Here’s what happens when teachers, business owners, and creatives all walk into an AI summit
The second annual Maryville College AI Summit, held May 12-13 at the college's downtown Maryville center, sold out. It's a sign of just how much the conversation around artificial intelligence has grown in a single year.
Niklas Trzaskowski had a simple challenge for the crowd when he opened the second annual Maryville College AI Summit on Tuesday morning: keep the “and” in mind.
“Not just this or that… But rather, this and that,” said Trzaskowski, director of the Maryville College Career Center and one of the event’s lead organizers.
AI conversations in recent years have adopted the habit of collapsing into either breathless enthusiasm or cautionary alarm. But he wanted this summit to hold both realities at the same time.
“It isn’t black or white, the truth about AI’s impact, positive or negative, is somewhere in the middle,” he added.
AI education is better together
That observation and instinct shaped the entire two-day program, which drew an at-capacity crowd to Maryville College’s downtown center for sessions spanning healthcare, business, K-12 education, ethics, and the creative economy. Trzaskowski said it was a deliberately wide aperture for attendance and content.
The education of artificial intelligence and implementing it into daily workflows often falls into industry silos.
For example, developers and entrepreneurs are often vibe coding, teachers are grading and making lesson plans, and marketing teams are mocking up copy. But what can we learn from one another?
“We want to bring together the teachers, the business people, the researchers, the different types of folks that interact with AI on a day-to-day basis,” Trzaskowski said. “So we’re really leaning into our liberal arts background as an institution and bringing that perspective to the conversation.”
Last year, the Summit focused primarily on teaching and learning. It grew out of a faculty initiative the college undertook with the American Association of Colleges and Universities on AI and pedagogy. Organizers quickly learned attendees wanted to range further than the classroom.
This year, the topics included business, AI’s impact on society, healthcare, and other practical use cases.
The right programming in the right place
The day one featured keynote speaker, Andrew Farrior, co-founder of AXM, explored AI’s impact on the creative economy. The keynote for day two is slated to be Dr. Jay Eckles of Oak Ridge National Laboratory to lead a discussion on prompt engineering.
The two-day speaker roster also included two Maryville College alumni: Andy Lombardo, technology director for Maryville City Schools, and Jeff Huckaby, CEO and co-founder of Versalytix, an analytics consulting firm, as well as Joel Smith, the founder of TeachCraft, and a former Maryville City Schools engineering teacher.
The physical setting, in Trzaskowski’s opinion, reinforces the Summit’s mission. The downtown center sits just steps from the main campus and was designed explicitly as a community anchor.
“Our president always says great colleges are in great communities, and great communities are because they have a great college,” he said. “It’s a symbiotic relationship.”
Trzaskowski’s greatest encouragement for attendees of the 2026 conference was to step outside of whichever lane and lens they typically look through. Stop thinking about “this or that,” and start considering both “this and that.”
“I want people to step back and think about how AI impacts society? How can we learn more about how another field is using AI?” he said. “That’s what has been important to us working for a liberal arts institution — having that really broad perspective on all things.”
You can learn more about Maryville College here.
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