Susie Wilhite, the director of operation at Iowa Area Development Group, handles many functions, works with a small staff and uses AI daily.
She’s among the many participants that have come through Iowa State University’s Center for Industrial Research and Service AI training programs. In the past few years, several units across Iowa State have launched AI training for students as well as small to large businesses and they are now working to collaborate and coordinate their efforts.
With the help of AI, Wilhite has created two apps on the back end of her website for employees to submit expenses and track their mileage.
“It’s saving me an incredible amount of time at the end of every month, not having to go through receipts and match them to expense reports, because this app will collect all that information for me and give it to me in a form where everything’s been matched, so all I have to do is print it out and have people verify it,” she said.
The following are summaries of ISU’s AI training efforts.
Center for Industrial Research and Service
WHAT IT DOES: CIRAS helps small- and medium-sized construction and manufacturing companies, and the ancillary services and businesses around them. “One of the things that they’re going to need to know now is artificial intelligence, and the application of artificial intelligence to all the things that they already do,” said Paul Gormley, growth project manager within CIRAS.
WHAT IT OFFERS: Courses in AI literacy, AI fluency — leaders are in the middle of developing AI automation — and the fourth level is AI integration, for those who want to be the AI champions within their organization.
WHO IT COLLABORATES WITH: CIRAS has teamed up with the Translational AI Center at ISU, as well as the Iowa Initiative for Artificial Intelligence at the University of Iowa. “We said, ‘Here are the people we’re trying to educate, these are the levels that we’re trying to get them to, or the things we’re trying to educate them with, and we went about developing some curriculum that at one point in time was three steps,” Gormley said.
WHERE TO TAKE THE TRAINING: At this time, CIRAS is offering in-person AI training at various community colleges, Gormley said. Soon, they will be offering synchronous virtual events. “I’ve got a cohort approach,” he said. “That means if you take a class then you get a certain amount of time in what we call the cohort, which is every Friday or some day we’ll have an hour and we’ll just get people together and we’ll talk about what they’re trying to do, what their successes are, where they’ve got frustrations.”
COST: Costs range from $395 to $999 per training. Companies can request custom-made trainings, which has a fixed cost per person, with a minimum of 25 people taught, Gormley said.
Translational AI Center
WHAT IT IS: The goal of the center is to bring together different faculty and researchers who were doing AI research from across the university, said Jessica Bell, assistant director for the Translational AI Center. Then experts work to incorporate AI into different disciplines, like agronomy, or seed science, or interior design, or electrical engineering, civil engineering, and business. “Then we’ve noticed there’s a need for … educating students in AI to help advance their own knowledge and opportunities for careers in the future, and then also the upskilling of employees, so in different industries or businesses across the state,” Bell said. “We have this three-prong approach: We do the core research, then translate it, hence [the] translational, for the educational opportunities we also provide for real world applications.”
WHAT IT OFFERS: The center has a micro-credential program it has offered at ISU in some form for the last two years. Most courses are online and asynchronous, and ISU offers anywhere from four to six courses. “We have faculty and we have data scientists who are experts … in their field and the things that they’re learning, and then being able to apply that and teach … the technical aspects of AI, and how to build an AI agent, or how to do different kinds of coding,” Bell said. Depending on the course, instructors will also set up synchronous learning opportunities via Zoom, so they can connect directly with students, she said. There are two different learning tracks: foundations in AI, which includes machine learning operations and generative models, and advanced AI techniques.
COST TO GET A MICROCREDENTIAL: For students, it’s the cost of tuition. For industry, it’s $600 per course and it takes six courses to get the micro-credential.
WHO IT COLLABRATES WITH: Among the center’s collaborators are the Ivy College of Business and the Murray G. Bacon Center for AI Ethics in Business. The business school is helping businesses with AI strategy while the center can bring in the technical aspects, Bell said. “The Bacon Center for AI Ethics – we’re really excited about working with them too, because ethics is a huge aspect of what we’re doing in AI,” Bell said. “A lot of our people are engineers, and they’re not necessarily thinking in the same way. We want to make sure that we’re covering all the things that we need … we’re covering the technical aspects, they’re covering the business aspects, the ethical aspects, so it’s a great collaboration.”
Ivy College of Business and the Murray G. Bacon Center for AI Ethics in Business
WHAT THEY DO: Jim Summers, professor in charge of custom education at the Ivy College of Business, said he’s been working to “bring everyone together,” to help upskill Iowans and solve problems using AI.“It’s a big scary open place right now, and a lot of organizations … pretend like it doesn’t exist,” Summers said. “Others are … fully in on it, and there’s everyone in between. And what we’re trying to do is just help companies navigate those waters right now.” The Ivy Custom Education program at the Ivy College is working with companies across the state to help them build new skills and capabilities with AI. Launched in 2023, the non-credit custom education program creates custom courses, workshops, seminars and hands‑on training sessions that bring faculty expertise and research-driven insights to an organization and its employees, according to a press release.
DEMAND: “There’s been a lot of energy, a lot of enthusiasm seeking out training in AI from different sets of stakeholders,” said Mike Howard, the ISU professor who leads the Bacon Center. He said undergraduates are interested in enhancing their AI skills, because they will soon face real-world problems of having to be competitive in an AI-driven economy.
“At the same time, the companies that we’ve been speaking to, they are also talking to us about the need to prepare our students and make sure that they have skills that incorporate AI as a very powerful tool to increase efficiency of their business and to help improve the way that the jobs are actually designed, so that they’re much more suited to productivity in an AI world. There’s been probably a dozen or so companies that we’ve talked to that have different perspectives on this, but they all agree with the importance of developing this component of the training within our curriculum; and as you can imagine, they face the challenge of also having existing employees who are however many years away from their college years, and so they also need retraining.”
Companies are in a variety of different stages, Howard said. “I think all of them are universally struggling with this question of how do we effectively implement AI and how do we do it the right way?”
UPCOMING TRAINING: In the fall, the business school is launching a workshop that’s inviting about 25 companies based around its executive MBA alumni, Summers said. A date has not been set yet. The workshop will take a macro-level perspective, going deeper than ChatGPT or Copilot, but “what are the strategic implications, where the impact [is] on your customers and employees,” Summers said.
COST: The school charges by deliverable hour at a rate of $1,700 an hour to build customized training. For example, a literacy training could be about four hours, Summers said, as could a workshop on creating your own AI assistant.
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