ABOUT AI Collaborate

AI Collaborate (AIC) is Santa Clara University’s student community for all things AI: AI projects, industry exposure, careers, and the intellectual and ethical discussion around AI.

AIC was founded at Santa Clara University in 2023 by Michael Iwashima as a place for students to build AI projects together. As the club grew, our meetings became bigger events, culminating in the first annual AIC AI Summit in 2024, with speakers including Andrew Mayne, one of OpenAI’s earliest team members, and Tobey Corey, former President of Tesla’s SolarCity. Alex Ren of Fellows Fund also became an important friend of AIC, connecting us with many of the speakers who have helped build our community.

Since then, AIC has continued putting on major AI events, hackathons, workshops, speaker events, company tours, and recruiting opportunities for SCU students, including the Adobe Hackathon in Spring 2025, NVIDIA Hackathon in Fall 2025, and our annual AI Summit in Fall 2025.

We started by giving students a community to build, experiment with, and talk about AI. Today, we also want students talking directly with the people rolling AI out across industry: learning how the industry works, building practical skills, making connections, and getting jobs. Through events like our AI ethics debates, we also want students involved in the intellectual and ethical discussion around AI. If AI is going to be for everyone, everyone needs a seat at the table in shaping what it becomes. We must ... collaborate!