Tuesday, April 14, 2026. Google brings Gemini Enterprise, NotebookLM, Deep Research, and a working agent kit to Kiewit Hall. The single biggest day of Husker AI Days.

Note: The following is a real-time draft. Check back for a refined version.

At a Glance

Headline

Day 2 of Husker AI Days delivered the clearest articulation yet of where enterprise AI is heading for higher education. Google's team walked UNL through Gemini Enterprise as a platform, not a product: a single private-tenant workspace that replaces the dozens of tabs faculty and staff currently juggle, with connectors that inherit existing permissions and data that never leaves the institution. The afternoon workshops translated that architecture into working agents and faculty research notebooks built in a single sitting. Behind the technology, the day surfaced a sharper definition of what "responsible use" should mean inside an R1 university and showed Prairie's partnership-driven model at full operational scale.

What Happened

The day opened in Kiewit A203 with a fireside conversation between Mark Stone and Hilary Kasel on where AI is heading in higher education. Hilary framed the moment plainly: AI literacy belongs alongside reading and writing as a graduation requirement, and no career field will be untouched. Industry has moved past the "agents can do everything" hype and is now investing in human checkpoints, confidence scores, and acknowledged limitations.

Arun Reddy and Satish Venugopal followed with the Gemini Enterprise primer. The audience walked through how a private cloud tenant works, what connectors do (and what permissions they respect), how curated deep research differs from open-ended chat, and where NotebookLM Enterprise is heading. Faculty wanted to know about training data, retention, and where student information fits. The Q&A ran long.

After the break, the room moved to A235 for two demonstrations of what Google's solutions team has built for higher ed: Grants.ai, an end-to-end grant lifecycle platform, and the AI Career Builder, an eleven-agent career exploration tool. The Career Builder demo, in particular, drew audible reactions when it generated a four-year UNL roadmap for an undecided incoming student in under a minute, then drafted personalized outreach to alumni at a target company.

Lunch at Cather Dining gave the Google team and UNL leadership a working hour to compare notes. The afternoon flipped Kiewit into workshop mode. A310 hosted Building AI Agents for Campus Workflows, where faculty, staff, and graduate students built working agents in natural language, ranging from a Big Ten benchmarking tool to a personal schedule manager modeled on Jarvis. A549 ran NotebookLM and Deep Research for Higher Ed, where attendees worked their own research questions through the tools.

The day closed with a short wrap-up at 4:30 in A310, then carried into a working dinner at Dish with Hilary Kasel, John Vialpando, Lance Pérez, and Santosh Pitla. By the time the team left Lincoln, the partnership had a sharper shape and a list of concrete next steps.

Schedule

The Sessions