WSU President Betsy Cantwell builds custom AI agents — but won't ask them to predict the Apple Cup

by Lisa Stiffler on Sep 4, 2026 at 2:54 pmSeptember 4, 2026 at 3:15 pm

WSU President Betsy Cantwell is a full-on techie.

She spent more than two decades in national laboratories working on space exploration, energy and defense, followed by top leadership roles at state universities in Utah and Arizona driving significant growth in research funding. The longtime sci-fi fan embraces “future-casting” — a systems engineering approach to imagine and prepare for technological shifts a decade out.

But if that leads you to predict that the head of Washington State University is blanketing her campuses with artificial intelligence, you would be wrong.

The essential role of a university is to foster a sense of wonder in students, and that is something AI will never do, Cantwell said in a GeekWire interview on Friday.

That wonder, she said, “is innately human, and when we bring that into everything you do in a university, you create humans that will actually be much better at ideating, managing and creating value out of AI.”

In line with that philosophy, WSU faculty decide individually how to incorporate AI into their research and classrooms, with students actively involved in shaping its use. The technology serves as a tool to reach a goal, but is not the goal itself.