In a special Women’s Day episode of the The CAIO Connect Podcast, host Sanjay Puri spoke with Jena Zangs, Chief Data & AI Officer at the University of St. Thomas and the first person to hold this role in Minnesota higher education. Zangs discussed her unconventional path from planning alumni events to leading the university’s AI strategy, explaining how institutions are developing practical AI tools such as in-house chatbots and agentic systems. She also highlighted the importance of leadership and preparing the higher education workforce for the evolving role of artificial intelligence.
From the conversation:
Sanjay Puri: You have described your role as not chasing AI, but as grounding your institution and how to move forward with purpose, care, and confidence. How have you managed that balance in saying no at times and saying yes at times?
Zangs: Your leader is asking you what’s going on, and you are looked at as the expert. Understanding what the value and the mission is of the organization you’re working for is what’s going to help ground you, and then you will be the grounding force for your enterprise or your institution going forward. While everyone’s looking at you, it’s not going to help to be in a variety of different buckets, but to really showcase here’s the task that we’re trying to do at hand.
Puri: Who do you think is your No. 1 customer internally? If I were to ask you to pick one.
Zangs: Our students are always top of every initiative and the student experience and making them successful. That is our No. 1 point in our mission and making sure that they think critically, act wisely and work skillfully. So they are our No. 1 customer now for internal operations.
Puri: How do we show the ROI? Because in educational institutions, it’s not the same.
Zangs: For our students, we are always looking to make them successful in the path they’re looking for. So as a liberal arts university, we’re able to open their eyes to a variety of paths that they may be interested in. And I think with this age of AI, having different viewpoints, including philosophy and language studies and art studies, just getting a breath of what the world can offer and where AI can fit into those, ROI for us is not only are the students being placed in those positions, it’s around internships, it’s around building and this entrepreneurial spirit.
I just love the idea of vibe coding and that these students can just jump in and build the solution they’ve been looking for. They don’t have to wait anymore. So those are the types of metrics that we are starting to track. What type of AI enablement are they getting in their classes? … So every dollar that we’re investing in AI is to support the students’ learning, to think critically, and to impact the workforce and our future economy.
Puri: Talk a little bit about leadership, because that matters within successful organizations and it matters within unsuccessful organizations.
Zangs: Yes, our leadership is so focused on being serving the whole person. That is our president’s focus. And he talks a lot about that, serving people across their discipline and to really enable them to be a successful human in the world.
And our provost then and our current CIO, they both saw the opportunity to have the first-ever chief data and AI officer in any higher education institution and push that forward, because it is a strategic value for us. It’s something that we want to continue to showcase to our ... we have a lot of Fortune 500 companies here in Minnesota ... that we are a partner that is going to deliver your next workforce. And so allowing that leadership to showcase that AI isn’t about removing critical thinking, it’s really about figuring out how creative critical thinking has evolved with AI, and to make sure that our students are able to deliver in this new workforce that’s coming.
