Susan Adams

This is my place to think out loud about what's happening as AI moves into the rooms where people learn, work, and lead.

I write from classrooms because that's where I see it first. At the University of Denver, I teach AI and Professional Practice: Design, Ethics, and Application to undergraduates completing their degree in professional studies, who are figuring out what AI means for their lives and their careers in real time. At Achieving the Dream, I coach community college faculty across a national network on how to teach in this moment. At Women in AI Labs, I facilitate monthly learning labs where people work through AI questions together. These are the rooms where the abstract becomes concrete and tactical, and where I get to see how we are figuring out how to use this well.

I also write from everywhere else the work takes me. From the keynote stages where I get to think out loud with audiences about the impact and experimentation of AI. From the panels I moderate and the board I serve on at the Rocky Mountain AI Interest Group, Colorado's largest AI meetup community. From the strategy conversations with mission-driven organizations such as GlobalMindED and policy rooms like the City of Denver's DEN AI Summit. I am deeply committed to thinking through the workforce upskilling that keeps getting bigger and more urgent.

The through-line is cognitive sovereignty. The idea that as AI becomes part of how we think, learn, and work, people need to stay the authors of their own minds. The project is bigger than that, though. It's about setting the conditions for AI adoption that genuinely changes lives. The kind of adoption where someone who was locked out of opportunity finds a way in. Where a faculty member who felt overwhelmed finds her footing. Where a community organization doing essential work finds capacity it didn't have before. Cognitive sovereignty is the precondition. Human flourishing is the point.

I write because the conversation about AI is moving fast, and a lot of what gets published is either too breathless or too despairing to help anyone. I want to leave a record of what I am actually seeing as I teach, facilitate, and strategize. I want to learn out loud, in public, where readers can think alongside me.

I share it all in Letters from the AI Classroom, my newsletter. New letters land roughly weekly when I am actively teaching.