Dr. David Andrews is Chancellor of UMass Global, a fully online university serving 19,000 students across all 50 states and eight other countries. Ninety-seven percent of them are working adults, with an average age of 35 for undergraduates and 36 for graduate students. Before UMass Global he served as President of National University and as Dean of the School of Education at Johns Hopkins, where the school was ranked number one in the country two years running.

He has been making the case for proactive, data-driven student support since long before AI made it fashionable. He wrote the first dissertation at Florida State University on a word processor, and his committee accused him of cheating because it wasn't a typewriter. Today roughly 60% of UMass Global's efforts are engaged with or exploring AI, from marketing and enrollment through scheduling and grading, and Andrews is pushing toward fully student-facing AI with no human intervention: "Are we waiting for the technology? No. We're waiting for the fear to reduce."