CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – With the fall semester underway, students, employers and faculty who participated in the brand-new UVA program “AI4VA” this past summer gathered on The Corner on Thursday to reflect on their experiences.

The online program paired 100 AI-trained students, representing eight of the university’s 12 schools, with 16 Virginia-based small and medium-sized business, non-profits and local public sector agencies, including four in Charlottesville. The students worked with these partners to find ways to improve their business using their newfound AI skills.

At the retrospective event, students and employers alike shared their experiences with each other, expressing overall gratitude for the program.

The program managed to attract students from across UVA, including second year Sunny Yuan. She told Cville Right Now she heard about the program through a poster she saw on Grounds.

“I was like, ‘Wow, this seems like a really great opportunity,'” she said. “I didn’t know it would actually lead to such a rewarding project.”

The program managed to attract students beyond UVA’s campus as well, including fourth-year Bensonn Anspach, an online student from Northern Virginia who previously worked as a web application consultant before returning to school.

Anspach said he came to UVA’s Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies program looking to study IT with a strong interest in AI, taking all three of the classes on the subject that were offered to him.

“As soon as I saw this AI opportunity come up over the summer, I was just all over it,” he told Cville Right Now. “And I was like, ‘I really want to get into it and understand how I can get into AI.’ Because that’s really where I want to go when I come back”

The program even managed to attract 10 international students, with Vice Provost for Online Education and Digital Innovation Kemi Jona saying in his remarks at the event that some participants joined in from the United Kingdom, India, Southeast Asia, and China.

Jona told Cville Right Now the program exceeded his expectations in its first run.

“Taking a student with no AI experience or very limited, through (Google’s AI Professional) Certificate, making them feel ready to dive in and then having employers feel like, ‘Yeah, they were ready and they did great work.’ That was like a huge gamble, basically, that it would all gel,” he said. “And for me, the biggest surprise was like that it all did gel.”

Employers at the event also gave rave reviews of the program.

Andrew Baxter, Chief Operating Officer for NOLA Builds & Design, told Cville Right Now the company had already worked with interns from UVA to implement AI into the business in past summers. While the company was unable to bring in an intern this year, the AI4VA program allowed them to continue that work.

The first of two groups of students NOLA worked with this summer helped the company refine its AI-developed, client-facing estimating tool on its website, while also making further recommendations about how the data flows into the site and how it could be used more effectively.

The second group tackled a project Baxter said, while not particularly attractive, will in his view be seen as “probably the most important one.” That project was the development of a policy framework based on the company’s existing standards and best practices for using AI and communicating and answering questions about its use with clients.

Overall, Baxter said the students made a “significant impact.”

“Having qualified, engaged energetic groups of students that understand the problem and look hard to come up with a solution is absolutely a real-world benefit for us as a business,” he said. “It also positions them as they go out into the work world as having actually produced something for a business.

“It’s a win-win.”

With a successful run now completed, the program will be running for a second time this fall, with applications for students and employers now open until Sept. 25. Jona said he hopes to see the number of participating employers increase in this second go-around and would love to more variety in the types of business and in their locations within Virginia.

“Helping out small businesses feels really good to the students and feels really good to me,” he said.