Most organizations spend months gathering requirements before a single line of code gets written. UC Riverside's CIO Matthew Gunkel is compressing that entire cycle into a single day — running live design sessions where stakeholders walk in with a problem and walk out with a working application spec built in real time using AI.

In this conversation, Gunkel explains why his AI strategy starts and ends with data — not models, not agents — and how UC Riverside's lack of legacy data infrastructure became an unexpected advantage, letting them skip traditional data warehouses entirely and move straight to vector databases and graph knowledge. He also shares how the university is deploying AI agents for student wellness outreach and procurement, using Notebook LM as a classroom RAG tool, and why the most practical AI skill you can learn right now has nothing to do with code.

This is the final episode in our citizen development series. Catch up on earlier episodes with Joseph Schultz and Jason Dittmer [link pending] for the full picture of how individuals and organizations are building their own solutions.

Contact an Insight AI specialist because you'll get solutions tailored to your data maturity, infrastructure, and use cases — not a generic platform pitch: https://www.insight.com/en_US/what-we-do/expertise/data-and-ai.html

Subscribe and follow Insight On for new episodes every week.

#AI #DataStrategy #HigherEducation #CitizenDevelopment #InsightOn

Chapters (8)

00:00 — Welcome and introduction

00:38 — Citizen development at institutional scale

03:06 — Change management at the speed of AI

04:00 — Live design sessions that replace months of planning

06:05 — Procurement and student wellness AI use cases

10:14 — Authentic assessment and AI in education

13:28 — Why data is the AI strategy

18:25 — The case for learning folders and markdown