AIRIA is proud to welcome Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos as a Strategic Advisor. Former Chancellor of Vanderbilt University (2008–2019), Zeppos led a transformative era of institutional growth, advancing campus innovation through initiatives such as FutureVU, while elevating Vanderbilt’s national standing. A distinguished legal scholar and higher education leader, Chancellor Zeppos brings AIRIA decades of experience in university governance, strategy, and academic leadership. 

We sat down with Chancellor Zeppos to talk about what he sees in AIRIA, why data-driven campus operations matter now more than ever, and where higher education is headed.  

Q&A with Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos & Edward Nass, AIRIA CEO 

On Higher Education and the Case for Data 

AIRIA: Chancellor Zeppos, you spent more than three decades at Vanderbilt as a professor, provost, and ultimately chancellor. What did running a major research university teach you about how institutions make decisions regarding campus space and facilities? 

Chancellor Zeppos:  Universities understandably focus on their people—faculty, students, and staff. They are what make a university a special place of learning. But for both strategic and financial reasons, university leaders must also focus on their facilities. A university's physical campus is one of its largest assets and one of its largest continuing expenses, yet leaders often have surprisingly limited information about how that asset is actually being used. 

These were issues I confronted daily, with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. We knew what buildings we owned, which offices had been assigned, and which classrooms had been scheduled. But those things are not the same as knowing how frequently and intensively a space is occupied. In many respects, we were “flying without instruments.” Without reliable utilization information, decisions can easily be driven by historical practice, anecdote, or the understandable desire of every unit to have more space. Reliable data does not make the decision, but it gives leadership a common factual foundation from which to make it. 

AIRIA: In your experience, how often are campus leaders making significant capital and operational decisions based on assumptions rather than actual occupancy data and what does that cost institutions? 

Chancellor Zeppos:  More often than they would like to admit. That is not because university leaders are careless. It is because most universities have never had a practical way to measure actual utilization continuously across millions of square feet. They rely on course schedules, periodic surveys, manual observations, and reports from individual units. Each provides useful information, but none gives a comprehensive picture of how the campus is actually functioning. 

The cost is potentially enormous. A university may construct a new building when existing space could be used more effectively. It may heat, cool, clean, and secure buildings according to fixed schedules rather than actual use. Better information can improve both capital planning and day-to-day operations—and, in some cases, help avoid or defer very substantial expenditures. With universities facing mounting financial pressures and increasingly stressed balance sheets, a better approach is more essential than ever. 

AIRIA: You launched FutureVU at Vanderbilt, a comprehensive land use planning process focused on sustainability, accessibility, and the creation of community-centered spaces. How would AIRIA's technology have assisted you in this endeavor? 

Chancellor Zeppos:  FutureVU was based on the idea that a campus should be planned as an integrated community rather than as a collection of individual buildings. We were thinking about how people moved through the campus, where they gathered, how academic and residential life intersected, and how our physical environment could advance sustainability, accessibility, and human connection. 

But even sophisticated planning of that kind necessarily depended largely on static and periodic information. AIRIA would have given us a dynamic layer of evidence beneath the planning. Instead of relying primarily on scheduled use, physical observation, and periodic studies, we could have seen how patterns changed by hour, day, season, and location. That would have helped us identify underused spaces, overcrowded areas, and opportunities to create better connections among academic, residential, and community spaces. It also would have allowed us to measure whether the changes we made actually produced the results we intended. 

On AIRIA 

AIRIA: AIRIA's goal is to make campuses smart, safe and sustainable while offering a solution that integrates with the existing WiFi infrastructure. Can you describe how AIRIA's insights would have saved you time, resources, spend, and why the scalability of the product is so important? 

Chancellor Zeppos:  The importance of AIRIA’s approach is that it can make an existing university asset—the campus Wi-Fi network—produce an entirely new category of operational intelligence. A university does not have to place and maintain thousands of additional sensors throughout its buildings before it can begin learning how its spaces are being used. 

That matters because a research university is not a single building. It may operate hundreds of buildings and millions of square feet, including classrooms, laboratories, libraries, offices, residence halls, athletic facilities, and public spaces. AIRIA’s scalability creates the possibility of understanding the campus as a whole, comparing patterns across buildings, and making decisions at the level where university leaders actually allocate capital and operating resources. 

It can also provide a common source of truth. When a university is considering a building expansion or renovation, constituencies understandably press their cases—often without reliable underlying data. AIRIA can provide a common factual starting point for those strategic discussions. 

AIRIA: Why did AIRIA stand out against other companies and offerings that exist in this space? 

Chancellor Zeppos:  AIRIA stood out to me because it addresses a consequential institutional problem without first requiring an expensive new physical infrastructure. It uses the Wi-Fi environment universities already maintain and converts existing signals into anonymous, actionable information about how physical space is being used. Because AIRIA works through the existing Wi-Fi network, the incremental infrastructure and installation burden can be far lower than with solutions requiring a large deployment of new sensors. That is important. There is real implementation fatigue on campuses after years of installing new enterprise systems and other complex technologies. AIRIA avoids many of those pain points. 

I was also attracted to the breadth of the application. This is not merely a room-scheduling tool or an energy-management product. The same underlying intelligence can inform space allocation, capital planning, sustainability, cleaning, building operations, and aspects of campus safety. Most importantly, AIRIA is not simply producing more data. It is translating data into information that university leaders and facilities professionals can use to make decisions. 

AIRIA: Where do you see campus planning and smart infrastructure heading in the next five to ten years, and what role do you see AIRIA playing in that future? 

Chancellor Zeppos:  Universities will have to move from periodically studying their campuses to continuously understanding them. Instead of relying on a once-a-decade study of the physical plant and campus land use, they will need information that is current and accurate. Financial pressures, sustainability commitments, and changing patterns of teaching and work will make it increasingly difficult to justify constructing and operating space without knowing how it is being used. 

The next generation of campus infrastructure will also be more responsive. Cleaning, heating, cooling, lighting, and security will increasingly reflect actual utilization rather than static assumptions. Capital planning will rely more heavily on longitudinal evidence, and universities will test whether renovations and program changes are delivering the expected results. AIRIA can provide an important intelligence layer connecting what is happening across the physical campus with the systems used to operate and plan it. Its recently announced work integrating occupancy information with building-management systems illustrates that larger opportunity. 

AIRIA: What would you say to a colleague leading a university or facilities team that recognizes there is a space problem, but is looking for guidance on how to address it, where to start, and how to get buy in from stakeholders?  

Chancellor Zeppos:  I would begin with a specific institutional problem, not with the technology. It might be pressure to construct a new academic building, an escalating energy budget, a shortage of student gathering space, or a concern that existing classrooms are poorly matched to demand. Define the question leadership needs to answer and then demonstrate how better information can improve that decision. 

I would also involve the affected stakeholders early. Space is a highly sensitive subject on every campus because it is connected to identity, status, and academic priorities. The objective should not be framed simply as taking space away from people. It should be framed as making better use of institutional resources, improving the experience of students and faculty, and directing scarce capital toward the university’s highest priorities. 

A focused initial deployment can establish credibility, but leadership should select one that can become the foundation for campus-wide understanding. Given the resources involved and the direct connection between facilities and academic programs, senior leaders must engage in these questions. Governing boards also have an essential stewardship role and typically exercise oversight over major capital commitments. 

AIRIA: How does better visibility into how campus space is actually used translate into a better day-to-day experience for students, and where did you see that connection most clearly during your time at Vanderbilt? 

Chancellor Zeppos: Students experience a university not through a facilities inventory but through daily life. They need to know whether they can find a place to study, grab lunch without waiting in a long line, use the library without confronting overcrowding, learn in classrooms that fit the way their courses are being taught, and find inviting places to meet and build community. 

At Vanderbilt, we saw the importance of that connection through our investments in residential colleges and community-centered spaces. Those projects were not simply construction projects; they were designed to strengthen the intellectual and social fabric of the university. I always insisted that every building project should directly advance our values, mission, and academic strategy. Better utilization information would have helped us understand more precisely where students gathered, where demand exceeded capacity, and which spaces were not functioning as intended. It also would have helped us continue refining those environments after they opened. 

AIRIA: When a university is weighing whether to build proprietary space-utilization software in-house versus adopting a platform like AIRIA, what should leadership be considering beyond the upfront cost? 

 Chancellor Zeppos: I have too often seen universities try to build their own technology applications and platforms. I pushed back hard on such efforts because technology development is expensive and generally is not what universities do best. 

When colleagues proposed that we design our own technology—for example, a travel-planning and reimbursement system—I would ask the would-be developers: Does the company that does this every day have a biochemistry department? Of course not. That is not its core capability, and it could not compete with us in biochemistry. Why, then, should we assume that we can build and continuously improve a technology platform better than a company whose entire business is devoted to doing precisely that? 

Universities also sometimes underestimate the difference between building a useful prototype and operating a secure, reliable enterprise platform. The initial software is only the beginning. The university must continually maintain integrations, update the product as network environments change, protect privacy and cybersecurity, support users, improve analytics, and retain the specialized personnel who understand the system. Leadership should consider total cost of ownership, speed to implementation, reliability, scalability, privacy, interoperability, and the continuing pace of product development—not simply the upfront price. 

AIRIA: Vanderbilt has built a reputation for cultivating founders and investors, with a significant share of the endowment invested in venture capital. How does thinking like an investor and building an ecosystem of founders shape the way a university approaches innovation and long-term planning? 

 Chancellor Zeppos: Patience and a long-term view are important in both university leadership and venture investing. That may seem counter to the current fascination with unicorns and companies that scale quickly, but building a great company usually takes many years. SpaceX, for example, was founded in 2002 and did not go public until 2026. The extraordinary returns earned by early investors required patience. 

I always felt fortunate that universities could plan over a similarly long horizon. They are among our oldest continuously operating institutions, and they endure by focusing beyond the next quarter or annual budget. When we built the Martha Rivers Ingram Commons, we were not looking for a short-term benefit or an “earnings bump,” to borrow a corporate term. We were looking across decades. That long horizon is a genuine institutional advantage—and one reason the best venture-capital firms value universities as investors. 

A strong innovation ecosystem also shapes the university’s culture. Faculty, students, alumni, and investors begin to see the university not only as a place where knowledge is created, but also as a place where ideas can be translated into real applications, new technologies, companies, and public benefit. At Vanderbilt, our medical school and health system provided a powerful example: basic research was the fuel, but discoveries could move “from bench to bedside.” In a dynamic research ecosystem, inventions and new ventures become natural extensions of the university’s mission. 

AIRIA: Vanderbilt has expanded into new locations in recent years, including New York, San Francisco, and West Palm Beach. Other universities are taking similar approaches, from acquiring real estate to merging with existing universities. What was the mindset behind Vanderbilt's expansion strategy, and how should institutions think about growth: buy, merge, or build satellite campuses? 

Chancellor Zeppos: Although Vanderbilt’s most recent expansion decisions occurred after my chancellorship, they reflect an important question we considered throughout my tenure: How can a university extend its reach while preserving the quality and identity that made expansion attractive in the first place? 

Universities should begin with strategy, not real estate. What academic purpose will the new location serve? What students, faculty, research partners, or industries will it connect to the university? Is there sustained demand? And does the institution have the leadership and financial capacity to support the initiative over many years? The opportunity is enormous—to take what is distinctive at a home campus such as Nashville and bring it to others around the world. The challenge is ensuring that the new location, while perhaps offering a different experience, delivers the same excellence in education and research and advances the same institutional mission.