Applied Intelligence Collective

Our story

Why we started.

Applied Intelligence Collective began with a simple frustration: everyone in business is talking about AI, and almost no one is saying anything real about it. It's just really hard to know what's working and what isn't. So we decided to find out for ourselves.

Two best friends hooked on where AI and the way companies actually run come together. We set out to understand it firsthand, then built AIC so other students could too.

Owen Burton and Jackson Delgrosso, co-founders of Applied Intelligence Collective
Owen Burton & Jackson Delgrosso, co-founders

The gap we ran into

As students, we ran into two problems everyone entering the business world faces: finding real-world experience outside the classroom, and understanding how AI is going to change the career ahead of us.

What made it click was an internship where those two interests finally came together and we learned by doing. That was the thing missing from school, and the more we learned, the more we wanted to hand other students the same shot.

How we got here

From a research group to the spark.

So we built Applied Intelligence Collective: the structure, environment, and accountability to work out how AI is really being used, published in the open. Doing that work kept surfacing the same thing: plenty of companies know they should be using AI and have no idea where to start. So we put the research to work for them.

  1. 01

    We started researching

    Students digging into how AI is really used, sector by sector, and publishing it openly. That is still the engine underneath everything else.

  2. 02

    We kept finding the same gap

    Companies hear the hype, look at hundreds of tools, and either buy something they aren't ready for or stall out entirely. Almost nothing exists to get them unstuck.

  3. 03

    So we became the spark

    We make a company AI-aware and get it moving: the credible first step on its AI journey, not a transformation program.

What we believe

Where we are now

A founding cohort, already at work.

What started as a shared frustration is now a working collective. Here's where things stand.

  • Cohort #1 seated

    A founding cohort

    Selected from 30+ applicants (with early encouragement from professors, student clubs, and industry professionals) and organized into research groups.

  • Publishing weekly

    Published in the open

    Weekly briefs and final papers publish right here on the site, each leading with the honest call, sourced and credited.

  • Now open

    Putting it to work for companies

    The same work now goes into engagements for business teams: their questions answered properly, with a roadmap for what to do first.