The Opening Scene
From a live thirty-minute Operator Chats session with Professor Nathan Yang—Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Gies College of Business, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign—the discussion stopped feeling like a standard interview within the first ten minutes.
We were supposed to be talking about the role of artificial intelligence in higher education. But the conversation kept shifting underneath the surface. We were not just talking about chatbots grading papers or students shortcutting essays. We were pulling on threads that connected curriculum design cycles to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), and comparing faculty tool adoption splits to organizational data governance.
That became the signal.