Our story
How N.A.I.L. came to be
Eight chapters, from an empty campus to a full ballroom.
Where it started
Nothing on campus
When Blake Steensland arrived at TCU, there was no organization on campus built around artificial intelligence in business.
He wanted to be part of something that mattered, and he could not find it. So he set out to build it.
The idea
The analyst stays. The job changes.
The idea took shape at a local hedge fund, where Blake worked alongside Chase Merrell. Surrounded by real trading and research every day, the two of them reached a conviction that has guided everything since.
The jobs students were training for were not going away. The job descriptions were. If that was true, the most valuable thing anyone could give a business student was real fluency in the tools rewriting their future work.
October 2025
Approved
Over eight weeks they designed the program, wrote the pitch, and brought it to the Neeley School of Business. In October 2025 it was approved.
December 2025
Launched side by side with Neeley AI Forward
In December the business school reached out. Neeley was building Neeley AI Forward, its own initiative to put AI at the center of business education, and it wanted to bring N.A.I.L. in as the student arm. The two launched side by side.
Behind that work is a ten million dollar grant toward AI research, committed over the coming years.
Into the room
The only students at the Dallas AI Convergence
N.A.I.L. went to the Dallas AI Convergence conference to hear from Mark Cuban and the head of AI research at JPMorgan. We were the only students there.
April 2026
Hired by Western Commerce Group
A month later Western Commerce Group, a Fort Worth M&A and capital advisory firm, hired us to run their team through a working day with AI.
We built the session around their real deal work. Prompts that keep verified facts apart from interpretation, AI that searches the firm’s own documents, costs kept in check, and agents that handle multi step work with a person checking every step. The rule we left them with was simple. A claim without a clear source is not treated as fact.
Spring 2026
Our first event, a symposium
At the end of last school year N.A.I.L. held its first ever event, a symposium that brought a room full of AI professionals together with Neeley students. A panel of industry leaders shared how AI is changing their work.
Fall 2026
Three hundred students in one room
Our first event of this year filled a ballroom with 300 students.
What began as two students is now a faculty board, an industry advisory board, and more than three hundred members. Here is what we are doing with it.