Artificial intelligence may have become mainstream over the last year, but it has been around for decades.

Tennessee State University’s vice president of technology and innovation Robbie Melton points out that it’s been in everyday items such as smartphones and Alexa devices. For years, she’s been testing technologies to figure out new uses for education. She was even one of the first people to try out a first-generation iPad.

“I get very excited when we talk about technology,” Melton says. “Because I’m before technology – meaning they didn’t even have the internet when I started. I’m from the era where to have the computer, you had to be rich. It was the haves and the have-nots.”

Melton is also the head of the university’s SMART Global Innovative Technologies Division. This center aims to make technology accessible for all and focuses on education opportunities.

“My role is to look at technology in terms of enhancing, improving, teaching, learning and preparing our students for tech careers,” Melton says. “Prior to AI, we were into smart technology. That’s anything that you connect to … Of course, it segues right into artificial intelligence.”

Now that AI has had its public boom, it has developed outside the technology space and into every industry.

While health care is Nashville’s largest economic driver, co-founder of the Innovation Studio Brian Moyer says manufacturing, logistics, and retail, along with music, hospitality and entertainment, are all major parts of the industry ecosystem that makes up Middle Tennessee.

“When I think about technology and what the role of technology is in our future, I think it’s making people’s lives better,” Moyer says. “I think that technology and AI in particular is going to change everyone’s lives over the next several years and primarily in a good way.”

Aaron Salow, CEO of field service technology provider XOi, says AI is opening up ways to improve workflows because the company has data about how its technicians interact with equipment.

“At the end of last year, we released AI-generated summaries,” Salow says. “Now our system will look at the work they’re doing organically on the job site and turn it into paragraphs of relevant detail about what they did.”

Nashville entrepreneurs have captured AI’s lightning in a bottle, implementing it into their companies and starting new endeavors – but they aren’t stopping there. They are already getting ahead of the next curve that technology could throw at them.

“I want to be involved in launching the next generation of tech companies that in the long run can have so much more impact on our economy than all of these companies that we’ve recruited over the past couple of decades,” Moyer says.

Moyer says cities like Atlanta and Nashville have been successful in recruiting larger companies (like Oracle’s commitment to making Nashville its global headquarters). However, he adds that a recruited company’s influence on the local economy is nothing like the effects of businesses that are born within a city, like Microsoft’s impression on Seattle or HCA’s in Nashville.

For the Innovation Studio’s part, Moyer says the goal is to launch 12 new tech companies here in the next four years, and adds there’s never been a better time.

“That’s due to the work of a lot of people over the past at least 20 years that have been involved in growing the tech workforce,” Moyer says.

With AI’s evolution comes concerns over privacy. Tennessee was the first state to pass a law protecting people’s voice, image and likeness from unauthorized use. Amanda Pietrocola says her company, Momentum Technology, will focus on consumer protections in 2024. Momentum is a software company specializing in caller privacy and robocall defense apps.

“I think for years people got very comfortable giving away their data in exchange for getting free products and services,” she says. “I believe that’s coming full circle where consumers are realizing that there is a price to their personal privacy and giving that up.”

History has shown that fear is a part of the development of new technology — not just in computers, Moyer says, but in revolutionary inventions from the steam engine to nuclear energy. That development has also shown that opportunity can abound.

“People are worried about AI replacing jobs,” Moyer says. “That’s not necessarily evil. It’s part of what we’ve seen in history repeated over and over again … We’re now in the fourth industrial revolution.”

Salow sees the benefits, too. He used an example: When a long-time employee retires from a trade, they often take a lot of knowledge with them because the only place it is kept is in their mind. However, by gathering that information over time in XOi’s systems, the company can build a dataset that’s never existed before for industry-specific information and solutions.

“Technology is continuing to allow our customers to hire younger, greener talent; encourage young people to get into the trades; and be able to give them technology solutions that allow them to be more effective,” Salow says. “It really is about centralizing and democratizing that knowledge and skill set so that it can be used by a much larger group of people.”

Replacing busy work especially, he says, will force people into more complex thinking.

“I think eventually it will actually allow humans to build expertise in more nuanced topics and abilities,” Salow says. “I hope that we continue to use technology to elevate humans’ ability to do things that are fortifying to them; that allow us to have people that love what they do every day.”

That’s how Pietrocola says her company is using it right now.

“AI has certainly helped us compile a lot of information very quickly for different topics that we’re looking to cover to educate consumers on,” she says. “Then our team is, of course, going in and fact-checking and also adding our own thoughts and knowledge and experience to it.”

Melton says AI’s use for educators will be “to break down complex problems and put them into sequential steps that will personalize learning.” She adds, “It will learn you. It will prompt you. It will bring you to another, what we call critical, higher-order skill level.”

“I’m a big proponent of continual learning,” Moyer says. “Because life changes, the only thing for certain is that change is going to happen. You have to be ready to adapt and to learn new skills. I think that is the opportunity that exists here – to learn a new skill.”

As for those critical of artificial intelligence, Nashville’s tech leaders agree people must stay vigilant with innovations.

“AI will never replace the human touch and the empathy that humans bring to the world,” Pietrocola says. “I think that people who are utilizing AI need to do so responsibly and understand the gravity of the technology that they have in their hands.”

“We have to harness it and keep it safe and not let it become what some people think it could,” Salow says but adds, “I think it is going to elevate the human experience.”

In education, the potential dangers aren’t new challenges Melton says, “If you just let [students] use it without instruction, they’re going to cheat. But they’ve been cheating before they had technology.”

She says she’s working on best practices guidelines for teachers alongside Tennessee’s commissioner of education Lizzette Reynolds and Steven Gentile, executive director of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission. The group represents Tennessee in working with 15 other states as a part of the Southern Regional Education Board’s commission on artificial intelligence in education.

While working on guardrails for artificial intelligence, Melton is already paying attention to the clouds ahead.

“You’ve heard of the internet, but most people do not know of Internet2 … That is a robust, private, secure – what we call, the next level of the internet, that is to come – that is going to also transform teaching and learning,” she says. “The Internet2 is like AI, and it’s all going to converge together in a blink. That’s how quickly data is being transformed.”

While change seems to happen as fast as lightning strikes, Nashville’s tech pioneers will keep watching what’s in the distance.