How PMOs Lead Responsible AI Transformation in Higher Education – with Ivonne Mejia
Ivonne Mejia shares how CPMAI is helping PMOs lead AI initiatives strategically and responsibly, ensuring alignment, oversight, and measurable impact from day one.
Episode Overview
In this episode of AI Today, host Kathleen Walch talks with Ivonne Mejia, Lead Project Portfolio Manager for the San Francisco Bay Region Network at California State University (CSU), to discuss how PMOs can drive responsible AI transformation in higher education.
As multiple CSU campuses consolidate under one unified PMO, Ivonne shares how she's embedding CPMAI into portfolio intake, prioritization, and oversight, ensuring AI initiatives are strategically aligned and governed. She makes the case for how CPMAI Phase One: Business Understanding shifts the question from “How do we build this with AI?” to “Should we?”
The conversation covers readiness assessment, outcome definition, ethics, and stakeholder alignment. Additionally, Ivonne connects her approach to PMI’s M.O.R.E. vision: managing perceptions, owning success, relentlessly reassessing, and expanding perspectives as data and policy evolve.
Tune in to hear about:
- How CPMAI prevents costly missteps
- Why starting with the right business problem changes everything
- How iterative go/no-go decisions keep AI projects aligned and on track
- What the future of AI-augmented project leadership looks like
This episode delivers practical insight into leading AI initiatives that are aligned, governed, and built for measurable impact.
Featured in This Episode
Ivonne Mejia, PMO
Lead Project Portfolio Manager for the San Francisco Bay Region Network
Ivonne Mejia is a PMO and portfolio management leader, PMI volunteer, and early adopter of AI-powered project management tools and methodologies for AI projects. She is the Lead Project Portfolio Manager for the San Francisco Bay Region Network, overseeing a multi-campus IT portfolio across California State University (CSU) East Bay, San Francisco State, and Sonoma State Universities, with responsibility for project intake, prioritization, governance, performance, and executive reporting.
She is a graduate of UC Berkeley’s Technology Leadership program with a focus on Digital and AI Transformation and holds the PMI-CPMAI™ certification in AI project management. Her interest centers on helping organizations and teams deliver measurable value through responsible and practical AI transformation initiatives.
Ivonne also serves as COO of the PMI Wine Country Chapter and as a PMIxAI Champion, supporting project professionals, PMO leads, and portfolio managers in staying current, improving efficiency through AI-enabled tools and methodologies, and applying them in real-world settings.
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