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Thank you so much, Susan. And now we'll hear from N2N CEO, Kiran Kodithala.

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Kiran Kodithala — come on up.

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Thank you, Chair Del Carlo.

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It's such an honor to be here.

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First, I want to confess a couple of things. I'm a Chicago resident too.

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I started my master's at the city campus, at Taylor and Ashland.

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I have a lot of secrets about my Chicago years — but I'm super proud of the Bears this year.

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So, go Bears!

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I learned a lot in Chicago — my master's and more — but one of the big things I learned was administrative systems.

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Even though many administrators and trustees are here, you deal with students from the front end.

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My first work in Chicago was on administrative systems — with the University of Illinois, on the back end.

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They had parking, housing, financial aid and other systems — and there's incredible complexity on the back end.

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This was 1998, when everything required a lot of software development and coding.

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But a lot has changed in the last few years — especially with AI. We're now moving at the speed of light.

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What we thought impossible — how we write an essay, how I built this presentation —

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is now easy, and at the speed of light.

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However, if you're a chancellor, president, CIO or CTO, there are a lot of no's out there.

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When you ask a vendor — one who built their software in the 1980s, like parking, ID cards, or the cafeteria —

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they're inflexible.

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Let's take an example. Facilities just wants to add an EV type to the parking system,

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because new kinds of vehicles keep coming.

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This should be a simple change — but since the system was built in the 1980s,

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the first answer is: "We don't have the feature. It's on the roadmap."

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The second answer: "We don't have it. It's coming up next year."

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And the third answer, 18 months later, with the lot overwhelmed by other vehicles —

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we're now facing the fact that we still aren't getting an answer.

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And it's not just the parking or ID system. This is the state of software development as it stands.

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Because these vendors built their software in the early 1980s — or earlier.

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They're still built around supporting every one of their customers.

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But as trustees and board members, you're not responsible for every other college out there.

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You're not responsible for the vendor meeting their roadmap.

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What we're responsible for is our own destiny — as the chair said.

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If our focus is to build a product, we want to change that paradigm and say:

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instead of relying on the vendor to build it — why should we rely on their permission?

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What if we change the paradigm from asking, begging and requesting, to: how do I build my own system?

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What we have is a system you build by conversation — with Meridian.

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This lets you take ownership of your own enterprise, so you can support your students better —

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so you're no longer working from a premise of no's, but from a premise of answers,

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where you can start building your own product from scratch.

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You can prompt it, build it, extend it — anything you like.

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It can be your cafeteria system. Your housing system. Your parking system.

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This morning I briefed Dr. Lee Lambert, who had a wayfinding idea — a president with great ideas

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for all the backlog items they're trying to build.

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With Meridian, you no longer depend on a vendor, a CIO, or an IT person to build it.

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We call it a vibe-dreaming platform — where you can prompt a product into existence, simply by typing it in.

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You can see the product in action by scanning the QR code, or going to meridian.lightleap.ai —

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or join us for a couple of workshops, Thursday and Friday, in the Randolph Boardroom,

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where we show you how to build this product.

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We're also hosting a panel with leaders truly changing higher education.

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N2N has supported higher education for the last 15 years.

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We built products to stop financial-aid fraud at over 200 community colleges.

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We built a Credit for Prior Learning platform with the California Chancellor's Office, so an apprentice can submit and quickly process an application.

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We worked with the California Virtual Campus to help students register for any course — built on the same platform we showed in Meridian.

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If you're a CFO, chancellor or CTO who truly wants to build a product that serves your students on your own terms,

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we believe the vibe-dreaming platform we built in Meridian will let you do it.

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Stop by our booth. Join our workshop. Let's talk.

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Thank you so much for your time.