Inside a University’s “AI Kitchen”

As a woman pursuing a career in computer science, Tiffany Le sometimes struggled to picture where she fit in the tech industry’s male-dominated culture.

Then she discovered Santa Clara University’s AI Kitchen, a weekly workshop launched this spring where students, faculty, staff and Silicon Valley professionals gather to experiment with emerging artificial intelligence tools. The welcoming, collaborative atmosphere eventually inspired the incoming third-year computer science and engineering major to become the program’s student studio lead.

“Tech sometimes can be a bit more male dominated, and so being able to create a more inclusive environment really resonated with me,” Le said. “When I went out to promote AI Kitchen and try to bring in other students, that was also something that they really liked.”

Every Friday Le helps welcome about 50 participants for nearly four-hour sessions where attendees test new AI tools and explore how they’re used across fields ranging from medicine and marketing to education and real estate.

“During one session we had a staff member from [the] Anthropology [Department], and they brought in a lot of new, different perspectives about how AI might be changing the humanities,” Le said. “Coming from a more tech perspective, we may be focusing on more of the technical details and all of the code and specifics, but it’s also really important to think about what the implications are in other fields.”

“The fact that AI Kitchen is accessible to everyone, regardless of their background, is one of the most incredible things,” she added.

An inclusive approach: Kai Lukoff, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Santa Clara University, said the name “AI Kitchen” was chosen intentionally.

“The kitchen metaphor is based on research that finds that if you create a [computer science] space or a space that is kind of stereotypical tech bro culture, a lot of women and underrepresented students will opt out,” Lukoff said. “That metaphor then signals that we’re going for something that’s more familiar, communal and creative, as opposed to perhaps an AI hacker space.”

To reinforce that sense of accessibility, Lukoff said every session is intentionally kept “code-light,” allowing an anthropology major, computer science student or curious staff member to participate in the same hands-on exercises.

“What I wanted to start with AI Kitchen is not just a course about AI literacy, but what one might call AI fluency,” Lukoff said. “So not just having an understanding of the tools, but also hands-on ability to work with these tools, explore their strengths and weaknesses, and engage in real-world projects that apply them.”

That emphasis on practical learning has also led to collaborations beyond the classroom. Lukoff recalled one project that began when a staff member in the university’s donor relations office sought help using AI to better connect donors with faculty members based on shared interests and priorities.

“That’s one project, for instance, that now students out of AI Kitchen are working on together with our donor relations that’s come out of the sorts of sessions that we facilitate,” Lukoff said. “That kind of collaboration is really what we need to explore some of the capabilities and also the limitations of these tools right now.”

Learning without fear: Lukoff said he hopes AI Kitchen teaches participants that AI is more than just chatbots like ChatGPT.

“I think a lot of folks are sort of still stuck in this paradigm of AI as a chatbot, like the early versions of ChatGPT that we interact with,” Lukoff said. “But if people can explore them as these agentic tools … that have really come out since the beginning of the year, that unlocks a lot of the capabilities of these systems.”

He said the workshops help participants understand how artists, doctors and small business owners—not just software engineers—use AI tools and encourage them to think critically about where the technology fits into their own work.

But Lukoff emphasized that AI Kitchen is not meant to convince participants to embrace AI uncritically.

“There is certainly a lot of hesitancy amongst students, faculty and staff sometimes with these tools, and I’m by no means a cheerleader for AI tools,” Lukoff said. “But I’m also a pragmatist in the sense that I think, whether we like it or not, these tools are here now. And as a university, we shouldn’t cede the development of these tools to folks who don’t have that kind of critical perspective that we can bring as students and faculty and staff in a university setting.”

For Le, that balance between openness and critical engagement is what has kept her coming back.

“That’s one of the biggest things that I appreciate about AI Kitchen,” she said. “It’s a place where people can feel comfortable exploring, and they don’t have to be worried about where their background may be from. They don’t have to be concerned about what they already know and what they don’t know, because we’re all here at the end of the day to learn.”

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