We Did Everything Wrong: A Field Guide to Accidental AI Success

What happens when a small team at a midsize public university ignores the conventional playbook for AI implementation and does everything backward? This session is a candid, lightly irreverent look at one institution’s first year building a campus-wide AI ecosystem by making every mistake the experts warn you about. We listened to people before buying anything. We gave students real responsibilities instead of focus groups. We let a three-person team build software with AI tools they barely understood six months earlier. We even threw a statewide summit before we had a strategic plan with the word “synergy” in it. Bridgewater State University’s Center for AI will walk participants through the surprisingly effective blunders behind its AI Ambassadors program, its Internship Pipeline with regional businesses, its “vibe-coding” development practice, and AskBSU, a student chatbot built on the radical premise that students might know what students need. Framed as a “don’t try this at home” cautionary tale (that you should absolutely try at home), this session offers real strategies disguised as entertaining mistakes. Participants will leave with a framework for productive failure and 2–3 “errors” they can start making on their own campus immediately.