Cal Poly AI² Immersion Lab
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Unveiling & Ribbon Cutting
| OCTOBER 2026 · THE LAB'S OKTOBERFEST |
The moment the doors open: not simply to campus, but to the community beyond it.
For the first time, consulting, communication, & change management come together and are practiced as one integrated discipline, grounded in human judgment, centered on people, and designed with a keen eye toward AI literacy & AI fluency and the realities of organizational transformation. First, for Mustang families. Then, for the campus. Then, for industry.
This is when AI² moves from an idea to a living model: visible, tangible, and ready for the world.
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About the Lab
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The Cal Poly AI² Immersion Lab is a universitywide initiative. Now in its first year, the Lab has grown from concept to a functioning, client-facing operation.
Its founding premise: technology creates durable value only when critical thinking, communication, and human judgment lead. Its mandate is a repeatable model for bringing AI into the workplace responsibly and measurably, delivered through two integrated tracks.
The inaugural cycle serves California agriculture, where family-owned enterprises face real operational pressure and limited access to applied AI expertise. Through on-site executive and manager immersions, deep-dive discovery, and custom Agile AI Builds, the Lab is testing the methodology with live clients, real data, and measurable outcomes.
Every module is built as a plug-and-play asset: hands-on practice segments, prompt libraries, verification drills, and change management frameworks designed to transfer to the next engagement.
The pilot is intended as proof of concept for a sector-agnostic AI Literacy and Agile AI Build engine with the potential to bring the same rigor to manufacturing, healthcare, public agencies, and education.
If the model holds, the Lab could scale across the California State University system, positioning Cal Poly as an AI hub for the CSU and creating a pipeline where faculty expertise, student talent, and industry need meet in a single, repeatable model.
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Welcome from the Lab Director
Why the Lab exists, and why it matters now.
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October 01, 2026
Dear colleagues, partners, students, & families,
I came to this work as a communication professor, not a computer scientist. For twenty-three years my job at Cal Poly has been to help people say what they mean and understand what they hear. Artificial intelligence has not changed that job. It has raised the stakes on it.
Here is what the Lab team observes in boardrooms, classrooms, and family businesses across California: AI everywhere, intelligence nowhere.
Tools arrive faster than judgment. The result is not transformation. It is noise with a subscription fee. The Lab exists to answer that. Its founding premise is simple to state and hard to practice: technology creates durable value only when critical thinking, communication, and human judgment lead.
Change management comes first, as a co-equal deliverable rather than an afterthought, because a capable tool without an adopted practice is a demo. Then two integrated tracks: AI Literacy teaches executives and managers to think with AI without outsourcing their judgment to it, and Agile AI Build turns what the room learned into a working prototype against live data. Literacy without a build is a seminar. A build without literacy is a demo.
AI is a spectrum, not a switch. At one end sits a chatbot that drafts an email; at the other, agents that run a workflow with a human checkpoint. In between are the analytics, the sensor data, the models trained on your own business.
"The Lab teaches the whole spectrum, and it teaches where each organization belongs on it today: what stays human, what an agent may earn, and how to tell the difference on Monday morning." We chose California agriculture as our proving ground on purpose. If the method holds where the margins are thin and the data is messy, it will hold in manufacturing, healthcare, public agencies, education and many other workforce sectors. This is Learn by Doing, applied to the defining technology of the decade.
Martin Mehl, Founding Director |
Leadership
The Lab is led by its Founding Director and guided by an independent industry advisor.
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Faculty & Team
Two Principal Leads carry the tracks, four Principals in Fall of 2026 carry the disciplines, and two administrative partners in the Provost's Office keep it moving.
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Friends & Supporters of the Lab
The deans whose colleges lend the Lab its faculty, the director whose AI Factory gives it compute, and the colleagues who lend it their expertise. The growing army behind the lab.
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Selected Publications & Recognition
The Lab's methods rest on a research record: two #1 selling authored textbooks, book chapters, refereed articles in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Functional Ecology, Agricultural Economics, Computers in Human Behavior, Sensors, and the Journal of Information Systems Education, an IEEE award, and invited keynotes. Listed newest first; the Founding Director's entries are limited to books, awards, keynotes, and co-authored work. Gold rules mark books & awards.
2026
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2025
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2024
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2023
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2020 to 2022
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2017 and earlier
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Updates & Resources
May 2026 Lab founded Aug 2026 Founding Director title conferred
Sep 11, 2026 Two-day immersion format locked
Sep 15, 2026 Founding Director announced
Oct 3, 2026 Mustang Family Weekend showcase
Oct 22, 2026 AI Day & Provost's Showcase
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Media & Commentary
The Lab's faculty are available to journalists, podcasters, and campus colleagues for comment on artificial intelligence in academia, research, and the working world. Press requests route through University Communications and Marketing so the university speaks with one voice; the Lab's faculty are listed there alongside Cal Poly's other subject-matter experts.
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Working with the Lab
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Interest is reviewed as the next cohort opens. |
Cal Poly AI Immersion Lab (AI²) · San Luis Obispo, California · Media inquiries: University Communications and Marketing · ucm@calpoly.edu · 805-756-1111 · Web Accessibility Statement · Privacy Notice