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Everyone has the potential to change the world. Finding the spark to become a changemaker can start with connecting with those who are already leading the charge.
On Colorado State University’s newest podcast, President Amy Parsons connects with CSU community members who deeply care about our collective future. Our conversations draw parallels between our guests' exceptional work and CSU's 150+ years of world-shaping achievements. With no topic off-limit, every guest opens up about their life, shares how they are making the world a brighter place and provides helpful advice they’ve learned along the way.
So, whether you’re a long-time CSU Rams fan or just discovering Colorado State University, it’s time to hit play, get inspired, and find your energy to help shape our next 150 years. Go Rams!
Amy Parsons:
Hi, I'm Amy Parsons, president of Colorado State University and host of The Next 150 podcast. We have so many remarkable people in our community, and this is where we're going to hear their stories. We're going to get their perspectives on CSU's next 150 years and gather their very best advice for today's CSU students. Let's get started, Rams.
Amy Parsons:
Hi, Rams. Amy Parsons here with another episode of The Next 150. Today we are broadcasting from Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington. It's really exciting to be here. My guest today is Chris Barry, who's Microsoft's corporate vice president of U.S. public sector industries. Thanks, Chris. Thanks for joining me on this and spending some time.
Chris Barry:
Yeah, happy to spend some time with you, and thank you for coming to visit.
Amy Parsons:
Yeah, absolutely. We just had a pretty awesome meeting between our two teams. So, I want to say thank you for that. We had a group of CSU people here, our leadership. We had faculty join us. It was a very broad-ranging set of topics that we discussed. We've got a great partnership going between Colorado State University and Microsoft. Thank you to your leadership. You're our executive sponsor for this partnership. And we just talked about everything from the science of learning to lasers, to student success, and financial aid, and everything in between.
Chris Barry:
That's right. And some AI as well.
Amy Parsons:
And a lot of AI.
Chris Barry:
A lot of AI.
Amy Parsons:
Cybersecurity, all of those things.
Chris Barry:
Even a little bit of football.
Amy Parsons:
Even a little bit of football. Yes. I should say we are here to play football, so we're doing double duty in meeting with Microsoft and playing football tomorrow. But we're really excited about our partnership with Microsoft and to have you, at your level, champion it. It is really special for us as well. Within the show notes for the podcast, they'll have your full bio, top to bottom, all of that. But I'm so impressed with your portfolio and what you do here. Just briefly, I mean, you've got, I think you said 23 years of experience at Microsoft. In your current role, you lead the public sector industries segment in the United States, overseeing Microsoft's engagement with critical areas including federal, state, local government, higher education, and the defense industrial base, with nearly 3,500 professionals that you oversee. So, congratulations. That's a huge portfolio, a lot of intersecting pieces and parts to that.
Chris Barry:
Yeah, for sure. Keeps me busy. And I do want to say we are very grateful for the partnership with Colorado State. It's one that we've had for many, many years. I'm new on scene as the executive sponsor, but this is a situation of building strength on strength. So, fantastic to be able to spend some time with you.
Amy Parsons:
Well, we are a higher ed institution, and I'm always interested in hearing people's pathways from college to where they are today. So, take us through that a little bit. I think, actually, you and I share in common that we're both political science majors back in the day, I think.
Chris Barry:
Yes, yes, yes.
Amy Parsons:
Yeah.
Chris Barry:
But you did a different fork in the road than me. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and went to a local university there called Santa Clara University for undergrad and did study political science, thinking I wanted to become an attorney. I did an internship at a law firm actually in Washington D.C. at some point during my undergrad career. It was a great experience, but it also taught me I didn't want to become a lawyer, which in some ways is...
Amy Parsons:
Very valuable to know that.
Chris Barry:
... very valuable to know that before you invest three years in that type of education. So, began my career in financial services, did that for several years, but ultimately realized I wanted to make some kind of career shift. Not knowing exactly what that looked like, I did the thing that people prototypically do, which is go get an MBA, which I did at Duke University at the Fuqua School. Two years of management consulting after that, and I've been at Microsoft ever since, so 23 years as of two weeks ago.
Amy Parsons:
Oh, my gosh. Well, congratulations on that and all your success. Talk to us a little bit about the advent of... Well, let's talk about the partnership first. We have been partners for some time, but I think that the advent of AI and how we're all so quickly incorporating that into everything that we do has really put a new focus on our partnership. We're also focused on cybersecurity within our partnership and in student success. Cyber, of course, is something that's on everybody's minds right now because a breach in cyber can be so devastating. Talk to us a little bit about how you're seeing that landscape right now and maybe how those of us who are managing higher ed institutions should be thinking about cybersecurity right now.
Chris Barry:
Yeah. I'll start on the AI piece and just sort of the evolution of the partnership broadly. I mean, we are at a very important time consequentially in terms of this platform shift. This is akin... We view AI as a general purpose technology akin to the rise of telephony or the internet or the advent of electricity. That is how important this is, which means it has implications in every facet of life. Certainly, all of us, ever since the first version of ChatGPT came out, now two and a half, actually almost three years ago, we've all seen how it's changed so much in terms of how we interact with information. And of course that extends directly into higher ed as well.
Chris Barry:
So, I think that by virtue of the partnership we've had, CSU is in this great position to sort of be in a very forward-leaning state about thinking, back to our conversation over the last few hours, around how AI can be used towards the greater good, towards amplifying the ingenuity of humans. Not replacing humans, but amplifying their ingenuity and driving better success for students, higher satisfaction for faculty members, people being able to get engaged in career paths that are meaningful to them, and those types of things. This is a time when generative AI technologies are now... We're sort of past this sort of science experiment phase, and now we're into the deep implementation phase of using it. And that is a very good thing. That is a huge opportunity, but it has important implications in terms of the how and whatnot.
Chris Barry:
One of those, of course, is around security itself because foundationally, these systems have to be trusted. They have to be secured. They can make consequential decisions or provide consequential information that people rely on. So, I think it's fantastic that CSU has invested, as you have, in helping skill people throughout their career journey in cybersecurity. This is a massive area of growth. You all have, of course, your student Security Operations Center, or SOC as we call it, within the industry. Fantastic. This is a great platform to really help build critical skills that are desperately needed. There is a massive shortage of cybersecurity personnel globally, never mind in the U.S. So, more power to you that you've invested in that direction.
Amy Parsons:
Yeah. Well, we want our students to be able to graduate and go right into these industries. And to the extent that they can help us at CSU along the way, all the better. I think when it comes to AI as well, the adoption rate for AI has been so fast. We just brought in our new class this year, 5,500 new freshman walking in the door. They're all already using AI. So we have to adapt as fast as they're adapting and get them ready for whatever discipline they're studying and career they're going to go into, it's going to be enabled by AI. Right? So how do we start working with these students from day one to understand, whatever their professions are, they've got to be literate in AI and the latest technology.
Chris Barry:
Yeah. You're absolutely right. I mean, this generation that we're now in, call them Gen Z, call them Gen Alpha, whatever we want to, they were born with technology in their hands. So, they are incredibly adept at leveraging and adopting new technologies very quickly. As you say, I think it's a fair bet all of them have been using this already. So, the question is, in the context of CSU, how do you bring these technologies like generative AI to bear to help with that amplification of their learning outcomes, their success as students, and in a way that's supportive, that sort of helps, sort of expand or amplify the learning opportunity, but does it in a sort of way that's got some controls or boundaries or what have you that are probably the appropriate depending on the context?
Amy Parsons:
Yeah. That's what we think about all the time, is how to enable better student success, better student outcomes. That's our number one priority. But we also are a land-grant institution. We're a Research-1 institution. So, part of our unique mission is access. How do we reach as many students as possible and help them to be successful? So, we think about how do we use AI at scale to reach not just the students who are in Fort Collins, Colorado going to class on campus at CSU, but reaching students who are maybe studying at a community college, or reaching students who wouldn't otherwise go to college. How do we get those students in the pipeline and utilize this new technology? I think that's what's really exciting about it, is that it's enabling the full mission of the university, not just individual student success.
Chris Barry:
Yeah. I think, on this exact point, this is where there's so much alignment between the work we do at Microsoft and the mission, as you describe it, at CSU. I mean, our mission as a company is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, which is a very lofty ambition, but it is about meeting people where they need and want to be met. So, to your point, yes, you have 5,500 or so new freshmen on campus, incredibly important, but there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of others that you reach already today through your online programs, never mind untapped populations that you could be reaching. Were you able to bring tailored tools or tailored ways of engaging, leveraging the amazing curriculum you have and the breadth of the programming you have being a land-grant university, but bringing those to bear in new contexts or via new vehicles, leveraging AI to give the right level of tailoring for each student along their journey.
Amy Parsons:
Yeah, a hundred percent. You think about people who have gone to college and for whatever reason stopped out without a degree. That's the worst place that you can be in, right? You've invested time and resources and money, and didn't achieve that degree. How do we find all of those people who have stopped out, and use this new technology to rapidly understand what they have, what they're walking in the door with, and how to ladder them up to a real valuable degree that's going to change their lives?
Amy Parsons:
So, I think I get so excited about the technology. We think about enabling students, but also enabling research. We talked today about some of the research that CSU's doing in laser technology and fusion, which we need that level of energy to be able to fuel all of this new technology. How do we partner on things like that? And then also partner in AI in making the university more efficient, our administrative tasks, our HR, our procurement, all the day-to-day functions that we have, so that the people that we have are freed up to do higher-level work and AI can do some of this lower-level things. I get really excited when I think about those types of efficiencies.
Chris Barry:
We're really in the earliest stages of exactly that. I mean, being able to leverage things like agentic AI to automate routine work so people, be the administrators or faculty, the work that's a bit more drudgery or sort of repetitive, free them up from that so they can focus on high value work, as you say, or complex problem solving or the things that are the most stimulating to them. That's just a great unlock, and we see that playing out not only in academia, but to your point, at the functional level, across the functions that make a thing like a university run. And that's absolutely, that work is underway today.
Amy Parsons:
Yeah. Talk a little bit more about what makes for a good partnership in this, because there are so many things we can do together, and this technology is going to enable us to do so many things. Like I said, I really appreciate this last meeting that we had, which was a really diverse group of people in the room. We had a faculty member, Anne Cleary, talking about a course that she teaches on the Science of Learning, and she teaches it to mostly juniors and seniors. She wants to scale that up to help freshmen and sophomores really be successful at CSU, and how can we power that with AI so they have those tools that follow them all the way through? I mean, that's just one concrete example of a way that AI can really help. How do we really structure our partnerships so we can take advantage of those types of things, all the way up to the really big opportunities?
Chris Barry:
Yeah. No, I think it's great. On the partnership piece, I mean I think it starts with many of the elements you and I've already been talking about, which is really having a shared vision together, rooted in the kinds of outcomes you're trying to drive, right? Student success, starting with student success. So, that, to me, is foundational, but it can't be glossed over. I mean, it's really important that that's in place. We build trust through the interactions that we have. We have a history together, and that's great. So, as I said, this is a matter of building strength on strength.
Chris Barry:
I think Professor Cleary's example is a great one of how can we potentially leverage this technology to get it in the hands of students at a time that's more appropriate, or makes more sense for them to be able to leverage it, in this case, earlier in their college journey when they're trying to get those foundational study skills to be successful at CSU in place. This is a great example where technology can be brought to bear to scale that. One of the things I love about this example is, it's of an appropriate scope.
Amy Parsons:
Yeah.
Chris Barry:
This isn't us trying to say, "Hey, let's go boil the ocean together and try to cure cancer right out of the gate." No, this is a specific course. For a lot of good reasons, it's capacity constrained because it's popular and it's impactful, and people who get into it get great different outcomes. How can we leverage this technology to get it into the hands of the students that need it earlier in their journey? And that could be digital technologies, using AI to help scale it, help figure out who should be in it first versus... There's any number of ways that we can look at it. But sitting down and then going on that journey together iteratively of what could that look like together. How do we back into the first step? What does the next step look like, and so on? Those are some of the classic examples of that. Look, it's a bit cliche, but success begets success. If we are successful with that one, I'm quite certain we're going to find use cases two, three, four, and five, and so forth.
Amy Parsons:
No end-of-use cases that we can come up with this.
Chris Barry:
No, not at all.
Amy Parsons:
I think one of the very most exciting areas is when we talk about academic advising for students, because we know that access to a great academic advisor on a consistent basis is one of the biggest drivers towards student success. A place where they can go and talk about maybe they're changing their mind, they don't want to be a veterinarian, they want to be a biologist, they want to do something different, or they want to pick up a minor or graduate early, or do study abroad. And to have access to information anytime day or night to really understand what their options are, and then to go in and talk to their academic advisor from there. That's going to be a game changer, I think, for student success.
Amy Parsons:
I think that's really what AI is going to be really good at, of helping students understand their options, thinking through their different pathways, and even laddering up to careers. So, thinking about what careers are in most demand, thinking, "Well, I want to be Chris Barry someday at Microsoft. What was his path? What do I need to do? What do people like him do in order to get there?" And inform that from day one, that I think is one of the most exciting frontiers of AI.
Chris Barry:
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. There is this opportunity to help. It's not about replacing advisors, of course. They have an incredibly important role that they play. But to your point, my guess, not being one, is that they probably answer a certain set of questions over and over and over again. And to what degree could those things be automated, but be automated in a way that is tailored to and respects the individual circumstance of an individual student, that understands where they're trying to get to, either career-wise or academic outcome-wise or whatever, the graduate school, whatever the next step may be, and says, "Okay, look, people similarly situated based on my knowledge and understanding, this would be..." You want to make a pivot in your major, for example, "Hey, here's a way you might want to consider doing this course and this course during the summer, doing it online. And that way you can still graduate in a four-year time horizon," because maybe that's important to you financially or in terms of where you want to get to next.
Chris Barry:
Those types of things can be super helpful to just make sure people are, at those consequential moments, taking the right fork in the road. And then, of course, you have the human in the loop still. Of course, the advisor is still there for the bigger decision-making and the more complex cases, things of that nature. That duality of that augmentation with AI, but then the human in the loop, that's a very important model that we think plays out broadly really across many large parts of society.
Amy Parsons:
Yeah, absolutely. Higher ed institutions are sort of a microcosm of that, because it really is that place, and especially a big public institution like CSU, is that intersection of technology and learning with that human element. Right?
Chris Barry:
Yes.
Amy Parsons:
We see that with our students right now. They love to be together in person. We see big crowds for events. They're joining clubs. They love to be together and to do these things, but they also want that technology-enabled classroom and advising and career services and all of that. And that's what we're trying to bring.
Amy Parsons:
Because we are so focused on our students and student success, and you've been so successful in your career...Think for a minute on what advice you would give to today's college students, whether it's about them navigating AI and technology or it's just about how to navigate what's ahead for them after college to be successful.
Chris Barry:
Yeah. I get asked this question often just in different contexts. The first thing I would say is, look, you're at a wonderful point in your life's journey to experiment broadly. There's any amount of either societal pressure or parental pressure or expectation, your own self-pressure on, "I feel like I should be at XYZ place in a certain time interval." And look, it's good to be self-motivated, obviously, of course. But this is an amazing time to go and experiment broadly and really try to discern what are some areas of passion for you beyond what you might hear is supposed to be a way you're supposed to go. So, I just think that's important in general.
Chris Barry:
I think, related to that, it's important to embrace whatever part of the journey you're on right now. It's very easy, I think, when you're early in career, early as a student to get sort of, what we would call, future tripping. Right? "I'm sort of thinking so much about my next thing. I'm not really enjoying the here and the now, or making the most of it." And I think that's incredibly important. I do think it is also important at this stage of things that everybody be AI literate. This goes beyond just being able to use a chat agent, be it Copilot or ChatGPT or whichever, but really to be thinking about how it is that I would use AI and experiment with it. Build an agent. It's very easy to build your own agent now. I build lightweight agents to just help me look at certain particular types of information and what have you.
Chris Barry:
Experiment with AI. Think about its use cases. As I said earlier, we're still in the early innings of all of this. AI has been around for 70 years. People forget in the 1950s is when we had the first machine learning algorithms written. It's only in the last three years we're in this age of generative AI, but this is the consequential age. This is that general purpose technology now because it is so readily accessible, and this is a great place for students or people in their academic journey to be thinking about the application of AI in their current context, but also wherever it is they're going next. So, those would be a few things.
Amy Parsons:
That's great advice. Well, we appreciate it, and thank you again for your leadership on the partnership with Colorado State University. I think we're just getting going on our partnership, and we're really excited about working together.
Chris Barry:
You bet. Very happy to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Amy Parsons:
Yeah, thanks a lot.
Amy Parsons:
Thank you for listening. I'm Amy Parsons, president of Colorado State University. You are listening to CSU's The Next 150, where we explore what comes next for CSU by chatting with changemakers who are already leading the charge and shaping our next 150 years. I'm gathering their very best advice for today's CSU students. Stay tuned to wherever you get podcasts for our next outstanding conversation. Go Rams!