Beyond the Hype: AI's Real Impact Across Industries

What does AI actually look like when it moves from buzzword to business practice? That was the central question driving the Beyond the Hype panel at the Boise Metro Chamber's 2026 Regional Leadership Conference. Moderated by Rebecca Hupp of Boise Airport, the conversation brought together three panelists with very different vantage points: Don Day of Boise Dev and Valley Lookout, Gordon Jones, president of the College of Western Idaho, and Cameron Schaefer of HDR. What emerged was an honest, grounded look at where AI is delivering real value, where it is falling short, and what businesses and institutions need to do to stay ahead of it.

Credibility Is the New Competitive Advantage for News
Don Day opened with a candid look at how AI is reshaping the local news landscape, and not always for the better. He described a growing wave of nontraditional players using AI to repurpose news content for their own business goals, whether that is driving social media engagement, selling real estate, or running content mills built around manufactured outrage. The result is a noisier, harder to navigate information environment.

He offered a striking example: a news outlet recently used AI to translate and publish a story about the Idaho Air National Guard deploying troops, pulling a quote from Governor Little that turned out to be from a news release the previous year, and conflating details from a past deployment with a much smaller current one. The story was wrong in specific, verifiable ways.

"It puts a lot more burden on us to make sure we are being even more diligent and rigorous in our fact checking," said Day.

Boise Dev and Valley Lookout have drawn a clear line: all content will be written by humans. That does not mean avoiding AI entirely. Day described using it to analyze years of Boise City Council agendas for data that would have taken a human several days to compile, a task completed in a fraction of the time. The distinction the outlet has landed on is using AI as a research and efficiency tool while keeping the editorial voice firmly human.

Day also made a point that resonated throughout the room: as deepfakes and AI generated content become more convincing, in-person gatherings carry more weight, not less. When misinformation can be manufactured at scale, showing up in the same room as someone becomes its own form of credibility.

Integration Beats Experimentation Every Time
Cameron Schaefer offered what may have been the most operationally useful framework of the panel. When asked how AI will separate high-performing companies from the rest over the next three to five years, he pointed to three things: integration over experimentation, governance and trust, and AI fluency across the entire organization.

On integration, his argument was straightforward. Experimenting with AI is easy. Building it into business processes, service models, and new lines of work is where the real differentiation happens. And that starts with identifying problems first rather than chasing the technology.

"Don't say, AI can do this, let me find a problem to solve," Schaefer said. "Identify the problem first."

On governance, he pushed past the idea of simply having an AI policy. What matters is whether the organization has a clear vision for where it wants AI to take it, guardrails that enable safe experimentation, and a culture where people feel encouraged rather than intimidated to try new tools. One of HDR's standing policies: employees are personally responsible for every word of AI generated output, whether they wrote it or not.

On fluency, Schaefer made a point about scale. Individual contributors using AI to multiply their output is not the same as an organization multiplying its output. Pockets of AI champions can actually create misalignment if the rest of the team is not brought along. He also raised mentorship as a structural opportunity, pairing younger staff who are fluent in AI tools with senior staff who bring years of technical depth and client relationships, with each group learning from the other.

He added one more dimension: talent attraction. Increasingly, top candidates are asking not just about salary and benefits, but about what technology access they will have, how much compute, how many agents, what the organization's AI strategy looks like. That conversation is already happening, and it will only become more common.

Higher Education Is Preparing Students for a Workforce That Is Still Taking Shape
Gordon Jones spoke to the unique pressure facing institutions like CWI, which must prepare students for jobs that are changing faster than curriculum cycles typically allow. His approach is grounded in two commitments: ensuring every student develops digital competencies, and making sure CWI itself is leaning into AI as an organization, not just teaching about it from the outside.

He described technical advisory committees and ongoing employer relationships as the primary mechanism for staying connected to what the workforce actually needs. For students who want to go deeper, CWI offers dedicated programs in AI and cloud computing. But the baseline expectation is that every student, regardless of field, will leave with the digital literacy to engage with these tools.

Jones also raised one of the panel's more sobering observations: the entry level job is disappearing. The tasks that have traditionally given new graduates their first real exposure to a workplace, discounted cash flows, research synthesis, basic analysis, are increasingly automatable. His concern is not just about those jobs vanishing, but about what replaces the learning that used to happen inside them.

His proposed response: colleges becoming employers in their own right, building in structured work experience so students arrive at their first job already having done something. He pointed to institutions now requiring a percentage of contract positions to go to students as one early version of this model.

Where AI Is Actually Working Right NowThe panel closed with a round of personal examples, and the range was instructive. Schaefer described building a custom meal planning agent that factors in his family's schedules, dietary preferences, and preferred grocery stores, generating a full weekly meal plan and shopping list automatically. Jones talked about using AI to quickly prepare for public forums, generating anticipated questions and consistent messaging around complex community issues. Day described automating ad trafficking at Boise Dev, a laborious manual process that previously required a dedicated staff member.

Hupp noted a counterexample worth remembering: she and her husband used AI to compare insurance policies and received a confident answer that was ultimately wrong because the tool lacked the full context of their situation. It was a useful illustration of a theme the panel returned to repeatedly. AI will give you an answer no matter what. It is the human responsibility to check whether that answer is right.

Day put it plainly: AI is wrong a lot, and you notice it being wrong more the more you know about the subject. Building in fact checking, asking the tool to say it does not know when it does not, and treating every output as a draft rather than a final product are the habits that separate effective users from ones who will eventually get burned.

The Parting Advice Was Simple: Start Now
​When asked for closing thoughts, the panel landed in a consistent place. Jones encouraged using AI with your kids, getting them familiar early while staying engaged with them in the process. Schaefer noted that AI will not criticize you, making it a uniquely low stakes environment to ask basic questions and learn. Cameron offered the framing that has stuck with many people thinking about this moment: the best time to start was a year ago. The second best time is today.

The panel was not a celebration of AI, nor a warning against it. It was something more useful: a practical, honest conversation among people who are navigating the same questions as everyone in the room, and finding out, one use case at a time, what actually works.
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Don Day, Gordon Jones, and Cameron Schaefer delivered these remarks at the Boise Metro Chamber's 2026 Regional Leadership Conference on April 20, 2026. This blog post was prepared from a partial transcript using the help of AI.

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