Summit explores AI’s role as public resource

There are a lot of questions about the future of AI, and Inside Higher Ed’s U.S. AI Summit 2026, hosted by UB, didn’t shy away from the big ones.

How can universities ensure AI benefits society as a whole?

Is it possible for AI to boost profits and efficiency while also serving the public?

Should AI be treated like public infrastructure — and what exactly would that look like?

Summit organizers couldn’t have picked a better location for those conversations than UB, home to the Empire AI consortium's supercomputing center advancing AI for the public good.

“Academic researchers will have access to turbocharged supercomputing that has only been available to a few large tech companies until now,” said IHE Editor-in-Chief Sara Custer as she opened the summit last week on the Downtown Campus. “So let that be an inspiration as we think about technology advancement for the public good.”

Co-organized by Times Higher Education, the summit brought together more than 170 attendees from academia, industry and government to the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. 

The goal? To move beyond theory and toward actions that can shape AI in the service of society.

Building on the summit’s collaborative discussions, the event’s organizers are now developing a collective AI statement. This foundational document will position the technology as a shared social resource and responsibility, with outlined practical commitments for the next decade of AI research.

UB President Satish K. Tripathi, in his opening remarks, said that universities have a critical role to play in ensuring that AI’s transformation of society happens responsibly, thoughtfully and inclusively.

“No single institution, sector or discipline can alone address the opportunities and challenges of AI. Progress requires collaboration across higher education, industry, government and civil society,” Tripathi said. “That is why I am so encouraged to see such a distinguished group assembled here today.”

Attendees got to hear more about Empire AI from Venu Govindaraju, UB senior vice president for research, innovation and economic development. He called the $500 million statewide initiative “a new model for public AI infrastructure” focused on education, transparency and societal benefit rather than markets and revenue.

While universities cannot out-spend Big Tech, Govindaraju said they can “out-purpose them.” 

“The significance of Empire AI is not that academia becomes another technology company. The significance is that academia remains at the frontier while pursuing a fundamentally different mission,” he said, explaining how researchers are using its supercomputer to make breakthroughs in science, medicine and education. 

AI as public infrastructure was a major topic during many of the summit’s panels. Brad Carson, former president of the University of Tulsa and a former Oklahoma congressman, noted recent calls for the public to own half of the AI industry. He called it a provocative argument given that AI is indeed a uniquely communal project — the models were trained on the public’s collective knowledge on the internet.

While the public has some claim to the data and energy components of AI, Carson said the actual computing of AI — including the graphics processing units (GPUs) needed to make it happen — is mostly a private endeavor.

“But the government has a role in making sure that some of that compute is equally distributed, so that academics, public organizations and civil society have access to expensive compute,” said Carson, who is now co-founder and president of Americans for Responsible Innovation.

Masud Khokhar, chief digital and information officer at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, was asked whether the industry’s language of profit and efficiency was compatible with the public good.

“I don't think it's incompatible. Quite often we think that it's one way or the other, and it's not,” he said. “AI being a force for public good does require some level of profit investment … and we shouldn't shy away from that. [But] it cannot be just about profit. Ultimately it has to be a collaborative endeavor between the industry and higher education and the wider community, and it has to be ultimately for public good.”

Several speakers were also asked how students can prepare for an AI-driven economy. Anne Clancy, national executive for higher education strategy at T-Mobile, said that the telecommunications company is not necessarily expecting AI skills from recent graduates.  

“It's really about the ability to communicate, understanding technology, language and adaptability, because AI is changing so quickly that we don't even know how to define what AI skills really are,” she said. “It's that adaptability and that ability to learn and grow and move forward that is going to keep up the pace with what's happening.”

That means that universities will have to scale up — not scale down — their teaching of critical thinking skills, Khokhar said.

“The irony of all this is that the more digital we become, the more human skills become more important again,” he added. 

Moderating the final session of the summit was Jeff Grabill, dean of the UB College of Arts and Sciences, who led a discussion about the priorities for AI and universities over the next five years.

A common theme throughout the discussion was that an effective AI agenda for higher education should reaffirm the university’s mission of advancing knowledge, invest in curiosity-driven research, and prioritize the development of human wisdom, empathy, judgment, and ethical leadership in an AI-enabled world.

“Adaptation is a pattern I’ve noticed in the conversations throughout this summit,” Grabill said. “Another way I think about our role, as a reservoir of design expertise, is to help the communities we serve adapt to these moments with empathy and innovation.”

Other UB speakers included Allison Brashear, vice president for health sciences and dean of the Jacobs School, and Ananth Iyer, dean of the School of Management.