Leading On the Bleeding Edge: Agentic AI, Accountability, and the Absence of a Playbook (a Leadership Ecosystem Webinar)

Where: Webinar/Virtual

When: Thursday, September 17, 2026
12:00 pm - 1:30 pm EST 

Note: Zoom login instructions will be sent the day prior. If you have not received login instructions by 4:00 pm 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:  Michael Cato of Bowdoin College and Becky Frieden of New York Institute of Technology

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

Event Overview:|
This is the first session in a two-part series on this topic.  The second session will take place on a date TBD.

An AI assistant is like hiring someone to do your laundry: your house, your machine, your detergent, and you are there to say how and intervene if needed. Agentic AI is dropping your clothes at the dry cleaner. You hand over the bag, someone else's process takes over out of sight, and the results come back.

For the first time in modern higher education, we are facing that shift with no known predecessor. There is no playbook, no colleague who has been here before, no benchmark institution that has figured it out. While there is no shortage of tools or opinions, many information professionals are asking a more fundamental question: what does it actually take to lead well when no one has led this before?

Join a candid conversation with senior technology leaders from institutions across the region, comparing notes on where agentic AI stands on their campuses today. We’ll explore the working reality, not the vendor version. Panelists will speak openly about what they have deployed and what they have deliberately paused, where governance has held and where it has not, and what they would do a second time differently.

Our new org charts may have two kinds of employees, human and agent, with both reporting to a human leader. The agent has capabilities; the human has accountability. Agents need onboarding like any new hire, and an escalation path for when they get it wrong. While some decisions need to stay human. Panelists will discuss span of control across both, and how they judge whether an agent earns its keep.

The conversation then turns to questions leaders are already sitting with. Which roles will be fundamentally different in one to three years, and how are you telling staff before they read it in the news? How can we prepare students for this emerging world? What becomes of security when attackers no longer move at human speed? Throughout, panelists will return to institutional context: culture, mission, readiness, and constraints. Adoption is no longer the differentiator. Coordination and governance are.

This webinar is part of NERCOMP's Leadership Ecosystem series, which focuses on critical leadership issues facing information-focused organizations and professionals in higher education.

Session Outcomes:
Attendees will be able to:
 - Understand the distinction between AI assistants and AI agents
 - Consider what it means for human employees and AI agents to coexist
 - Examine the practical side of agentic AI such as defined scope, access controls, audit trails, and crucially which decisions stay human regardless
 - Reflect on how culture, mission, readiness, and constraints shape AI leadership approaches, and why there is no one-size-fits-all answer
 - Identify where your institution's bleeding edge sits and what governing AI at enterprise scale would actually require

Moderator:  Michael Cato, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Bowdoin College

Panelists:
Becky Frieden, Senior Director of Enterprise Applications and Decision Support Systems, New York Institute of Technology
Neeraj Kumar, Vice President of Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, Roosevelt University
Edlira Stefani,  Executive Director, Data Engineering and Operations, Bentley University

This session will not be recorded.

This session is for individuals employed by higher education institutions only. No vendors, please.
 

Accessibility
NERCOMP strives to make its online offerings and in-person workshops accessible to all registrants.  Please contact us should you have an accessibility need. We've worked to provide resources that are accessible to as many people as possible, and if you encounter any issues while attending our events, please contact us at accessibility@nercomp.org or at 860-345-2081 to request assistance.