Faster Cars, Real Roads:  What Higher Ed IT Leaders Actually Need to Build - Webinar - presented by Boodlebox

Where: Webinar/Virtual

When: Friday, November 6, 2026
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. ET

Note: Zoom login instructions will be sent the day prior. If you have not received login instructions by 4:00pm the day before the webinar, please check your spam folder; if you still have not received the login details, please email nercomp@nercomp.org.

Workshop Organizers: Tracee Aliotti of Boodlebox

Registration Fee:
NERCOMP Member: Free
Non-Member: Free

Event Overview
Higher ed IT leaders have been told that checking the "US-based" box is the finish line for AI risk management. It isn't. It's the question everyone stops asking too soon. As AI makes generation nearly free, the real work — and the real risk — moves to the two ends of every decision: framing what you're actually protecting, and validating whether the answer you got actually protects it. Most AI procurement skips straight to a faster car (a compliance checkbox, a vendor's yes) without ever building the road underneath it. This session pairs BoodleBox's CEO/founder and CTO to walk campus tech leaders through what that means in practice: the architecture, cost, and security trade-offs hiding behind every data residency promise, and a concrete framework for interrogating them before they're in a contract.

Audience: Higher Ed IT Leaders, VPs of Academic Technology, CIOs

Key Themes:
 - The inversion: as generation gets cheap, the real decisions move to framing the right requirement and validating the vendor's answer to it-"US-based" vs. "US-bound" — what your data residency clause actually guarantees, and what that guarantee costs
 - Token architecture and optimization: what genuinely reduces cost and risk vs. what just looks like it
 - A five-question framework for evaluating any AI infrastructure claim before you sign it
 - Why geography is a jurisdiction question, not a security control — and what actually secures data

Accessibility
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