Your faculty aren't resisting AI. {They're waiting to be heard.}
Structured listening and facilitated town halls for campuses where the AI conversation has turned adversarial. Alex bridges faculty, staff, students, and administration — and translates what he hears into recommendations shared governance can actually pass.
FREQUENTLY FEATURED IN:
What separates structured dialogue from another open forum.
Unmoderated forums produce heat, not light. Surveys without visible action breed cynicism. Structure is what turns listening into change.
Internal Facilitation
Survey Vendors
Alex Goryachev
Concrete outputs, not another feedback survey.
Every engagement ends in something your governance bodies can vote on.
Dialogue Architecture
Session design built around your governance bodies, union landscape, and the specific fault lines on your campus — a format that worked elsewhere can fail here.
Facilitated Sessions
Town halls and listening sessions run by a facilitator faculty extend real trust to — because he works inside the largest AI deployment in academia and has nothing to sell them.
Action-Ready Synthesis
Findings delivered as recommendations framed for senate agendas, cabinet decisions, and policy drafts — so listening visibly turns into change.
How an engagement works.
Designed for polarized campuses — from a single town hall to a term-long listening architecture.
Design conversation
Where the conversation broke down, who needs to be in the room, and what leadership is prepared to act on. That last part decides everything.
Structured listening
Facilitated sessions plus methods that surface the silent middle — the faculty who decide whether adoption succeeds and never speak at the open mic.
Synthesis to action
A working session with leadership converting findings into motions, policy inputs, and visible commitments the campus can watch happen.
The playbook came from building inside universities.
As Cisco's Managing Director of Innovation Strategy, Alex built global innovation centers and programs inside universities and research institutions across 14 countries — a $1.1B portfolio, innovation tracks for three Olympic Games, and partnerships from Imperial College London to Keio, NUS, University of Toronto, and UNSW Sydney. That operating history is what his assessments measure against.
Countries
University-anchored innovation centers built with partners including Imperial College London, Keio, École Polytechnique, and UNSW Sydney.
Portfolio managed
Innovation strategy at Cisco run with the same discipline these assessments bring to campus: governance, measurement, ROI.
Olympic Games
Three Olympic Games — innovation programs delivered live on the world stage, with immovable deadlines, global partners, and zero tolerance for failure. That's the operating standard behind every campus engagement.
The most expensive AI decision a university can make is the one faculty {find out about in the newspaper}.
What's the conversation your campus is avoiding?
Describe the room you're worried about. Alex replies within one business day.
Check Alex's availability
Frequently asked questions
How do you get faculty buy-in for AI initiatives?
Faculty buy in when three things are true: AI gives them time back, they co-design the policies, and academic judgment visibly stays in their hands. Alex Goryachev's facilitated dialogues are built to make those three things visible — which is why they end in consensus instead of counter-resolutions.
What is an AI town hall and how does it work?
An AI town hall is a structured, facilitated campus conversation designed so faculty, staff, and students are actually heard: sessions are architected around your governance bodies, findings are synthesized, and leadership receives action-ready recommendations. The structure is what separates it from an open forum that goes sideways.
Who should facilitate a faculty dialogue about AI?
Someone independent enough that faculty trust the process and experienced enough to turn what's said into policy-ready output. Internal facilitation inherits internal politics; Alex Goryachev brings outside credibility from inside the largest AI deployment in academia — with nothing to sell.
How do universities handle faculty resistance to AI?
Treat it as information, not obstruction: resistance usually points at real gaps in policy, workload, or trust. Structured listening surfaces those gaps, and visible follow-through closes them. Alex Goryachev's town halls turn the loudest objections into the agenda — and the silent middle into data.
Can one town hall change a polarized campus conversation?
One well-designed session can reset the tone; lasting change needs synthesis and visible action afterward. That's why Alex Goryachev's engagements end with recommendations formatted for senate agendas and cabinet decisions — so the campus sees listening turn into motion.
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