The University of Iowa’s first and only club centered around artificial intelligence, Applied AI, has reached one year since it was first founded in April 2025, continuing to expand in membership and leadership.
Applied AI was founded by Tippie College of Business third-year students Gabe Harris and Mac Van Fleet, who serve as president and vice president, respectively.
The idea for the club was conceived after Harris and Van Fleet had taken a course about AI with Tyler Bell, a UI associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. Harris said they identified a lack of learning opportunities about AI outside of the course, and they hoped to provide a go-to resource for students at UI.
“The goal of the club was to learn about AI, and we have learned a ton,” Harris said. “I mean, we’ve met a lot of the guest speakers, personally gotten to know them, and gotten their backstories. Learning more about their knowledge has been huge.”
The club meets every other Thursday from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. in the UI’s Pappajohn Business Building. Applied AI sees a diverse range of student membership, with various majors and levels of familiarity with AI.
These meetings are split between guest speakers from the industry, hands-on workshops experimenting with AI, and conversations centered around its ethics.
Popular guest speakers in the past have included Nate Herkleman, a UI alumnus who began the AI company Uppit AI, and Andrea Mach, one of the first BeReal employees and the founder of chatbot Peekz.
Uppit AI has a similar mission to Applied AI, which is teaching students and businesses how to design AI systems, even with limited coding knowledge. Peekz is an AI-powered chatbot that is catered toward universities and its students, assisting with admissions, financial aid, and providing information about student services and organizations.
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Harris said the club’s leadership hopes to include topics relating to the ethics of AI in a majority of their meetings on top of meetings already dedicated to it. In these meetings, the executive board remains neutral while the members discuss the productivity benefits of AI and the issues it may present, such as hurting people in certain industries.
“Just by putting up bipartisan statements about AI and then opening it up to either good, bad, for, or against comments,” Harris said. “There’s honestly not a ton of guardrails on what we address. Obviously, we keep it very respectable. Everybody’s very understanding, and nobody’s arguing against each other. They’re just simply stating disagreeing points.”
Nic VanArkel, a second-year UI student, is the club’s vice president of external relations. His role consists of reaching out to clients and companies looking to partner with the club and finding guest speakers who can provide insight for its members.
VanArkel said it has been interesting to see how the club’s membership has expanded. The club’s GroupMe currently has 438 members. He said the first meeting this year drew well over a hundred students, filling the classroom.
“Every single chair was filled, the back wall was lined up with people standing,” VanArkel said. “It’s cool how these guys created this club, and now there’s almost like a lecture hall-sized amount of people who come to this club.”
Photo contributed by McCadam Van Fleet.
Harris said one of the biggest changes the club has seen was introducing the consulting branch. He said the club’s executive board was originally just five positions: the President, Vice President, and Vice Presidents of External Relations, Marketing, and Innovation.
“We saw the club as an opportunity not only for students to come to when they need help with AI or want to learn about AI, but the Iowa City business community as well,” Harris said. “By adding the consulting branch, they’re the people who work outside for different organizations, different businesses that need help either learning AI or how to use it in their own functions.”
Harris said he hopes to continue growing the consulting branch in order to expand the number of projects they have with businesses outside the club.
While the terms for the sitting executive boards will end at the end of the semester, Van Fleet said they are confident in the club’s future.
“It’s been very impactful for me, a community that we’ve created around such an interesting topic that’s moving so fast,” Van Fleet said. “We’re not experts. Nobody on the executive board is an expert. And so when we’re in these meetings, everybody’s kind of learning and going through this process together.”
