Reston, VA | December 11, 2025 – Brillient Vice President of Customer Success, Paul Weiss, participated as an industry expert in a final exam for George Mason University AI Students who took UNIV 182 – AI4All: Understanding & Building Artificial Intelligence (GMU’s first campus-wide AI literacy course) this semester. Amarda Shehu, VP and Chief AI Officer for GMU, launched the new course this fall and invited Weiss along with other leaders from industry, nonprofits, and education to evaluate students’ final projects.
“I don’t believe in traditional final exams for a course like this. If you can’t defend your work to people who evaluate ideas for a living, you haven’t learned what I’m teaching,” said Shehu in her weekly substack.
The final exam consisted of 10-minute presentations from each of the six teams of students, followed by five minutes of structured cross-examination, then an open Q&A session as guests moved between the round tables, asking questions about ethics, feasibility, data pipelines, and privacy safeguards.
Student projects spanned multiple domains, including energy efficiency, retail innovation, combating misinformation, behavioral intervention, and transportation safety.
Weiss spoke highly of the students and the experience, saying the final projects demonstrated not only a strong grasp of AI fundamentals and solid business acumen, but also a thoughtful approach to the social and moral responsibilities that come with using AI.
“The best compliment I can give is that this went far beyond a typical classroom experience. What we saw were teams of engaged, energetic entrepreneurs pitching what they believed in and having deeply meaningful conversations with industry participants,” said Weiss.