Most conversations about AI and education ask how traditional institutions can adapt. Sasha Thackaberry asked a different question: what if you didn't start with the old system at all? As Founder and President of Newstate University — the nation's first AI-founded, AI-focused university — she's not retrofitting a legacy model. She built something new from the ground up, and the architecture itself is the argument.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆

Sasha spent decades inside some of higher education's most respected institutions — LSU, SNHU — leading digital transformation and watching the same patterns repeat: slow curriculum cycles, credential debt that outpaced career payoff, and a growing gap between what learners needed and what institutions could deliver in time to matter. When AI started reshaping the job market faster than any traditional university could respond, she stopped trying to fix the old system and started building a new one. Newstate University launched as a fully competency-based, self-paced, stackable institution where learners can apply, enroll, and start a credit-bearing course the same day — for $300 a month, no textbook fees, no waiting for "next semester."

𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗥𝗼𝗮𝗱𝗺𝗮𝗽

• 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹𝘀 𝗱𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗹𝘆: Why stackable certificates let you solve an immediate career problem now and build toward a full degree when you're ready

• 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲-𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗼𝗳 𝗮 𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗲𝗿 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗷𝗼𝗯 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀𝗻'𝘁 𝗲𝘅𝗶𝘀𝘁 𝘆𝗲𝘁: The skills and frameworks Newstate builds around so learners stay relevant through multiple role shifts

• 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗔𝗜 𝗶𝘀 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝘁 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗶𝘁𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳: From AI coaches inside courses to LinkedIn-based communities replacing traditional discussion boards

• 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗼𝘄𝗻 𝗔𝗜 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗴𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗼𝗹 𝗳𝘂𝗹𝗹-𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲: What the "New State" of education looks like for the professional who feels behind

• 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗶𝘁𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗺𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲: Why competency-based, no-elective, prescribed progressions reduce friction for learners who need outcomes, not options

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗼𝗼𝗹𝗸𝗶𝘁

• 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗨𝗻𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆: https://newstateu.com/

• 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗦𝘁𝘂𝗱𝗶𝗼 𝗮𝘁 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗨: https://newstateu.com/about-the-professional-development-studio-at-newstate-university

• 𝗦𝗵𝗲 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱𝘀 𝗔𝗜: https://she-leads-ai.mn.co/

• 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗜 𝗦𝗮𝗹𝗼𝗻: https://thesalon.ai/

• 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗜 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗺: https://ruready4ai.com/

𝗟𝗶𝗸𝗲, 𝗦𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗲, 𝗦𝘂𝗯𝘀𝗰𝗿𝗶𝗯𝗲

Catch a new episode of The AI Readiness Project every Wednesday at 3pm (PST), co-hosted by Anne Murphy of She Leads AI and Kyle Shannon of The AI Salon. Want to meet others navigating this new terrain with humor and humanity? Visit The AI Salon or She Leads AI to find your people.

She Built a University Because the Old One Couldn_t Keep Up_ with Sasha Thackaberry_ Ph_D_

​[00:00:00]

Speaker: At the AI Readiness Project, we believe that in this remarkable age, AI isn't the main character you are. While the tech is racing ahead, it's the humans who learn to harness AI mindfully. That will win. Each week, we meet remarkable people doing just that. Join Kyle Shannon, tech leader, an AI instigator and Anne Murphy fundraiser and AI consultant as they lead the conversation about staying grounded, growing smarter, and leading with what makes us human.

Kyle Shannon: Ann Murphy, how are you doing?

Anne Murphy: So good. There were so many things. I have, I, I have so many things that I need to know about what you've been up to. I have a couple little nuggets to share from my own long world.

Kyle Shannon: I don't catch you up. I, I, I apologize. I couldn't be here. Last [00:01:00] week I was in the, the scenic city of Orlando, Florida. In a scenic corporate conference room.

Anne Murphy: It sounds like a sitcom already.

Kyle Shannon: It, it, it, you had carpet from the 1990s and wall coverings from the 1980s. It was lovely. There you

Anne Murphy: go.

Kyle Shannon: It was, it's everything's coming back in fashion, but, uh, great to see you. Great to see you. Yes, I've been, I've been traveling the world. I've been doing some stuff for Story Vine.

I was in Boise, um, last weekend speaking at the hack fort, like the tech track of the music conference they have in Boise once a year. And, uh, and was talking about the seven economies and I was talking about AI readiness and, and uh, was up there just, uh, just, you know, letting the people know,

Anne Murphy: letting the people know

Kyle Shannon: what's happening.

Anne Murphy: Good. Awesome. Yeah. How overall, and you were in one other place, you did the corporate, you did the Boise. Was there a [00:02:00] third or am I thinking about something else?

Kyle Shannon: Nope.

Anne Murphy: Well, anyway, I you, the, you're, you're everywhere. In a way, when you think about it, depending on if, you know, for those folks who are, who are listening, like depending on what your algorithm does, you can get a lot of Kyle, Shannon, and, and Murphy in your life if you,

Kyle Shannon: if, if you so choose,

Anne Murphy: if you wish.

And, and one of the ways to do that is you take these lovely opposable thumbs and you tippy tappy. Mm-hmm. And you follow us on our various social media platforms and you rate and review the podcast and you don't do those kind of things.

Kyle Shannon: Things Yeah, exactly. And

Anne Murphy: exactly. And then you keep catch up with us.

Kyle Shannon: So the, the thing that I've been out there, the, the thing that's been really resonating, I put together this chart of the Seven Economies, and I think I've, I think I showed you that, didn't I? I don't know if I showed it on the show. Oh

Anne Murphy: yeah. But I love, I love it.

Kyle Shannon: This chart right here, but the basic idea of, you know, [00:03:00] sort of.

Increasing, um, levels of AI adoption. And, and what's been fascinating about talking about that is that what a lot of people are saying is it's the first time they've been able to say, oh, here's where I am and here's where I want to be. And, and you know, one of the economies economy, one is, you know, just going, playing in the dirt, right?

Not dealing with AI at all. And people are like, oh, that sounds really good about now. So I, so I think there's, you know, there's, there's a lot of stuff coming. And then, um, the other thing that I was struck with is, is that, I think it was last week, it might've been the week before Jack Dorsey put out a note that he was laying off 4,000 of his 10,000 employees while they're profitable and growing.

So it's not like he, you know, did it for a cost cutting measure. But he talked about, um, their people armed with. Increasingly powerful [00:04:00] AI operating in smaller, flatter teams, um, are changing the way you start and run businesses. And so yesterday he put out a post where he basically talks about the future of the organizational structure and he gives, it's a, it's a fascinating article.

He gives the history of 2000 years of organizational development starting with Roman armies and basically just coming all the way up through where we are at the present that basically, um, as organizations grow, um, to. You have middle management, that becomes the bottleneck for communication that you have to, you know, communicate up and down the chain.

And human beings, it's slow and inefficient. And so what he's talking about in his new organization is basically blowing up the org chart, flattening the organization, and letting AI operate as essentially middle management and have humans out interfacing with other humans where their value is [00:05:00] in being human with other humans.

And let the AI sit in the center and coordinate all the different piece parts. So. So the first thing that I saw that is, was very much sort of an economy five in, in my chart is, is AI aggressors. So people that are just willing to burn down the org chart and start over. Um, and I'm really excited to have, uh, Sasha come up that we're gonna talk about the university that she's created that probably lives more in like an economy six.

We're just gonna do it the way we, you know, if we were gonna start one from scratch, what would we do now that we have all these crazy tools. So I'm really excited to talk to her. So anyway, enough about me. What have you been up to?

Anne Murphy: Well, uh, a ton of things, but the biggest thing that you even don't know about, because it is so stealth, is that

Kyle Shannon: Don,

Anne Murphy: but

Kyle Shannon: if you don't

Anne Murphy: my, yep.

So, Donnie, um, Rachel Zsi and I tonight, well, LA later on today, um, [00:06:00] officially launched Moxie. Which is the current version of the platform that started talking to me 10 years ago, and in part inspired me to leave, you know, my higher ed role and become, you know, a consultant in the, in the, in the, in the nonprofit sector.

Um, and now has evolved into, evolved a completely disruptive technology. And today we launch with our first client.

Kyle Shannon: Wow. And what is Mox? I saw a TikTok video today mm-hmm. Where you're like, slitting your hair or something and you're doing this, and then there's like the big moxie letters on the screen.

And I'm like, is she like advertising some social media platform dating platform?

Anne Murphy: Ooh,

Kyle Shannon: it was, it was really good. But, but

Anne Murphy: what, alright, well, here, here, here, here. Here, here, here. So I will share,

Kyle Shannon: oh, this is so cool.

Anne Murphy: This is just a little sneak peek, so [00:07:00] I'll give you just a ti Thank you. I'll give you just a couple of tiny, little juicy tidbits.

So yeah.

One of the things that is so hard about being in the nonprofit sector is, is we're, is being okay with the amount of injustices that we do on the way to advancing justice. And a perfect example is the data that we have built. All of our fundraising, all of our philanthropy, all of that work. The data that we have built those programs on is, is skeevy af.

It is all of the exploitive data that we would never want. To have in our systems. And we then use that data, which is based on, you know, very like really reductive stuff, right? Uhhuh major purchases. Um, you know, we pull in people's what they, who [00:08:00] they, who they, uh, their political donations, divorces, right?

All those kind of things. And we assign a number to them. And then the data companies sell that pe those people, those names, those numbers to nonprofits and they say, these are your donors, but what they have never factored in and they're not even your donors. They're saying, this person because of this publicly available data and some that wasn't publicly available that we bought, seems to have the capacity to make a gift of 10,000 to $50,000.

Not necessarily to your organization, but somewhere Uhhuh that a lovely nonprofit who cares about. This kind of thing, buys that, brings that into their system and then they start making financial decisions around it and hiring decisions around it and, you know, wow. But it never brings in any, anything related to the relationship.

Kyle Shannon: Right.

Anne Murphy: What do they care about? Who are they friends with? Who did they bring to the event? [00:09:00] Oh, in the well screening, it only brings back 44% of the names, the whole of their database. So now, but we, because we provide feedback on the relationships, we don't have to have a perfect address. We don't have to have even a per an email address.

So that's what we do in phase one, is we build your data without the saviness and with the relationships to create what is called the Moxie Donor Index. And that Oh,

Kyle Shannon: that's so cool.

Anne Murphy: Is what you use to decide, can we have an $11 million campaign? Can we have a $15 million campaign? How many staff do we need

Kyle Shannon: based on people in your, in your, that you have relationships with

Anne Murphy: and that you'll grow relationships with.

Yeah. And so then, not to still be talking about my thing, but like this is a pretty pre B, FD. [00:10:00]

Kyle Shannon: Yeah.

Anne Murphy: We've had like, yeah, so, so a couple more things because that relational data is so incredibly important. We have to remove all friction for people to get their data into the system. Executive director comes back from a meeting, right?

She's like, oh, what I don't wanna do is click 87 things down and enter a contact report.

Kyle Shannon: Yeah.

Anne Murphy: Right. And now it's like, oh. Okay. That's the, just not how it works. So it's the talking, it's the multimodal, right?

Kyle Shannon: Talk into it. Yeah.

Anne Murphy: Talking into it. It's talking. It's, take the picture of the artifact that the, that the, you know what?

That the lady shows you at her house. Take a picture of it, upload it. Now we know what she likes or that her mom founded the thing with this piece of paper or whatever. You bring all of that together. You make it easy to get that data in. No friction, frictionless. And you use AI to make the data searchable, like Uber, Uber searchable, and we, we begin to surface [00:11:00] insights like that's interesting to the executive director.

Last time you met with Cheryl, she also mentioned that so and so was coming to town and that it is a big deal.

Kyle Shannon: Mm-hmm.

Anne Murphy: Or whatever. Right. That, that maybe it's something where you would wanna talk to her about a, a, a family trust. Like it's gonna serve you up appropriate ways and then it gives you the data that you need in the format that you want to prepare you to go to the meeting.

Kyle Shannon: Yeah. That's beautiful. And you said it was, it was, it was like a 10-year-old idea. And, and now because of ai you, you, you were able to bring it all together?

Anne Murphy: Yep. Yep.

Kyle Shannon: Beautiful.

Anne Murphy: It's been bugging me. It's been, I've built, I mean, this deck that I, that I just showed you. The front of that. Yeah. Yeah. This from 2023.

Kyle Shannon: Oh really?

Anne Murphy: Yeah.

Kyle Shannon: Wow.

Anne Murphy: But I built the deck from, in, like, like five years before that. Anyway, thanks for listening everybody. That's my story. It's, it's [00:12:00] moxie. We're rolling it out. There's gonna be a wait list and we're undermining Edward's. Is it,

is

Kyle Shannon: it moxie.com?

Anne Murphy: It's, I don't know what it is yet.

Kyle Shannon: Oh, okay. All right.

Anne Murphy: Um. Uh, it's, uh, we're just going to under, under price all the, all the, all the bad companies. All the, we're just gonna, yeah, we're just gonna charge like 50% of what everybody, what they choose, what they pay, what they charge.

Kyle Shannon: That's brilliant. That's brilliant. Yeah. Very, very cool. Congrats. Thanks. That's exciting.

So it launches tonight's stealth launch tonight.

Anne Murphy: That's what we're saying. I mean, but, you know, then you just asked me the URL and I'm like, huh,

Kyle Shannon: huh huh. Well, listen, listen, you, you, you and I have certain skills together, and one of them is the details. We'll get to, we drive the people around us crazy, but you know, we're gonna move this thing.

Anne Murphy: I think there's a reason that Donnie told me that it had to be two Xs, not just one. Because it was m[00:13:00]

Kyle Shannon: It

Anne Murphy: might.

Kyle Shannon: That's cool. Well, let us know. If you figure it out, we'll pop it in here. Congratulations. That's really awesome.

Anne Murphy: I'm psyched. Yeah. And Donny's running it is Donny's the Donny's, the, the, the, the, you know, benevolent tech bro here, so

Kyle Shannon: that's awesome. And how are things going with, with you, with, with AI readiness?

Are you, what's, what's going on? I, I, I, I fear to talk about

Anne Murphy: Adam's so

Kyle Shannon: poorly behaved.

Anne Murphy: Well, maybe, maybe I just,

Kyle Shannon: oh, actually, Gareth right here. Gareth, I sent you a note. I sent you a note on the AI salon. I actually, I just need an hour of your time to de bork my, my agent. I'm, I'm officially throwing in the, uh, surrender flag.

He responded. Okay, good.

Anne Murphy: Yeah. We have, we, I guess it's not that [00:14:00] big of a surprise that you and I are having complicated relationships with our agents, but, um, I, I do. There is something to the fact that I like how come I didn't like, how come I didn't rescue my agents? Like I stepped on my computer, but the computer was still functional.

All I had to do was take all those things off of my C drive.

Kyle Shannon: Yeah.

Anne Murphy: But I didn't, I let them go.

Kyle Shannon: Yeah. Yeah, I know

Anne Murphy: Phil's gonna be pissed.

Kyle Shannon: There's there's something there. There's, there's, there's, there's a psychological underpinnings about managing these agents. Um, it's true. It's true. And you know what I'm finding is because they were created by technologists, and because it's so early that if you're really good with technology and programming and organization, and you have a functional prefrontal cortex, you're gonna be good with these things.

And if you're like us, where we're more like jazz, we're just improvising. [00:15:00] These systems are not good for improvisation. Because that's how I screwed up my agent, was I, I installed two different versions of access to Google, basically thinking that one would be better than the other, and then it wasn't. So I uninstalled it.

And now Adam's just confused. He thinks he can't send emails, but he can, but he can't figure it out. And he sends me long posts on Telegram and long emails about how he can't send emails.

Anne Murphy: Oh my God.

Kyle Shannon: So, so, yeah.

Anne Murphy: S so many, like really levelheaded people could listen to us and our friends and just be like, like, why, how is this worth it to you?

Kyle Shannon: Yeah, I know. It's, it's hours and hours really to get it, to do, to, to get it, to do nothing. Well, and you know, it's funny, this is, this is another thing that you'll [00:16:00] probably relate to.

So there's this guy on, on YouTube called Alex Finn, and he's been like an open claw dude from the beginning, and he's like, mm-hmm. He's like the most amazing thing ever. And, and so he put together a video where he said, I'm gonna take my two months of learning and just watch this 20 minute video and I'll tell you all the things, right?

So I'm expecting to watch this video and learn. That I had done, like 10% of what I needed to do to get it there. So I watched this video, basically. I've done everything. I just, it's, it's sort of janky, like, but I like,

Anne Murphy: yeah.

Kyle Shannon: So, so it is, it is like I'm, I'm right on the start line, like I'm right at the start line, but he sort of tripped right before the start line and, and now I just resent him,

Anne Murphy: well,

Kyle Shannon: I re I resent my bot.

Anne Murphy: I

Kyle Shannon: feel

Anne Murphy: like the feeling is probably mutual at this point. I mean, you gave him like, like a whole bunch of fucked up instructions. I mean, are you sure this is on him? [00:17:00]

Kyle Shannon: I gave him very clear instructions from where I sit,

Anne Murphy: right? Yeah. Screwed

Kyle Shannon: them up.

Anne Murphy: Yeah, yeah,

Kyle Shannon: yeah.

Anne Murphy: You know, um, I was going to, I was talk, I was thinking about how you and I, I was thinking about how the, the some, some of the advantages that our brains have and.

Oh, you do. Gareth has a really, really, really three reallys, um, yeah. Good video on setting up open claw. Anyway, AI readiness, the shortcut that you boil it all down, it continues to be curiosity. Mm-hmm. A willingness to be vulnerable and community.

Kyle Shannon: Yep.

Anne Murphy: However, couple of things have, have snuck in where I feel like it's also our, it's this piece about being [00:18:00] willing to be in this weird liminal space where we're kind of in this, we're kind of living these age agentic fantasy lives right now, but we're also trying to be human.

But this agentic thing is happening so freaking fast. Yeah. That there's like this willingness to free fall practically. I guess it's a version of vulnerability, but. I know what I was gonna say. It's courage. Mm-hmm. It's how Brene Brown talks about there is no courage without vulnerability. Yeah. We're in that.

Kyle Shannon: Yeah.

Anne Murphy: And so, yeah, I think that's where I am with air readiness.

Kyle Shannon: Well, the, the, the place that I go with, with the agents is that if you've got something that can operate and do things for you 24 7, the actual first step is to understand what you want it to do

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: so

Kyle Shannon: hard, which then makes you, um, who am I, what do I value?

What's the difference I wanna make in the world? Right? Because, because it's so easy to get seduced in, oh, I've got this tool that'll work 24 7, and you get wrapped [00:19:00] up in that activity and it's like, wait a minute, what do I actually want? And so part of my issue with, with Adam is I sort of, I sort of got him up and running and he, you know, whether he is functional or not, that'll fix, but it's like I sit there and where I get paralyzed is, well, wait a minute, what do I actually want?

Anne Murphy: Yeah.

Kyle Shannon: And that one's a hard one. That one's a hard one. Mm-hmm. Because it's like, are you gonna aim him at this project or that project? Do you wanna start a new project? What does success look like if, if Adam goes off and creates a whole bunch of new things that I then have to review to decide whether they're good or not?

Now I'm the bottleneck again. Right? Yeah. And so is the project that I point him to do worth my time to even do that? Right? So one of the things these things do is just generate more and more stuff that you then have to deal with, right? And so I think that idea of, of taking a moment, not even a moment, taking the time to figure out what you want, that feels to me like a prerequisite for not going [00:20:00] absolutely crazy.

Anne Murphy: We so samesies, so the, we had a team meeting today, which of course is in the kitchen. And, um, we were talking about getting all three of us set up on cloud code with. The same skills, the same, la la, la, everything. The same, same, same, same. And how, what a royal pain in the butt. This is like having to approve a content vault, having to have a system for updating all the skills.

And I, and we were, we were going down that path and I'm like, but wait, let's just flip the script. Talk about the bottleneck that is on the other side of this. If it's the same bottleneck in terms of time, investment, annoyance, lack of velocity. But it's just, we're dealing with it upfront.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: It totally is.

Anne Murphy: And then it's go slow to go fast. Go, go slow to go fast, go slow to go smooth. You the going slow part sucks. It's not [00:21:00] sexy, it's horrible. You saw Donny. He hasn't shaved in. I don't know how many days

Kyle Shannon: he looked. He looked a little rough. He looked ruggedly handsome.

Anne Murphy: He was ruggedly

Kyle Shannon: handsomely handsome. Um, well, so, so let's do this.

I wanna get s up here. I want to talk about, um, sort of building a new thing from scratch, right? In the, in the, I'm really excited about that. Why don't you tell the good folks about she leads and then I'll tell 'em about the salon and we'll bring Sasha up.

Anne Murphy: Yeah. So she leads ai. One of the conversations, well a conversation that we were having right before we hopped on today was about another, um.

Educational and certification cohort that we're working toward launching for women who are interested in chief AI officer roles. So we would be, we would be, you know, we'd have, she leads AI certified Chief AI officers. It's an example that I, that I mentioned now of kind of our trajectory. So we are really [00:22:00] evolving into a leading AI education and certification group for women who are in ai who have just crazy AI skills, maybe have been in a vertical for a really long time, have all the wisdom to bring to it and we, you know, hang out with each other.

We are super colleagues and we have an in-person conference. It's just. It's just the best. So go to, she leads ai.ai.

Kyle Shannon: Beautiful. I love it. Uh, and I'll do a similar, I'll do, I'll do a concise version of the salon. So the salon is, uh, the AI salon is a community of about, uh, 4,000 people that are trying to figure this stuff out.

Um, we have a remarkable group within the salon called the Mastermind, where we've got the Mastermind practice lab where you can design a daily practice around ai. And we just, this is new to you. So we, we basically just created a whole new area in the salon, inside the Mastermind for the great repurpose.

And so I kicked off, I did a, I did a session yesterday, yesterday on defining. Your, who are you [00:23:00] as a one of one player in the world? And, and that moving forward, understanding who you are and what you bring to the party is gonna be the way we market moving forward. Because all of the stuff that we're selling, everyone's gonna be able to copy that, but they can't copy you.

And so we've got a whole series of, of, uh, workshops and things that are part of the great repurpose that are coming up. So really excited about that. So, yay, check out the AI salon, uh, and, and come join us. And, and with that, I am excited to bring up on stage. Hello,

Anne Murphy: it's Sasha.

Kyle Shannon: Hello. Hello,

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: hello, hello. Nice to actually, this is the first time, uh, the three of us have been together.

Same place, same time, and first time I've met Kyle. So nice to meet you and nice to see you again, Anne. And I am so excited about your program for, um, chief AI officers for women. Super excited. We need to talk more about that.

Anne Murphy: Yes, we do. Yes, we do.

Speaker: Exactly.

Anne Murphy: Okay. Casa, it's, it's just like [00:24:00] Kyle said, we get excited, we get enthused.

We just start barreling down the highway. Tell the people who you are, what brought you to this moment.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Love it. Yes. Um, so I'll do the short version. Otherwise we would be here for quite some time. Um, so I, along with my co-founders, uh, created, uh, an AI first fully online university. It, uh, was really, I mean, we, we thought of this at exactly the right time.

We identified this huge need. There's gonna be so much disruption in the workforce, and we knew people needed a way to get, um, upskilled and reskilled in a way that was more than, um, you know, a, a free course by Google or a free, you know, digital badge from IBM. Though those are also valuable and we actually have.

Uh, those credentials stacked into what we do as well if people wanna get those. But we decided to really build something from the ground up so that we could make [00:25:00] this education, um, credentialed. So we're a, we are a university and also so that it could be radically affordable and insanely flexible. So you can literally go to our university any day, any day you can apply, get accepted and start courses on the same day.

Um, because, you know, hashtag 2026, right? Yeah. So when you could get a mortgage on your phone, you should be able to apply for an m mba, a, you know, without it requiring a multi, multi-step and multi-week process, right?

Oh

Anne Murphy: my God, yes.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Like they, the, they know more about you when you go into this process, or they should, right?

Mm-hmm. And so we like to keep it simple. It's everything we do is based on what are your employment outcomes or goals based on that. And we also, um, really focus on the professional component. So we have a group on LinkedIn where we have folks, um, available for networking. And [00:26:00] we don't do some of the awkward things that a lot of, um, online degree programs do.

No group projects. My God, no more group projects. I'm an adult. I don't need that. I have that in my real life.

Kyle Shannon: Real life.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Yes. And so we have sort of this like meta AI concept where we teach AI integrated throughout these business fields. So, um, customer experience, product management, project management, business finance, leadership, all that stuff.

But then, um, we also built our business with ai. Right?

Anne Murphy: Mm-hmm.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: And so we're using, um, all of these different tools to be able to create, uh, the university so that it can scale at such a low price point. We wanted to do everything we could to make effective education, super, super affordable, debt free. That was like a must have.

Oh,

Anne Murphy: yes.

Kyle Shannon: Amazing. And you, you come

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: from So teach We [00:27:00] use it.

Kyle Shannon: Yeah. You come from the world. What, what was your experience of, of higher ed? The, the relationship with AI as AI started coming, like, it, it clearly inspired you to say there's got to be a better way. I'm curious what that experience was like.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Yeah, so at the time when some of, so I should explain that from, I, I am dispositionally an impatient person, which, uh, makes it a, a little strange that most of my career has been in higher ed, somewhat in ed tech as well.

But, um, higher ed is not reputationally known for moving faster, being on the cutting edge. Um, and so. Uh, when a, uh, like really around, I would say 2022, you know, chat, GBT, all that fun stuff. But it did it, like I started thinking about this, not the concept of the university, but the concept of what this disruption was gonna mean when, um, actually one of my co-founders, Jamie Du, she ran the design, the global design team at [00:28:00] Pearson for instructional design development.

And I charged her with getting a group together to really see how far could we go with multimedia at the time, which is like infancy, right? Like we look back now. But I remember her bringing to me some images that they created, and this is so inter, like this is interesting to me. I don't know anyone else, but, um, from the, the folks who did graphic design and all that stuff, they were like, the images that we were being created, they were like, oh yeah, it's great, but look at the hands.

Do you remember? We went through the moment, everyone was like, everybody had creepy hands and you know, 16 fingers and it looked like a spider was attacking you. And then there was like the phase where, you know, all of the um, like what was in the foreground and what was in the background, like, didn't quite match.

So I remember having this conversation with a bunch of people who that's what they did. Like creative design is, is what they did. And they were focusing on the weird fingers. And I was focusing on, oh [00:29:00] my gosh, we just got like 50 different versions of an image that we now can cobble together in a fraction of the time.

Kyle Shannon: Yep.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: You just cut your production time by 80%. Right? Yeah. And that, that moment for me was, it's not gonna be the technology that's gonna be the problem, it's not gonna be the technology, it's gonna be the humans. Yeah. And I say that it comes across like I'm saying like my team was a problem. They totally weren't.

They were awesome. It was, it was that moment though where you're like, it's gonna take us. Longer to understand the power of this thing and what we can actually do with it. It's gonna take us longer because that's what we do. Like, that's what those people did. They were like, we create the graphics.

Kyle Shannon: Right?

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: You don't have to create the graphics anymore. You have to envision the graphics and you have to partner to develop the next version of the graphics. It's, it's, it's a different way of working with the ingredients. You know, it's just a different set of tools. But I actually think this really [00:30:00] goes to what you were saying, and we did start talking before we got on camera, so I feel like we should have recorded that part too.

But what you were saying, Kyle, about like identity in a world where tasks are not, or I guess what we think of as like the middle of the bell curve tasks, right? Yeah. Like the general tasks where those aren't things you need to do anymore.

Anne Murphy: Right.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: You know, so that was, that was one of those things where I was like, oh, this is gonna change.

Everything.

Anne Murphy: Mm-hmm.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: You know, everything. And that's, that's really, you know, fast forward a couple of years and you get, you get some women together who are like, this is, this is the moment we need to be, we need to be here in this moment to help people move forward. And that was, that was like, it just, this is the impact we can make on the world.

And we just picked it up and we never could have done what we did like three years ago. Even three years ago would've been impossible. Right. Yeah.

Anne Murphy: Wow. [00:31:00] Okay. So what's it like to launch a university? I mean, let's, let's hear that some tea.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Uh, yeah. So I would say, uh, it, it's, it's such a journey and I know it's, it's so stereotypical to say it's such a journey, but it literally feels like, it feels like you are getting different, you know how, um, the yellow brick road, like everybody's looking for their special thing, it mm-hmm.

It feels like sort of the opposite of that, where you have all of the things, but you're picking all, you're trying to figure out how to use them to get to your goal. Yeah. So this is, you know, and this is on your like seven, um, you we're, we're, I, I, we had this conversation like, which economy are we in right now?

Mm-hmm. I still think people are figuring out incremental improvements to current processes. Yep. Um. If that, and then there's Silicon Valley, which is like, we're living in, I don't know, a different parallel universe, which is awesome. 'cause it gives us the [00:32:00] tools to actually like, build things, to change lives.

Love it. Um, but that, like, so from the very beginning we started seeing new tools, adopting new tools, using new tools, and then putting them down mm-hmm. When they were no longer the right tool for the job. Mm-hmm. That is super hard for a lot of organizations to do. They get like, or like they get over, um, enthusiastic about a tool and so they persist with it.

The tools move so fast that we, we make a joke. We don't do a year subscription of anything.

Anne Murphy: No, for sure, no

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Black Friday. Like, okay, we're on this for a month, but now this person can do better infographics or now this comes automatically with all text. Or now this can be in three different languages.

Let's swap it up. Right? But to do that, one of the things that we really had to think about was like, what is systems thinking in a world of ai? Because if you think about a normal university, there's like a typical tech stack, right? They have their student information system, you have your learning [00:33:00] management system, you have your application system, you have your traditional database, you have your like bursar's office stuff, you have loan packaging software, all that stuff.

We are like, forget that. What is the goal? Right? Like what? What is the goal? The goal is to get people skills with the credentials. In as simple and effective path as possible. Like we don't want any of the gunk. Right. So what you were talking about is removing, removing barriers, like making the friction go away.

When people think of higher ed, they don't think frictionless experience. No, because it was historically built as, um, you know, the, the, the general principle was we have to make sure every, you know, everyone who proceeds to level two engineering, we need to get rid of all the people who can't deal with level two engineering.

Then we need to get rid of all the people. It was like a, you know, um, you got rid of people that you didn't feel were we're gonna be able to take it to the next level every single time. No. An exclusionary sort of concept. [00:34:00] Um. The, it, it, it's flipped on its head because we need all of the brains now. Like we are coming up in the zombie world of leadership where we do need divergent thinkers, creative thinkers, we need all of these things, which is, it's interesting that it's happening at the same time that like all these people are getting laid off, right?

Like we're gonna see a massive economic shift coming. But so, so what we did was we really went back to first principles, and this is something that we've stayed very true to, is what is our philosophy of building this.

Anne Murphy: Mm-hmm.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: You know, our philosophy is simplicity, it's affordability for the student and it's flexibility and pace.

So we built our whole tech stack thinking what's extensible, what's low code or no code? What, what, this was a really important one, which platforms? Are going to align their business model with my business model.

Anne Murphy: Mm-hmm.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: So like, which platforms are going to be most incentivized to make their business model work [00:35:00] that they are gonna make sure we show up in a gen AI overview.

Right. And that's, that's a different way of thinking about technology,

Anne Murphy: huh?

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Right. Like what company's motivations for growth are gonna align with my motivations for growth and this philosophy that we have around scalability, simplicity, low code, no code. So our whole organization is hands on keyboard, everybody, everybody's building everybody.

Kyle Shannon: That's so cool. That's amazing. Um, I have a question here from Erica Lens. Um, do you teach logic, writing, history, literature, those things that help build critical thinking? Or is it just skills based?

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: All of those other things. So it's interesting. So, uh, especially I would say at the bachelor's degree level, right?

We have what we call, um, the new state U Core, which has what, you know, what you would consider to be gen ed, but we add a little bit of context to it. So from a psychology perspective, for example, when we teach psychology, it's psychology [00:36:00] and like power structures in business is the, like, the emphasis is like how human beings interact.

Um, we do have things like English literature and we do, um, I come actually from a, I come from an arts background, so I, I, I grew up as a member of the creative class. So my parents have been in theater for forever. And when I say theater, I mean like in theater. They ran a professional theater, like equity actors.

I'm married an actor. My sister's an actor. My niece is an actress. Like I come from absolutely from like fine and performing arts background. I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts in dance. Which, if you wanna talk about like a completely useless degree. Absolutely. That, that is, I

Kyle Shannon: have one, I have one in acting.

We should, we should swap.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Oh, okay. So my husband has won in acting. Yeah, yeah,

Kyle Shannon: yeah.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Um, but my, my point is, is in my professional work, I cannot tell you the number of times that a Shakespearean quote has proven to be an [00:37:00] absolute instant friend maker in like a committee room. Like I cannot tell you enough 'cause my father and my mother have directed and costumed and designed so many Shakespeares.

I used, I joke that I was like spear carrier number three as I grew up because they were like, oh, we need another person and she can clean up Caesar's blood during intermission. That's actually not joke that.

Yeah. So I feel very passionately about it. I actually think that, um, the work that we do is, is highly creative work. And actually, so I'm um, I'm in the middle of a, of a book that's about moving our workforce from, um, knowledge workers to power workers, right?

Anne Murphy: Mm-hmm.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: And I see that as like four key components.

And this is one of the things that a lot of times you will hear people be like, well, you don't need to be an expert in anything anymore. 'cause AI is the expert. I don't buy that. Mm-hmm. I think you still need a knowledge set, um, maybe not quite as deep [00:38:00] as you used to, or maybe. In an even more specialized way.

Like not in the same way. Right. Like they call it a jagged profile. Mm-hmm. But, um, you still need to know stuff. And you guys know this because of what you were just talking about on working with ai. Mm-hmm. You have to know your topic enough about your domain to be able to effectively create something.

Speaker: Yeah.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Um, so that's one part. But, but two of the, two of the other components are, um, a divergent thinking, which is gonna be hard to teach because for most people it's been beaten out of us as we've gone like from kindergarten through eighth grade to high school. It's just our systems are built around sort of the middle of the curve thinking.

And what we need for the age of the, uh, age of AI is outlier thinking. So divergent thinking and creative thinking. That's one of the really critical skills that I think the new power worker needs. And then also anti fragility, which is a whole separate conversation, but yes, [00:39:00] is the short answer. We do have those.

And even more importantly, even as we teach economics in our economics class, it's like, this is what's going on with ai. Here's how it impacts society. Here are things that you need to think of on the macro level, on the micro level. Um, so it's, it's very embedded, I would say. Mm-hmm. Like the teaching, how to think with these things is very embedded in our curriculum.

Kyle Shannon: Yeah.

Anne Murphy: Um, what Sasha, what you just shared at the, at the very last sentence, reminded me of our friend Kyle, um, Vanessa Chang and her work with AI and metacognition. So Sasha, I would love to connect you our, the AI Readiness Program, project, project podcast. Audience has heard from Vanessa before, so you guys should go back and listen to it.

She's amazing. But the two of you are on the perfectly same wavelength about what is, [00:40:00] what matters in the future. Like, you know, what is the skillset that you're looking for? She talks about what's the definition of smart, right? No, I love that. What we used, and by the way, how we were lured into wanting to be that, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And in a very narrow definition of what that is. And the two of you have to be, you're gonna be best friends. So

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: one, one of my co-founders, um, not to call her out Charlotte, uh, she and I talk a lot about how we work with AI because how we prompt ai, how we talk to ai, how we build things with AI so different,

Kyle Shannon: so different,

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: very, very different, like how we interact with it.

Mm-hmm. And that I think is going to be the thing that matters most because it's going to be the individuals, these big companies are setting us up to be able to build. All different sorts of things. Right. Ourselves. And that is absolutely, Sam Altman was like, you can just build it now. You can't, you can just build it now.

But everybody's not doing it. [00:41:00] Yeah. 'cause they don't have the space to experiment with it. Or because their company has a policy, so they can't do something like, I can't put Chrome on my company laptop. Right. And everyone doesn't have like 15 machines working for them overnight. Like I do, I'm gonna end up with like a computer lab here.

Every, all of the computers are working on different things.

Anne Murphy: Um, oh, I, I know it's a little bit, it's it's a little much. Donna was like, so we buy the one and then do we. Buy the next one and then do we buy the next one? And then the next like, well, how do you know when you've bought enough computers?

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Yes, yes.

No, I, I have adopted all of the, so the children, I have two of them. I say the, like, there's a dozen, the children, each of them had, you know, their, their, um, COVID laptop. Mm-hmm. We, we bought 'em, COVID laptops and those, those are old, but they are now like my backup. I just have Claude working on one while I'm doing other stuff.

'cause I literally, I don't, I have met the limits of my machine and the amount of [00:42:00] simultaneous things I can have it doing.

Anne Murphy: Yeah.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Right. So I can't, I can't have Claude building stuff in HubSpot while I have 50 other tabs open and I'm working on my Gemini bots at the same time. It's just, it doesn't like it.

So I have to, I have to give my, um, friends, ai friends, their own laptops.

Anne Murphy: They need to have their own, their own spaces so they can just do, do their job.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Yeah. Make 'em comfortable.

Kyle Shannon: Yeah, exactly. Well, one of, one of the things I've thought about, I I, I have two questions for you. I mean, one, one is just I feel like there's an inversion coming where in, in, you know, today's or, you know, recent workforce.

People that were specialists were more highly valued. People who were generalists were like, we don't know what to do with them. Let's sit them in the corner. And I feel like the value of generalist is coming back. Um, and I'm just curious, I'm just curious your thoughts on that. And, and then also it sounds like when you decided to do this, you decided to go after a business audience.

I'm, I'm curious if that was just purely [00:43:00] economical, if you're finding that going after young people, young people are not as into AI or education. I'm just curious, you know, those two things, uh, generalists and then why go after business people as a start.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Awesome. I'm writing those down so I don't f. I know

Kyle Shannon: I should

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: have

Kyle Shannon: done them

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: a separate question

Kyle Shannon: because they're kind of separate

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Short term recall.

That is it. Um, I actually highly analog notes here sometimes. So your tools have to be fit to your purpose. Yeah. Um, so for the business audience, so what we did is we're really, really focused on getting people, um, advancing their current jobs or getting them new jobs that have high wage potential in growth fields that are moving very dynamically, right?

Mm-hmm. Because of ai. So that was really our target was, um, sort of economic mobility for people who are gonna be disrupted, hence this field. So we purposefully [00:44:00] stayed away from certain things that our current institutions are. Much, much better designed to do. Mm-hmm. Um, things like healthcare, right? Like highly regulated fields, there are a lot of those types of things.

Um, liberal arts I absolutely love it is still as much as important as liberal and also fine. And performing arts are, and the humanities, um, employers still hire for more business type degrees. They just do. Yeah. Um, and these things don't have to be mutually exclusive, you know, like you can have, you can participate in the life of the mind and the world of ideas and also, you know, know how to work with, uh, the Claude.

Um. You know, embedded in your Excel spreadsheets. Mm-hmm. You can do both and, right. Yep. But I also disbelieve that there is, there is not going to be a world where in AI does [00:45:00] everything for us and we get to sit around and write poetry. Like, that is also not a future that I believe is coming. Um, so that, that, that's specifically why we picked those areas, like customer experience, not customer service, like this, not the same thing, but customer experience is really gonna be a super critical field.

And people don't teach, like most colleges and universities, they don't teach B2B sales. They don't teach B2C sales. They don't teach how to configure A CRM, you know? Right. And our world is becoming our, our capability is gonna be defined by our ability to work with a tool set, with a different way of thinking.

Mm-hmm. That's, it's gonna be, yeah. So, so we expose people to a lot of different tools. So that was really how we honed in on that. Um, high demand fields moving fast. And then the other thing is there are a lot of sort of secondary credentials in those fields that have value, you know? Mm-hmm. And we are more than happy to accept [00:46:00] those credentials into our ecosystem to accelerate someone's path towards their degree.

So if someone has, you know, existing, uh, a SHRM certification or A PMP or a, you know, a Scrum master or Google certificate, we will, we'll literally map those using an LLM right against our curriculum, and we will provide, um, transfer credit for that. So someone can accelerate like their MBA, like, we'll even, we even accept transfer into our MBA.

So we essentially have a way for people to just do MBA degree completion. Like, who does that? We do that.

Anne Murphy: That is so cool. That is

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: so, so that so cool. Oh, I'm sorry, I just interrupted you.

Anne Murphy: Nope. Okay.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Or was that cool? I'm just gonna go with it. Was that cool? Cool. Um, so the second thing, which was actually the first thing was about being a generalist.

So you know how people talk about like a jagged, [00:47:00] um, talent profile. I really think of it as, um, you know, we, we had the T-shaped professional, right for a while. Like this, you know, like a y generalist and then deep in one area, and then we had the X shaped professional. You guys remember the actually professional adding leadership?

It's like this, right? Um, I think of it more like, uh, a spider. That is maybe a mutant and constantly changing how many limbs they have.

Anne Murphy: Mm.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: It's a much more sort of dynamic generalist. But I think what you had said earlier is even more important, which is the curiosity piece. So what makes it possible for someone's, because you still need knowledge for someone's domain knowledge to be more fluid than it used to be.

Anne Murphy: Mm-hmm.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: And to be able to sort of, um, zoom in and zoom out around content to create experiences, like when we think about how we built our [00:48:00] university, really went, started with what do we want the most seamless, frictionless experience to be? That was this piece. Mm-hmm. What data do we need to make that happen?

And then how do we move the data around to meet the most seamless experience? But that requires you to think. Business process perspective, user perspective, like from a curriculum per, how are you gonna design the curriculum? So there are a bunch of different domains in that. And that generalist piece, like being able to pull on the threads and make those connections like that is where that sort of, that deep thinking that comes from liberal arts and humanities, but it's not, it doesn't happen by accident.

Mm-hmm. You actually mm-hmm. Need to be taught how to master that. And it does feel like, to me, at least it does feel like you're going to Hogwarts. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. There are all these capabilities, but you know, you can fly on the broom, [00:49:00] but you could also fall from the broom because you've never used the broom before.

Right. And you know, your wand explodes in your face. This stuff is magical and powerful, but you have to know how to use it.

Kyle Shannon: Yeah. Yeah. What's your experience with, with age? Um, who's, who's adopting ai? I'm 47.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Oh, I'm kidding.

Kyle Shannon: Well, no, I don't mean you personally. I mean, how are, how are the different generations, uh, adopting ai using AI based on what you're seeing?

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Okay. So I do not think that I have a pure, clear-eyed view of this. I'll say

Kyle Shannon: I don't think I

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: do either. The, yeah. I mean my, you know, you're always influenced by what your population you're exposed to is, right? Um, I think that there are a lot of people that are experimenting with it for general content creation.

Right. I see that all [00:50:00] over the place. It's helping me with my PowerPoints. It's helping me create a, um, proposal for something. Mm-hmm. Most people though, haven't even, I don't think, moved on to like using context files. Mm-hmm. Or how are you creating your knowledge bases or your LLM so that you're able to.

Utilize the same set of information across a range of scenarios, or how are you building bots? Like I would say of the people I know professionally, probably 80% have never built a bot. Maybe more. Yeah.

Anne Murphy: Oh yeah. Yeah. I bet.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: And or don't, don't maybe even use existing bots. Mm-hmm. Now they're surrounded by ai.

A lot of them have like an incredible amount of stuff that they do on their phones with it, right? Mm-hmm. But the most part of it I see is around content creation. Unless your job is in this area or it's being impacted now, which if it isn't now, it will be in, it will be in two days. Yeah. Mm-hmm. [00:51:00] So like people really need to become the AI expert at their organization.

Speaker: Yeah.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Or they are not going to be needed in the same way in. In the near future. And I'm not trying to be alarmist about it, it doesn't come from at nowhere, but, you know, the adoption will shift, it'll go slow. But I have not seen any, um, consistent patterns around age when it comes to the business application of it.

When it comes to like the daily content creation, I would say it skews a little younger. Right. I would say, and I think the data supports that, that like the sort of millennial population tends to be using it on a more regular standardized basis. Um, but those of us who have 20 years left in the workforce, like you can't, you can't wait.

Right.

Anne Murphy: Yeah.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: And also the difference between playing with something or generating basic content versus fundamentally changing how you operate as a business. Yeah. That's a [00:52:00] golf that is, that is a huge golf in between those two things.

Kyle Shannon: Yeah. Well it, it requires someone to be. Ambitious enough to be able to question how we currently do things, right.

If, if AI can make, give us new ways of doing things, then you need to be willing to go, wait is how we do things now? Not great. And that's, that's a rough one, potentially, right? You know,

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: it is. And we had the huge advantage of starting from scratch, and I think a lot of entrepreneurs are gonna say that, you know, 10 years from now, people are gonna look back and be like, wow, we did that at exactly the right time because the tools were available and it was just at this moment, right?

Like, we are at a moment, we're in a

Anne Murphy: moment.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Yeah, we're

Anne Murphy: in a moment. And

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: that, that moment will have either moment you or you'll be able to really, um, really learn from it and leverage it [00:53:00] and, you know, learn how to cast your spells.

Anne Murphy: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, uh, it's, it's, so, it's a, it's a balancing act to not come across as alarmist or to not come across as a charlatan or to not come across as just kind of like abjectly enthusiastic about something.

Right? Yes. While, and, and also we're not the ones who are rolling in, in a lot of contexts, the three of us on this screen in, in a lot, in many, many contexts. Our role in whatever setting is not to be the one to say, here are the 10 or 15 reasons why you should never use ai. We're coming, we're rolling in and saying, right, right, right.

And also, there's so much more to it, and like being able to weave this AI first, um, you know, uh. Well, way of being to a university setting where it's [00:54:00] imbued across it. It's not the computer science department, it's not the la la la department. It's like everything you do.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Yes, yes.

Anne Murphy: Yeah. It's good

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: stuff. And you know what is interesting is, so I have a daughter who's a junior in high school and, um, they, they really do practically nothing on AI in the high schools, practically nothing.

Mm-hmm. And there is a lot of, um, there is a lot of emphasis on not cheating. That's the thing I hear all the time also in college settings. Don't cheat, don't cheat or don't cheat. I'm not cheating. But everybody else is writing their essays with chat, GPT, that part me or there is a reluctance. So, so it's either sort of like, don't use it, which puts people at a disadvantage 'cause they're not learning how to use it.

Yep, yep. Or the other big thing is, um. We shouldn't be using it as a society because of the environmental implications, [00:55:00] which is sort of, um, you know, there are environmental implications for sure, for AI and for data centers. I mean, these things are for, for very real. But, um, I think we need to look at what mitigation looks like.

I don't think we need to, um, not engage in something that's gonna fundamentally change how our businesses operate. So I think those, for younger folks, and I've heard this consistently, like friends of mine who have kids or also from high school kids directly, is they don't wanna do AI because they think it causes environmental harm or they don't wanna do AI because it's considered cheating.

Right. Right. And. Wow. We really need to be teaching these young people how to work with ai. Yeah. Right.

Kyle Shannon: I mean, it's, it's the ultimate rebellion tool. If they wanted to embrace it, they can do so much with it, but, but, you know, they're [00:56:00] choosing not to use it. We're, we're running up on time and I wanna, I wanna pop a question here.

We ask all our gifts,

Anne Murphy: Kyle, why does this, why does our show go by so fast? I was just getting started with Sasha.

Kyle Shannon: No,

Anne Murphy: it's darn it all.

Kyle Shannon: It's so fast. I know. It's crazy. Anyway, um, tell us what AI readiness means to you and, um, what would you say to someone who is just getting started, young, old, indifferent, you know, somewhere in the middle.

Mm-hmm. Um, what's, what's AI readiness?

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: I would say, um, it's a couple of different things. I'm gonna start with a mindscape piece and then move into what I would consider to be some like critical skills that you need to have now to be ready to sort of tackle the world of ai. So I would say on the first side, you have, you've got to be ready to question the way you've done everything forever, right?

Forever. You have to question yourself. And this [00:57:00] is, this is hard, but it's possible from like neuroplasticity. You can rewire your brain, but you have to approach it from a non threat perspective. So I'd say the first thing has to be like that curiosity base of, look what I could do. And I can just, I can just set aside the way I'm doing it for right now and figure out a new way.

Doesn't mean I made all like poor life choices because the technology and world changed around us, right?

Kyle Shannon: Yeah.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Um, so I would say the mindscape is, the first thing is get curious. Don't be afraid. Everything will change though, so I have some urgency behind it. Mindscape is number one. The second thing is what, uh, is like, um, the sort of pa uh, hierarchy of basic skills.

Right now, uh, in April of 2026, 'cause this will probably change in a couple of months, but at the beginning I would say people need some, like general AI literacy. You do have to know what it is and what it isn't, [00:58:00] because it will impact how you work with it. Right? Yeah. I hear a lot like, oh, AI's just hallucinating.

Well, do you know why it's hallucinating? Yeah. 'cause you can ask it different questions to get it to not hallucinate, or you can triangulate answers across multiple platforms to mm-hmm. You know, there's all different ways you can work with that. So general AI literacy, I would say would be one. Um, prompt engineering.

Absolutely. Now they're, you know, like they're getting, all of the tools are getting better at understanding you, like reverse prompt engineering you. But people think so differently that you still need to figure out how do you get to those answers? How do you construct prompts? Um, context files I think is huge.

I think a lot of businesses aren't using those at all. So think through what are your sources of truth. That you want to query AI on, because if, if you just let it loose on all your stuff, it will bring you back old answers just for fun.

Yeah.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: You know? Um, and then I would say specialized AI tools. So you don't need to know every AI tool everywhere, [00:59:00] but knowing how to build bots, knowing how to, um, do things that maybe you still own the trigger for.

I think that's important. I don't think everybody needs to build AI agents yet. I actually don't think they're quite ready for mass market use.

Anne Murphy: Mm-hmm.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Um, so I give that about like, I, I think it's another five to six months before true, like a Gentech u user friendly age agentic, um, friends come to us and we can really do that.

And then also things like vibe coding, right? That is not like, you don't need to vibe code to be AI ready, but I would say the general AI literacy, um, prompt engineering and context files with some tools.

Anne Murphy: Yeah.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: So that was a lot. But it centers on mindscape because those things are like, those are essentially stackable skills, right?

You have to have one to get to the other.

Kyle Shannon: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Mm-hmm.

Kyle Shannon: Beautiful. Well, Anna, wow, great. I'll agree with you. This went by too fast. I feel like we were just getting this, [01:00:00] getting started.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Well, I have so much fun. I could just keep, keep talking. So we

Anne Murphy: did too.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Thank you for having me.

Kyle Shannon: Thank you for being here.

That was incredible. Good luck with, with, uh, with the university.

Anne Murphy: What's the, what's the best way for people to learn more and to get a hold of you?

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Oh yes. And to write about the book,

Anne Murphy: the book,

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: people can go to the website. It's here, it's new state u.com. Um, they can also contact us at literally [email protected].

Um, happy to answer any questions. We're on all the platforms as awesome at New State U, so you can hit us up on any of those. Um, happy to answer questions. Uh, we're actually, we have a scholarship right now for our founding 50 students, which is really exciting. Great. Um, so we're creating a community and we have some special events and special, um, benefits for these first, uh, founding 50, including scholarships.

So we are, we are built for today and we are very excited for the folks who are joining us on this [01:01:00] journey.

Anne Murphy: Wow. Wow. Wow. Thank you for being here. Thank you for what you're doing for the world.

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich: Thank you guys. This was awesome.

Kyle Shannon: Terrific. Bye bye.