One of the biggest messages Rohana Meade impressed upon VCU School of Business students this spring was that artificial intelligence is only useful when leaders know the problem they are trying to solve.
“What problem are you trying to solve?” she said. “What does it do for the business?”
Meade is speaking from experience. The founder, president and CEO of Synergy Technical has spent more than 30 years leading technology teams through major shifts in business. She started in Enterprise Resource Planning consulting in 1989, when many systems still ran on terminals and green screens, and has since watched personal computers, email, the internet and cloud computing go from new tools to everyday expectations.
This spring, Meade was one of two executives featured in Expert Insights, a new School of Business speaker series that brings students, faculty, staff and business leaders together for conversations on current business issues. William J. Groves II, president and CEO of New Horizon Bank, also spoke this spring, focusing on growth mindset and the culture required to support a company’s ambitions.
In Meade’s session, moderated by Mark Wensell, Ph.D., director of the Master of Decision Analytics Weekend program and an instructor in the Department of Information Systems, AI was the focus. Meade placed AI in a longer history of technologies that companies first questioned and later relied on.
Radio took decades to reach mass adoption, she said. The internet took about five years. Smartphones took about two. ChatGPT reached 100 million users in two months.
“I don’t think it’s overhyped at all,” said Meade. “I think AI is an adoption issue rather than a hype issue.”
Some organizations are already experimenting with AI, Meade said, but pilots often stall when leaders cannot connect them to a business case.
“If you can’t measure that, then you’re not going to be able to move it forward,” said Meade.
At Synergy Technical, that kind of discipline led to an AI agent that draws from years of statements of work, agreements, scoping documents and deliverables. After a salesperson gathers information from a customer, the tool can draft a statement of work in minutes.
“It takes maybe two minutes for that to happen,” said Meade. “That then gets turned over to our engineering team who validates it. Because you have to have a human do that.”
The process has taken weeks of work off the engineering team, she said. The review remains important because the tool can produce a document without understanding the customer, the company or what can realistically be delivered.
“AI doesn’t have ethical standards,” said Meade. “AI is not going to tell you if something is right or wrong. And AI doesn’t necessarily understand your business.”
Groves, who spoke in a separate Expert Insights session, brought a similar focus to company growth.
New Horizon bank was founded in 2009, purchased in 2021 and reimagined in 2024. Groves said the Richmond-based bank’s total loans grew from about $89.4 million on Dec. 31, 2024, to about $145.7 million on Dec. 31, 2025. Since then, loans have reached $170 million, and total assets have increased to $280 million.
Groves is speaking from experience, too. He described his first months in the CEO role as “learning while flying.” There was “no ramp-up,” he said, and the bank “was not built for growth.” Its culture and systems were misaligned with its ambition.
Changing that meant shifting from an operations-first culture to a sales-first culture, hiring for aptitude and moving quickly when roles were misaligned.
“Culture is set by behavior, not words,” said Groves.
Groves said he personally makes at least three prospect calls a day, and he pointed to the bank’s Hampton Roads expansion as a calculated bet. Both examples reflected a broader point in his presentation about making decisions without assuming a perfect result.
“You can make the best decision and still have a bad outcome,” said Groves.
Meade and Groves approached the spring series from different industries, but both focused on decisions students may face in their own careers. During Meade’s session, one undergraduate asked how students should prepare for a business world changing quickly because of AI.
Meade had already told the audience that employers want people who can solve problems, work across functions and communicate. Her answer to the student returned to one skill that will matter no matter how sophisticated the tools become.
“I don’t care if you use AI,” said Meade. “I want you to validate that the output is correct.”
The VCU School of Business thanks Universal Corporation for its generous support of the Expert Insights series and extends its appreciation to speakers Rohana Meade and William J. Groves II for sharing their time and expertise with the school community.