About us
Applied AI is a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to developing the next generation of AI leaders in Minnesota. We do this through a conference, podcast, weekly news, monthly newsletters, YouTube channel, and monthly meetups. Our events provide education, hands-on training, and real-world AI applications to help people of all ages learn how to use AI to solve real-life problems.
Want to speak at a Meetup?
We'd love to hear from you! We're always looking for practitioners to share real-world AI projects, lessons learned, and hands-on demos. No polished keynote required, just something genuinely useful for the community. Our one big rule: teach, don't sell.
Apply to speak here and check out our speaker expectations before you apply.
Additionally, we encourage you to subscribe to our Conversation On Applied AI Podcast. We publish new episodes every other week on topics related to Artificial Intelligence and its applications! We also publish a Monthly Newsletter with details on our current events and ways to engage with our community.
What is Artificial Intelligence
In computer science, artificial intelligence (AI), sometimes called machine intelligence, is intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans. Leading AI textbooks define the field as the study of "intelligent agents": any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals. Colloquially, the term "artificial intelligence" is often used to describe machines (or computers) that mimic "cognitive" functions that humans associate with the human mind, such as "learning" and "problem solving".
What is AppliedAI?
Simple. :) It's the real-world applications that these far-fetched, big ideas lead to. Some things around us that are applications of AI include digital assistants (Google Home, Alexa), self-driving cars, robots, chatbots and many many more!
Who should go AppliedAI Meetups?
This group is a place for anyone who is interesting in learning, sharing and applying Artificial Intelligence to their products and services. It's also for people of all ages just interested in what's going on in the AI space by networking and talking with real-world practitioners of this exciting and new technology.
What happens at AppliedAI Meetups?
• We have speakers and panelists talking about AI in real-world scenarios
• We do demos of AI related projects and explain how they work
• We discuss, where AI has been, where it is today and where it's heading in the future
• We have fun!
Where else can I find you?
Follow us on social media!
Facebook, LinkedIN and Twitter
We also have a podcast and YouTube page.
What are the colors of your logo?
They are derived from the color palette of a few of the first-ever AI-generated photos from Google’s Deep Learning tool.
Upcoming events
2
- $25.00
Agentic Systems: Engineering the Right Solution
Lab651, 550 Vandalia St #231, St Paul, MN, USOverview
Agent architecture decisions seem to fall into one of two categories; either they over‑complicate simple problems or under‑engineer genuinely hard ones. This session offers a framework for choosing between single, and multi‑agent systems, and orchestrated designs in real‑world LLM applications. Attendees will leave with a decision flow and heuristics that they can use to keep systems simple when it’s smart, split when it helps, and orchestrate only when it earns its keep.Agenda
6:00pm - 6:30pm: Networking - food & drinks
6:30pm - 8:00pm: Presentation & discussion
8:00pm: Networking at Lake Monster BrewingMeet Our Featured Speaker
Chase is a professor of Artificial Intelligence and AI Fellow at Metro State University, where he teaches Data Mining Tools, Advanced Data Mining and Applied AI in Business. His journey began on the factory floor as a welder, grew through systems integration and building management systems, and landed squarely in the world of cybersecurity, AI, and Industrial Controls. With an MBA and CISSP, Chase bridges the gap between industry reality and academic insight. He’s been featured on Minnesota Public Radio discussing the changing role of AI in higher education, and has spoken and presented at academic conferences like MWAIS, ICAIS, and IACIS. Known for his lighthearted and generally optimistic approach to serious tech, Chase’s talk explores the chaos found in the algorithm if you’re brave enough.Sponsors
This event is sponsored by Lab651 & Recursive Awesome24 attendees 
Enterprise Claude in the Wild: A Real Governance and Security Playbook
Eliassen Group, 5929 Baker Road, Minnetonka, MN, USOverview
Anthropic's Claude is the most capable agentic AI platform on the market, and it creates a control surface most IT and security leaders haven't seen before. Cowork wants admin rights on user devices. Chrome extensions browse with user session cookies. Scheduled tasks run unattended overnight. MCP servers reach into file shares, SharePoint, and mail. The vendor won't tell you what to configure because their incentive is to maximize capability, not minimize your blast radius.This session walks through real enterprise Claude deployments across multiple organizations and unpacks the five decisions that matter most:
- Cowork admin scoping. Where to draw the line on local device rights, MDM approaches, and the mobile-to-desktop dispatch controls most orgs miss.
- Prompt injection mitigation. What Anthropic's self-reported ~1% injection success rate on Claude in Chrome actually means, and how to layer defenses without breaking the tool.
- MCP and connector allowlisting. Read-only enforcement, org-managed vs. self-service registries, and the gotchas across SharePoint, Egnyte, and large mailboxes.
- Scheduled task governance. The overnight injection loop risk and how to build an approved-pattern model that keeps agents useful without letting them go feral.
- RBAC across the agentic stack. How to think about roles when skills, plugins, MCP, connectors, Chrome sites, and scheduled tasks all need permission models.
For each decision, attendees see what teams with different risk tolerances actually chose, why, and which of those choices are already getting revisited.
What the audience walks away with
- A clear-eyed view of the enterprise Claude control surface and where the real risk sits
- A one-page governance decision guide covering all five decisions plus the secondary controls (skills, plugins, network egress, account switching, connector specifics)
- Enough context to have a productive conversation with legal, security, and the business the day they get back to the office
Format
35 to 45 minutes, single speaker, no product pitch. Q&A as time allows.Meet Our Featured Speaker
Kolby Kappes is VP of the Data & AI Practice at Eliassen Group, where he leads enterprise AI deployments across financial services, insurance, retail, government, and PE portfolios. He's been writing commercial software since high school and speaks regularly on agentic AI, governance, and moving AI from proof of concept to production.Sponsors
This event is sponsored and hosted by Eliassen Group51 attendees
Past events
227
Group links
Members
5,820
