AI Academy
GW Engineering AI Academy
Faculty leading the change through AI fluency and Entrepreneurial Mindset
What is the AI Academy?
The GW Engineering AI Academy is a strategic initiative to position the School of Engineering and Applied Science as a truly AI-forward institution. Through systematic faculty development and the lens of entrepreneurial mindset, we're building AI literacy across our school—moving from uncertainty to confidence, from tools to workflows, and from passive adoption to intentional innovation.
The entrepreneurial mindset aids in challenging the status quo, recognizing opportunities at the intersection of disparate concepts, and solving complex problems to drive meaningful societal impact and human flourishing.
Our vision is: AI Literacy as the Foundation for Transformation
A way of thinking
The entrepreneurial mindset changes how we think about the world and act upon what we see.
“AI products available to us all today can greatly lower the barriers to starting a business and accelerate a founder's learning curve.Skills most critical for staying ahead of the AI curve include curiosity, imagination, critical thinking, the ability to work well with AI, and intrinsic motivation. That's essentially an entrepreneurial mindset. It's a golden age for entrepreneurs.”
Prof. Lorena A. Barba
GW Engineering AI Academy Director
The Entrepreneurial Mindset × AI Fluency: A Synergistic Framework
The AI Academy is built on a distinctive foundation: the integration of AI literacy with the Entrepreneurial Mindset—a framework championed by the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN), of which GW is a proud partner.
The Entrepreneurial Mindset is characterized by three core principles:
Curiosity
A drive to explore, question assumptions, and seek new understanding about our changing world. In the context of AI, this means investigating capabilities, challenging our teaching assumptions, and discovering AI's impact on our disciplines.
Connections
Integrating information from diverse sources, making interdisciplinary links, and seeking insights to reveal innovative solutions. With AI, this translates to building deep workflows, learning across tools and platforms, and bridging theory with industry practice.
Creating Value
Acting on opportunities to produce meaningful benefits for others, continuously learning from both success and failure. Through AI, we focus on redesigning for student success, improving research impact, and enhancing educational effectiveness.
AI as an Entrepreneurial Enabler
The "AI Economy" is bringing with it changes that are impacting early career knowledge workers the most, and young graduates and students have reason to be worried. On the bright side, the advent of AI promises to significantly lower the barriers to starting a business and accelerate the necessary learning curve.
An entrepreneur who once might have spent years learning how to run a business now has access to on-demand intelligence. AI systems can perform market research, analyze financial reports, help develop pricing models, draft marketing campaigns, and even help strategize to build a professional services firm.
As a partner of KEEN—the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network—we adopt a definition of the Entrepreneurial Mindset as a set of attitudes, habits, and behaviors conducive to problem-solving, innovation, and value creation, especially in engineering contexts.
Skills most critical for staying ahead of the AI curve include curiosity, imagination, critical thinking, the ability to work well with AI, and intrinsic motivation. These are essentially the ingredients of an entrepreneurial mindset, augmented with AI literacy.
While an entrepreneurial mindset is essential for success in a rapidly changing world, AI literacy provides the fundamental skills necessary to leverage these tools for entrepreneurial success. Entrepreneurship and AI fluency are in synergistic interaction in today’s world.
Why start an AI Academy
Artificial intelligence is reshaping engineering practice, education, and career paths at an unprecedented pace. Rather than allowing this transformation to just happen to us—or letting technology companies dictate our educational future—GW Engineering is taking a leadership position.
The AI Academy represents our commitment to building comprehensive AI capabilities from within our academic community. AI literacy is much more than learning to use tools: we need new ways of thinking, working, and creating value. Our approach empowers faculty to become AI orchestrators who can integrate multiple capabilities into coherent workflows, amplifying both their productivity and creativity.
Through structured learning, hands-on experimentation, and collaborative innovation, we are fostering a culture where faculty lead the transformation. The result: engineering education that prepares students not just to use AI, but to shape how AI serves humanity.
The AI Academy aims to cultivate the mindset shift from fear and misunderstanding to confidence, fluency, and excitement about the future we're building together.
88%
… executives and IT professionals believe AI projects are blocked by a lack of AI skills among their colleagues—PluralSight 2025 AI Skills Report
7x
…growth in demand for AI fluency in U.S. job postings in two years; it is now the fastest‑growing skill requirement—McKinsey Global Institute November 2025 Report
65%
…organizations have had to abandon AI projects due to a lack of AI skills among staff—PluralSight 2025 AI Skills Report
Content Gallery and News
Session 2: Context Management
Working with AI requires thinking in context. This means considering the full state available to an AI agent at a given time, and the potential behaviors that state might product. Context management is curating and maintaining an optimal information bank available to your AI assistant.
𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝟭 𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗮𝗽: 𝗙𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗧𝗼𝗼𝗹𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗦𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀
For the inaugural session with our first faculty cohort, we moved past the "shiny object syndrome" of individual apps and focused on 𝗔𝗜 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗳𝗹𝗼𝘄𝘀. We explored how to move from being an AI "operator" to an AI "manager"—orchestrating a team of digital specialists.