Pat Estes
Consultant, Life Coach, and Public Speaker in Madison, Wisconsin
Most people working on agentic AI come from engineering and learn change management on the job. I came from organizational development and people analytics, then built the production AI infrastructure myself. That combination is the reason institutions can actually ship and govern these systems instead of just piloting them.
At American InterContinental University System, I lead institutional research analytics across six higher education institutions as a soloanalyst while co-leading the system's GenAI strategy initiative. I design agentic platforms, write the governance frameworks that get them approved at executive levels, and translate ambiguous strategic goals into production AI systems with measurable institutional outcomes.
Recent work:
- Authored the system's GenAI Technical Mapping and Authorization Framework, approved at the Provost level in May 2026, and now operationalizing it as a 32-SOP library governing AI-assisted institutional research.
- Designed InsightOps, a LangGraph / Next.js / Supabase agentic IR platform with multi-LLM orchestration, longitudinal memory, and PII redaction. Stress-tested against a 50k-record synthetic corpus to validate without FERPA exposure.
- Built a FERPA-safe qualitative analytics engine (BERTopic, BART-MNLI, VADER, local Ollama inference) and led the 2025 Student Experience Survey sprint: a 7-domain, 46-subcode NPS codebook, an AI-assisted coding pipeline for over 10,000 open ended responses, VP-level narrative deliverables, and a formula-driven 26-sheet workbook.
- Standing up a formal inter-rater reliability program (Krippendorff's alpha, human adjudication, structured re-test cycles) so AI-assisted coding is validated against human coders before it informs decisions.
- Designed a six-institution doctoral chair retention metric that now underpins a stipend pilot launching in August 2026.
Before AIUS, I led leadership performance measurement and Qualtrics EX/CX work at Bon Secours Mercy Health. Master's in Organizational Development & Leadership; undergraduate in Psychology with HR minor.
Active interest in AI safety, evaluation methodology, and the governance side of model deployment.
Always glad to compare notes with people building or governing production AI systems in higher education and other regulated industries.