we actually do a
lot of higher ed trade shows and we have, we give out stickers, like our booth is
the most popular booth 'cause of the stickers we have, and we give out badges
like sticker badges, like merit badges. So it's a little different than yours. These
are actually tangible.You know what our most popular badges is? It says one that says, I watched my
idea die in committee. And people come up and just crack up at that badge
because that's what we're up against sometimes is discussion. I mean, in higher
ed, we want to discuss, we want to understand, we want to question, we want to
challenge and that's great.
But when you're working with the technology moving as fast and students who
are looking for something cutting edge, it can, it can be detrimental. So. I love
this idea of, of using badges as a way, you know, to sell it to, to faculty and
students really. And employers. I mean, and I think your advice on top, down
and bottom up is, is spot on.
Anything else, Dave, that you would add? Like if you were talking to a college
president, we have a lot of presidents listening to the podcast and maybe they're
excited about integrating some of these tools or ideas you've shared. How would
you encourage them to bring it to campus? How can people get started if they're
a little bit behind?
[00:32:40] David Marchick: So I think creating incentives and creating a
culture of experimentation are the two things that I would advise. So,
incentives, we basically said, this is our mission. We said that we're gonna
reward faculty who adopt AI and incorporate it, and that we encourage faculty
to essentially get retrained to use AI in their field.
So we had a lot of faculty, for example, last summer that went to seminars, went
to classes, went to conferences, went to industry shows to learn how AI is gonna
be applied in their industry. And then second is find someone like Angela Virtu
to help drive culture. So. She has created a faculty training program that really
went person by person, subject by subject, and helped our faculty figure out
how to apply AI concepts in their classes and in their research.
So on the research side, AI can help scholars be more productive, and it can also
help scholars get the word out about their research. So let me just give you one
example. We are training our faculty and our staff to think of AI as an audience,
not just a tool. 'Cause right now, when you, let's, I'm 58, 59 pretty soon. When
people my age wanna find information, they go to Google. When people that
are 20, they go to OpenAI or Perplexity. Okay, so we are teaching our faculty
and staff to see LLMs as the audience, so that when someone searches a
question about research or about American University, ChatGPT kicks out an
answer that has American in it or our scholars' research in it.So that's a huge change of strategy from a psychological and, and orientation.
You know, you, you do this in your business. You've been training your clients
to pursue SEO optimization for 20 years.
[00:35:09] Cheryl Broom: Oh yeah.
[00:35:10] David Marchick: Now it's really AI optimization. How do you
ensure that if you do a search for which schools has have the best AI programs
that American University shows up in that search?
And so that requires a very different orientation. So, but all of this is really
about incentives and culture and we've, fortunately, thanks to Angela and
Professor Lee and others, we've created a culture of experimentation and a
culture where it's okay to fail. Like, you know, we're making this up as we go
along and if it's something doesn't work in a class, try something else. It's fine.
[00:35:46] Cheryl Broom: So interesting. And you just gave me two new ideas
for business offerings as you were talking, so I would wrap up and go research
on AI, some things that I think I can sell to clients. Before we wrap up, just a
quick note on searching on AI. My mom is 69 years old and has had a very
successful real estate career in North San Diego County, and she's, she's on the
verge of retirement.
She's just taking on clients here and there, and she got a call a couple weeks
ago. From an executive at Google that is looking for a high-end home on the
beach, and he asked AI to give him the top three real estate agents in North San
Diego County. And my mom was one of 'em, and the other two were, are her
main competitors.
I mean, there's thousands of real estate agents here. And I was like, well, that's
amazing. You've had such a successful career. It must be pulling from, from
maybe your past listings or other clients you've had, but.
[00:36:45] David Marchick: It's pulling from Reddit, it's pulling from
comments. It's pulling from Twitter and LinkedIn. That's great.
[00:36:51] Cheryl Broom: Yeah, and so, I mean, people are using it. They're
using it to search. They, they've used it to find my company and so it's an
amazing tool. So many applications, and it's really just been so fantastic to talk
with both of you. I could ask you a million more questions. And I hope that
maybe we can have another conversation sometime in the future, and I really
appreciate both of your time and your expertise.Great stuff you're doing at AU.
[00:37:17] David Marchick: Thanks for having us.
[00:37:19] Narrator: That's a wrap on this episode of Higher Education
Conversations. Thanks for listening. We hope you found value in today's
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