The rapidly expanding capabilities and applications of AI has created a new frontier in higher education. As it is more widely integrated into industry and becoming a highly desired skill, universities are faced with finding effective and ethical ways of teaching the technology and preparing their students for a more technologically savvy workplace.
"Our students are going out into the workplace, and they’re entering a bit of a storm," said Price Jett, University of Lynchburg’s chief financial officer.
"AI is the highest impacting tool set that we can use to give lifts to businesses. … But it dawned on me that our students are ill prepared, and maybe even some of our professors [are] unaware of what’s going on. … So, we came up with this concept called the [AI] Garage."
The AI Garage is an agentic AI laboratory where selected students can experiment with building AI agents to solve a company’s real business problems. Jett and Dr. Timothy Schauer, dean of the School of Professional and Applied Sciences, launched the AI Garage as an experiment in the spring of 2026.
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The project brought together businesses, students, and industry experts who Schauer and Jett referred to as "thought accelerators."
"We talk about ethics — we talk about responsibility — but this isn’t just basic AI where you’re using it to write your papers for you," said Schauer. "We want it to accomplish things that can be done behind the scenes so that the human doesn’t have to do it, but still stays in the loop."
Agentic AI goes beyond the generative large language models, such as ChatGPT or Gemini, which typically create content in response to a prompt. Given a goal, an AI agent can determine the necessary steps, use connected tools, and perform tasks independently within defined rules, without requiring a new prompt at every stage. Depending on its purpose and permissions, an agent could analyze data, research information, send emails, schedule meetings, update records, or monitor a process and adjust its actions until the goal is met, all with a persistent memory capability similar to a human co-worker.
Of the nearly 30 students who showed interest in joining the pilot cohort, only seven were selected. Working in teams, the students spent four weeks at the end of the spring semester creating solutions to the real-world problems provided to them by four business executives.
The AI Garage was set up in Schewel Hall on special computers that were not connected to the university’s network. Schauer and Jett worked closely with Lynchburg’s IT department when setting up the lab to create a "walled garden" where the students would be able to safely work with their AI agents.
The students selected for the Garage had to be dedicated to the work, willing to put in the necessary time and effort even while finishing their course work and preparing for final exams and projects.
"These students were in this room — they ate there, some of them slept there," said Schauer. "We’d come in in the morning, sometimes they worked all night. They were there on the weekends. They were very motivated."
One of these students was Kristofer Hickson ʼ26, a veteran who transferred to Lynchburg after completing his associate degree at Central Virginia Community College.
"I’m not a computer science person," said Hickson, a business major. "I have trouble finding my way around my own email. … [but] I can stumble my way around things and find my way into it."
Hickson began experimenting with generative AI as he searched for work, using large language models, or LLMs, to refine and improve his resumes and cover letters so they better aligned with a given job description. Over time, he became exhausted with manually prompting the LLM to do this work so he asked it to create a program that would do it automatically and upload and export to a file on his computer.
A few months before the AI Garage was launched, Hickson explained what he had been doing to Dr. Eric Kyper, a professor of business and economics. Kyper recognized that Hickson had stumbled into agentic AI and through their conversation, Hickson began thinking about what pursuing agentic AI could mean for his future.
Khurshid Kazimi ʼ28, an accounting major, was another student in the first AI Garage cohort. When she learned about the project, she immediately jumped at the opportunity.
"The first two weeks of working on building the AI agent was so difficult," said Kazimi, an international student from Afghanistan. "And one thing that I realized later was that Price Jett and Dr. Schauer — they were not sharing all the information with us. … We were completely lost."
Kazimi explained that Schauer and Jett wanted the students to take initiative and have the curiosity to figure out the next steps on their own. She was appreciative of the approach they took, saying, "They did the absolute best thing."
She was also appreciative of her fellow students and the various talents each brought to the AI Garage.
"When we’re working together, we can find out the things that we cannot find out when we’re working alone," Kazimi said.
"We were working on the same thing [and] I was not realizing a problem," she explained. "I didn’t have that mindset to look at the problem in the same way … and then my teammate — she was finding out the thing that I couldn’t."
At the end of the four-week period, the students presented their work to executives from each company. All of the companies involved wanted to use the tools the students created for them.
"The goal was not to give something valuable to a company, although that happened," said Jett. "The goal [was] to teach our students how to solve business problems and give lift to businesses. That’s what businesses expect from us at the university.
"I think that’s our responsibility as leaders at the university to do that."
Schauer added, "I do think that those universities that teach [AI] responsibly will put their students in a better position to actually get jobs and create value for companies. You can’t ignore that."
Three students, including Hickson and Kazimi, were immediately offered internships or full-time employment.
"[Companies] don’t want people with computer science degrees," said Hickson. "They want people with accounting skills, business skills, marketing skills, who know how to use agentic AI."
He added, "I got a lot of confidence because [of] everything I built from scratch in the [AI] Garage. … It got me where I’m at and has helped give me the confidence to tread a little further."
