Ep. 36: AI, Content Marketing, and the New Rules of Search Discoverability

Host Brian Piper speaks with Scott Clyde, Chief Growth Officer at enroll ml, about the evolving role of artificial intelligence in higher education admissions and enrollment strategy. Scott shares his first hand experiences navigating change management, testing AI tools, and learning from “fail fast” moments, including why 17-year-olds won't connect with AI phone callers. They also dive into the fine line of hyper personalization, the importance of retention, and why creating a sense of belonging requires an “all in” campus effort where recruitment and retention become everyone's responsibility.e

Host Brian Piper sits down with Teege Mettille, author of College Is Broken (And What We Can All Do to Fix It), to unpack how the higher ed trust deficit is being broken wide open by AI-driven transparency. Teege argues that just as Kelley Blue Book stripped used-car dealers of their information monopoly, accessible AI tools now empower under-resourced families to interrogate opaque pricing models, debunk inflated medical school admit rates, and cut through manipulated post-grad employment statistics. Despite the systemic dysfunctions, Teege lays out an optimistic case for campus practitioners: because higher education built these broken structures, everyday enrollment and marketing leaders possess the power to dismantle them and rebuild genuine trust.

Traditional marketing personas are often locked away in static PDF documents or PowerPoint decks, collecting digital dust while teams rely on gut instinct rather than real audience insights. Host Brian Piper welcomes Matt Wilkinson, Founder of Strivenn and author of The Buyer in the Loop, to explore how interactive AI personas in higher ed and marketing are transforming audience research. Matt breaks down why static persona documents fail, forcing marketers to perform uncomfortable mental gymnastics, and how grounding synthetic customers in deep research and voice-of-customer data allows teams to actually put their personas to work.

Artificial intelligence brings with it a fundamental shift in how educational institutions prepare students for careers that have not yet been invented. In this episode of AI for U, host Brian Piper sits down with Dr. Rachelle Keck, President at Grand View University, to explore what institutional AI leadership in higher ed looks like from the president's office. Dr. Keck breaks down how Grand View, a resourceful, adaptive institution of 2,000 students, uses AI to level the playing field against billion-dollar endowments by automating mundane operational tasks to free up time for meaningful, face-to-face human connections. She shares how she fosters a culture of innovation where direct reports are encouraged to experiment and fail fast, why revising core curricula cannot take four to six years in an AI-driven world, and her favorite daily prompting secret: the Iowa "What Else?" method.

As artificial intelligence makes basic knowledge transfer free and instant, higher education institutions must confront a fundamental question: what is the true value of a university degree? Host Brian Piper speaks with Michael Horn, Author of Job Moves and co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, to explore how AI is fundamentally reshaping higher education. Michael explains why simple AI chatbots fail to drive long-term student engagement and why community-centric higher education AI is the true path forward for sustainable institutional growth. Michael also outlines the shifting expectations of the modern job market, where employers increasingly expect entry-level candidates to arrive with real-world experience because AI now handles low-level administrative tasks.