Fellows are placed on a live problem inside a regional operating company, working directly with a CEO or VP, and ship a working system by the end of the summer.
Bring us an operational bottleneck: quoting, drawings, ERP data, lead triage, compliance. A fellow team scopes it, builds it, and hands it off with full documentation. The first step is a conversation, not a contract.
How partnering works →Any major. Fellows this year came from engineering, business, psychology, neuroscience, Spanish, and economics. We train you first, then put you on a live project with a president or VP as your client.
What the fellowship involves →Applied AI is not a computer science elective. This summer it was a psychology major building an agent for a manufacturer. If you teach a course where that kind of work could live, we will help source the projects.
The campus case →
We give students real applied-AI experience, and give our region AI it can actually use.Program leadership, iNDustry Labs.
Every project has a named champion at the partner company who owns the engagement and approves what appears here.
A text-to-SQL agent over PLEX ERP and Paperless Parts data, with a benchmark framework built to catch hallucinated joins before a plant manager ever sees a wrong number.
A pipeline that reads decades of engineering drawings and rebuilds them as parametric SOLIDWORKS feature trees, preserving the original design intent rather than just the geometry.
Government quoting demands ITAR, NSN, and ASTM compliance across hundreds of line items. One agent parses the RFQ, one sources qualified suppliers, one scores what comes back.
The most common misconception about this program is that it is mainly for computer science majors. Only two fellows in the 2026 cohort came from that field.
Psychology and Spanish, Arts and Letters
Hover for a quoteI spent the first two weeks certain they had put me on the wrong project. Then our partner ran the tool past twenty employees and it failed, not on accuracy but on trust. That is when my major stopped feeling like a stretch.
Gabriella, Psychology and Spanish
Computer Science, Engineering
Hover for a quoteI had written plenty of software before this. I had never had to defend a design decision to the person paying for it.
Maureen, Computer Science
Finance MBA, Mendoza
Hover for a quoteI came in thinking the challenge would be the model. It was the data, and it was always the data.
Akshat, Finance MBA
Neuroscience and Behavior, Science
Hover for a quoteThe hardest part was never the code. It was learning to ask a VP the right question in the ten minutes he actually had.
Liam, Neuroscience and Behavior
Mechanical Engineering and Spanish, Engineering
Hover for a quoteI switched between the technical work and the client conversations all summer. Both got easier. Neither got easy.
Sarah, Mechanical Engineering
Finance and Economics, Mendoza
Hover for a quoteI am a finance major. I did not expect to spend my summer talking to engineers about how their work actually gets done.
Kiki, Finance and Economics
Quotes shown are illustrative drafts, real quotes to be collected from each fellow.
Manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, real estate and finance across the South Bend and Elkhart region.
Approximately a 45 minute drive from campus
The interactive map could not load. Every partner location is listed below.
Companies start with a conversation. Students apply when the window opens in the fall.
