2026 NASA Team

The Challenge

NASA is scaling enterprise AI across the agency, pairing Microsoft Copilot with internal AI tools, but access has not translated into use. Usage data showed a sharp burst of interest at launch followed by a decline and only a partial recovery, and activity stayed concentrated in general chat rather than in the everyday workflows where AI would actually change how work gets done. The real challenge was not whether NASA had AI capabilities, but whether the workforce was equipped with the skills, governance clarity, and organizational support needed to adopt those tools responsibly and consistently at scale.

The Solution

The student team worked the problem on two fronts, organizational and behavioral. It analyzed NASA's Copilot usage data, the most mature dataset available, and built dashboards covering both launch week and longer-term adoption. Launch-week requests clustered at a few centers, led by Johnson Space Center at 37%, Kennedy Space Center at 22%, and Marshall Space Flight Center at 19%. The adoption view showed the same rise and fall agency-wide: total requests fell from 4,690 in December 2025 to 1,489 in February 2026 before recovering to 2,048 in March, and Copilot chat absorbed 87% of Microsoft 365 AI activity at launch and still 73% by March, with Outlook, Word, and Teams together accounting for only a small share of activity.

To explain why the numbers behaved that way, the team ran stakeholder interviews and a listening tour across centers and leadership groups, then synthesized the quantitative and qualitative findings into a library of eight workforce personas — from the mission-driven optimizer and the AI skeptic to the silent adopter and the champion — each mapped to mindset, needs, concerns, and adoption posture. Those artifacts, together with a case for change, a data framework, and a metrics framework, became the grounding for an AI agent that helps leadership tailor communication and rollout strategy for each new AI initiative.

The Impact

The result gives NASA a repeatable change management process rather than a one-time rollout, with adoption defined by sustained, integrated use instead of activation. Because the team delivered grounding documentation rather than a fixed tool, NASA can load it into whichever AI platform it chooses. The metrics framework tracks manager engagement, sentiment, champion stories, event presence, and use-case diversity on a monthly to quarterly cadence, with use-case diversity reviewed quarterly to semiannually, giving the agency a measurable, workforce-aware basis for every future AI rollout.