A three-year, $1.25 million seed grant from long-time Cornell donors James C. Morgan ’60, MBA ’63, and Rebecca Quinn Morgan ’60 will support the establishment of an artificial intelligence fellows program focused on operational and administrative transformation at Cornell.
The new Workplace Innovation and Impact Team (WIT) Seed Funding Program – part of the Cornell AI Initiative, led by Provost Kavita Bala and Vice Provost for AI Strategy Thorsten Joachims – will fuel responsible development of AI including innovations in AI-enabled Cornell teaching and learning, and the effective transformation of Cornell administration and operations.
WIT will be co-led by Ayham Boucher, executive director of AI strategy and innovation for Cornell Information Technologies; Kathryn Burkgren, associate vice president for organizational development and effectiveness, in the Office of Human Resources; and Ben Maddox, Cornell chief information officer.
“Cornell is fortunate to have strong leaders at a critical time,” Jim Morgan said, “and I see an opportunity to build a culture of skilled management enabled by innovation to propel the university forward.”
The new program will feature a cohort of six to eight early-career fellows and adjunct AI leaders per year; workforce skills enhancement; and an emerging toolset pilot program that will feature a closed “sandbox” environment to allow for safe experimentation using emerging AI tools.
The first year of the program will be dedicated to design, recruitment of four to five fellows, development and launch. The fellows will be recent graduates, from across disciplines, who will be in one- to three-year rotations focused on AI-enabled administrative and operations projects. They will gain hands-on organizational experience and receive AI-specific and general business training.
“Jim Morgan cares about upskilling the staff at Cornell with AI, and we will be using the gift to accelerate programs that do the upskilling,” Boucher said. “We’ll do this in different ways, and one very effective way is with the new WIT team and the AI Innovation Hub. Staff work with expert faculty, students and tech leads on building projects, and they not only get a process improvement at the end of the project, but they have gone through a hands-on approach to building, and learned what works and what doesn’t work with AI.”
Burkgren said the Morgans’ gift will “move forward, in a significant way, what we are trying to do as we build a human-centered AI approach at Cornell, where we are putting people at the center, with support from AI.”
WIT, which will work closely with Information Technologies and Services in Ithaca and at Weill Cornell Medicine to streamline operations, strives to empower staff and early-career professionals with the skills, tools and mindset necessary to thrive in an era of rapid technological change. The Morgans’ seed funding will accelerate that vision by allowing for the creation of programs that build AI literacy – focused on solving “problems of practice” related to service improvement, efficiency and innovation – as well as fostering adoption of AI.
“The hands-on experience that this gift will allow is the best type of AI literacy training,” Boucher said. “They will learn where AI shines and where it fails in their specific domains.”
The Morgans are Cornell Presidential Councillors, emeritus members of Cornell Silicon Valley Advisors, and recipients of the Frank H.T. Rhodes Exemplary Alumni Service Award. Becky Morgan is a Cornell trustee emerita; last year, Jim Morgan received the Cornell Duffield Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award, the college’s highest alumni honor.
“Becky and I see unique potential at Cornell,” James Morgan said, “and we like to seed good ideas that take advantage of those strengths to help solve problems that allow the university to reach its potential.”
Year 2 of the program will focus on expansion, with an additional two or three fellows added to the cohort; year 3 will prioritize expansion and the development of a sustainability plan to foster continued workforce development in AI.