Dr. Thomas Waite

Dr. Thomas Waite is a higher education executive, educator, technology founder, former CEO, board chair, and applied artificial intelligence practitioner whose career spans more than three decades at the intersection of education, business, technology, strategy, and organizational transformation.

He is Founder, Executive Chair, and Chief Evangelist of K16 Solutions, a global education technology company serving hundreds of colleges and universities across 14 countries. As K16’s founding Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Waite helped build the company from concept through product development, commercialization, fundraising, profitability, international growth, and executive succession. He raised and oversaw approximately $24 million in capital, built a 69-person organization and nine-member board, helped develop patented technology, and established major strategic partnerships across the education technology sector. K16’s technology now protects approximately 2.7 petabytes of institutional data and more than 12 million archived courses.

Before founding K16, Dr. Waite held senior academic and operational leadership roles including Provost, Chief Academic Officer, Chief Student Affairs Officer, National Associate Dean, Program Dean, and faculty leader. Across his academic career, his responsibilities encompassed more than 34,000 students, more than 1,000 faculty, more than 22 degree programs, and operations across 32 states. He helped pioneer nationally scaled online education and built academic, faculty, quality, accreditation, assessment, retention, and operating systems supporting large and rapidly growing institutions.

Today, much of Dr. Waite’s work focuses on the practical application of advanced artificial intelligence to leadership, education, strategy, and organizational performance. He operates an integrated, human-in-the-loop AI environment using five specialized agents working continuously across research, analysis, strategy, writing, decision support, institutional memory, project execution, and multi-model verification. His work includes multimodal AI, agentic workflows, multi-model orchestration, governance, privacy, verification, and the design of AI-enabled operating environments that preserve human judgment, accountability, and decision authority.

At Arizona State University’s W. P. Carey School of Business, Dr. Waite teaches senior capstone courses in strategic management and leadership. He pioneered Executive AI Labs that integrate multimodal, multi-model, human-in-the-loop artificial intelligence directly into strategy and leadership education. Rather than teaching students simply how to prompt an AI system, the Labs require them to compare models, challenge assumptions, identify weaknesses, verify claims, improve decisions, document their reasoning, and understand when human judgment must override the machine.

Student response to the Executive AI Labs has been exceptionally strong. Students have reported substantial gains in confidence, practical AI fluency, judgment, and willingness to use advanced AI systems in their professional lives, including students who began the course apprehensive about AI and completed it with markedly greater confidence and capability. His WPC 480 course in Spring 2026 and WPC 470 course in Fall 2026 received the department’s highest student course-evaluation ratings.

Dr. Waite also teaches and coaches executives, faculty members, employees, and business leaders in the practical and responsible use of advanced AI systems. He was selected from among W. P. Carey faculty to lead a six-hour executive master class in February 2027 for business owners and leaders focused on artificial intelligence, strategy, leadership, and organizational performance.

His work in technology extends well beyond AI. Dr. Waite helped pioneer automated learning-management-system migration and enterprise LMS archiving, co-authored a United States software patent, and led the development of technology helping colleges and universities create trusted institutional data foundations for governance, analytics, planning, continuity, and AI readiness.

Dr. Waite has also spent much of his career working at the intersection of leadership, quality, and organizational improvement. His background includes ISO quality systems, Malcolm Baldrige Performance Criteria, large-scale academic restructuring, institutional recovery, accreditation, governance, executive succession, fundraising, and board leadership. His accreditation and regulatory work has included the Higher Learning Commission, Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education, National League for Nursing, WASC, and state agencies.

He is the founder and author of Ego Friction, where he writes about leadership behavior, institutional decision-making, artificial intelligence, governance, organizational change, and the future of higher education. His writing reflects a recurring theme throughout his career: institutions become stronger when leaders combine curiosity, evidence, accountability, humility, and the courage to change.

Dr. Waite holds a Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration, an M.A. in Organizational Behavior, and a B.S. in Business Management. His doctoral research examined transactional distance and student retention in distance education. He has also completed advanced business strategy and strategic decision-making study through Harvard University.

Whether in the classroom, boardroom, executive suite, or technology environment, Dr. Waite’s work is grounded in a simple principle: increasingly capable technology should be used to build increasingly capable people and organizations.