Penn AI

The Opportunity

AI is an accelerating wave of innovation that has already transformed learning, research, operations, the way we work, and the way we live. The Penn Forward Penn AI initiative positions the University to lead in applying AI responsibly and effectively across health care, business, engineering, the social and life sciences, and the humanities—strengthening student outcomes, and amplifying the impact of faculty and staff humanistically.

Penn’s breadth of expertise across the humanities, arts, social sciences, medicine, business, and engineering uniquely equips the University to address the implications of AI for education, work, and public life. Building on Penn’s strength in commercialization and industry partnerships, we will also make it easier for nonprofits, government, and industry to engage with the University, accelerating discovery and translating developments into real-world impact.

Across Penn, faculty, students, and staff are already exploring and deploying AI at an extraordinary pace. The opportunity now is to connect and scale these efforts, moving from distributed activity to a coordinated institutional strategy that accelerates impact, aligns with our mission, and reinforces Penn’s leadership.

Vision

The Penn Forward Penn AI initiative will guide how AI is applied internally across the University’s research, education, and operations, and harness Penn’s work to lead in external arenas, helping shape AI policy and responsible application in society. Building on significant activity already underway, this initiative will focus efforts on four complementary elements:

• Advance AI-enabled discovery and deployment. Position Penn as the leading site where AI systems are rigorously tested, validated, and deployed in academic research and real-world settings, accelerating breakthroughs in priority research domains spanning medicine, education, engineering, basic science, climate science, business, and social science.
• Integrate AI into learning and professional formation. Prepare every Penn student with the “character skills” needed in an AI-driven world—judgment, creativity, adaptability, and critical thinking—through redesigned curricula, experiential learning, and structured engagement with AI tools across disciplines.
• Build infrastructure to transform academic, research, and clinical operations. Establish the platforms, data, and external partnerships needed to scale AI across Penn while preserving our academic mission and values.
• Shape how people learn, work, and live with AI. Position Penn to serve as a national leader in shaping policy and influencing industry in the responsible and effective application of AI in education, work, and public life.

Emerging Design

The Penn Forward Penn AI initiative is pursuing a set of specific near-term initiatives aligned with our long-term vision to connect and scale the University’s AI capabilities. These initial pilot projects will inform a longer-term reimagining of how the University discovers, teaches, delivers care, and influences policy and practice on the national and global stage. The initial focus on research and practice will be in the biomedical and health care arena, where Penn’s combined strengths in life sciences, clinical care, and translational research create a distinctive platform to apply AI to high-impact problems and accelerate the path from discovery to real-world implementation. In parallel, we will pursue work anchored in the social sciences, humanities, and arts—recognizing that the questions AI raises about democracy, labor, identity, knowledge, and culture are as consequential as any technical challenge.

Integrating AI into learning and professional formation

• Establish a Penn-wide vision for AI in teaching and learning that emphasizes not only technical fluency but also judgment, critical thinking, and responsible use, and provide training for faculty and students—explicitly including humanistic and social-scientific perspectives on AI as core competencies, not electives.
• Scale AI-infused curricula and cross-school offerings (e.g., discipline-specific pathways) to prepare Penn students for the AI-enabled workforce.
• Embed AI deeply into graduate education and research training to attract AI-fluent scholars, practitioners, and world-class faculty and staff who want to work at the leading edge of the field.

Advancing AI-enabled biomedical discovery and research

• Launch a flagship AI partnership focused on life sciences and health care, demonstrating Penn’s distinctive strengths and delivering visible breakthroughs in priority domains.
• Deliver fast, visible wins that demonstrate AI’s impact in real clinical environments and advance progress for high-impact scientific challenges (e.g., biomedical R&D infrastructure, clinical trials).
• Over time, expand from a focused life sciences collaboration to a broader AI partnership across Penn’s schools and institutes, addressing critical questions at the intersection of AI and society.
• Secure a major naming gift to underwrite the AI foundation that would support the next decade of our research breakthroughs.

Shaping the future of clinical care with AI

• Accelerate the rigorous evaluation and integration of AI into core clinical workflows, including tools that elicit and synthesize patient information, generate differential diagnoses, recommend diagnostic testing strategies, produce guideline-concordant treatment plans, and support management of chronic conditions.
• Strategically deploy AI to accelerate improvements across patient, clinical, and operational experiences, partnering with best-in-class vendors (e.g., K Health, Chart Hero, Ambience) to usher in the next frontier of health care.
• Build an integrated enterprise AI platform to manage AI as a coordinated capability rather than a set of disconnected tools.
• Expand use of AI to reduce administrative burden, accelerate workflows, and enable a faster “learning health system.”

Shaping how people learn, work, and live with AI.

• Establish a sustained program of convenings and public engagement to shape how government, civil society, and the public understand and steward AI’s impact on institutions and everyday life. This program will draw on Penn’s distinctive depth in the social sciences and humanities—including faculty in political science studying AI governance and democratic legitimacy, economists analyzing AI’s effects on labor markets and inequality, and sociologists and communications scholars examining algorithmic bias and media transformation.

Existing Foundation

Penn has already built a distributed but deeply complementary set of AI capabilities that, when coordinated, can position the University as a uniquely powerful, end-to-end AI ecosystem:

• Penn AI Council: A group of six faculty members across various disciplines who are leading the effort to map and strengthen Penn’s AI community focused on our core mission of research and education.
• Wharton AI & Analytics Initiative: A leading hub for AI in business, spanning more than 70 AI- and analytics-focused courses, applied learning programs such as the AI & Analytics Accelerator, and a portfolio of labs that partner with industry to solve data’s toughest challenges and shape the future of work.
• Breadth of AI research and interdisciplinary activity: More than a dozen centers, institutes, and labs spanning engineering, science, medicine, business, the humanities, and the social sciences, with AI-enabled faculty and hubs applying machine learning across genomics, clinical and population health, and drug discovery to accelerate translational insights. Examples include the RNA Biofoundry, the Center for AI-Driven Translational Informatics, the Computational Social Science Lab, the Data Driven Discovery Initiative, and the Center for Health AI and Synthesis of Evidence.
• Penn Medicine AI: Penn Medicine is rapidly and strategically deploying AI to improve patient, clinical, and operational experiences, partnering with best-in-class vendors (e.g., K Health, Chart Hero, Ambience) and building custom solutions to usher in the next frontier of health care.
• Compute and research infrastructure: Investments such as the Penn Advanced Research Computing Center (PARCC) and Amy Gutmann Hall provide high-performance computing, data infrastructure, and dedicated space for AI-enabled research and collaboration.
• AI-infused curriculum and learning pathways: Penn Engineering’s undergraduate and master’s programs in AI, alongside AI-focused offerings across Wharton, GSE, and other schools, including early cross-school efforts that combine technical foundations with domain-specific application.
• Enterprise adoption and operational use of AI: AI tools and workflows are already being deployed across administrative, research, and academic functions, supported by centralized capabilities such as ISC’s AI Hub and enterprise access to leading platforms.
• AI, sustainability, and climate impact: Penn is advancing research and dialogue on the environmental footprint of AI, including the energy demands of large-scale computing and data centers, and is committed to developing more sustainable, energy-efficient approaches to AI. Faculty across disciplines—including leaders in Penn Engineering and Wharton—are exploring sustainable computing, clean energy integration, and policy frameworks to ensure AI innovation aligns with responsible stewardship of climate and environmental resources.

• Collaborations and partnerships for AI in education and public good: Penn AI, the Graduate School of Education, and Penn Engineering have launched initiatives such as a cooperative AI agreement with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the “Unlocking AI for Public Good” summit, and a Google.org–funded expansion of the Pioneering AI in School Systems (PASS) program to build responsible, equitable AI capacity across K–12 school districts in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.

  Leads

• Josh Beeman, Vice President of Information Technology and Chief Information Officer
• Ezekiel Emanuel, Vice Provost for Global Initiatives and Levy University Professor at the Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School
• David Meaney, Vice Provost for Research
• Michael Ostap, Senior Vice Dean and Chief Scientific Officer, Perelman School of Medicine
• Mitch Schnall, Senior Vice President for Data and Technology Solutions, University of Pennsylvania Health System