CNI Spring 2026 Membership Meeting

The ARL/CNI AI Scenarios: AI-Influenced Futures was designed to guide readers through envisioning possible futures, ten years out, in which artificial intelligence (AI) has reshaped the landscape of research, higher education, and research libraries. In 2025, teams at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) libraries and the University of Delaware (UD) Library, Museums and Press deployed the scenarios to facilitate strategic planning conversations about AI in their institutions' libraries. These two institutions differ in significant ways, from their private/public status to their current centralized/distributed methods of supporting AI at the university. Yet, both planning processes leveraging the AI Scenarios surfaced similar strategic priorities, including the necessity for cross-institutional partnerships, staff upskilling, and cultural shifts within libraries around the knowledge, use, and implementation of AI. In both meetings, participants recognized various tensions, such as the value of openness versus embargoing of digitized collections, particularly as unique library materials hold unique value for large language model training.

This session will share how the JHU and UD teams ran internal strategic planning sessions using the AI Scenarios, detail the strategic themes that emerged during these discussions, and share how each is prioritizing and implementing findings at their institutions. During this session, the presenters will invite attendees to reflect on their own experiences in strategic planning, implementation, and navigation of organizational culture change in the context of AI. Attendees will have learned how the AI Scenarios were facilitated and analyzed at two very different institutions, providing the attendees with a strategy to either engage in the scenarios at their own institution or to learn from the unified findings from these two institutions.