In just this 2025-26 academic year, Royal has worked with 27 student interns in 21 distinct internship positions. Most of those students are from UW-Eau Claire and UW-Stout, with occasional hires from UW-River Falls, the University of Minnesota, Chippewa Valley Technical College and other universities.
“There is risk with any type of innovation, but we didn’t want polished answers from a consultant. We chose specifically to leverage student curiosity and knowledge of the latest AI information,” Riechers says.
Next, Dr. Doug Dunham at UW-Eau Claire was tasked with coordinating the collaboration. Based on the Royal Credit Union locations near UW campuses, UW-Stout and UW-River Falls were invited to join UW-Eau Claire in a partnership.
Formalizing a multicampus internship program
Dunham is the interim director of the Office of Corporate and Community Partnerships at UW-Eau Claire. He says the goal in establishing new partnerships is simply “to connect companies and organizations to the available expertise of our faculty and students.”
Dunham handled logistics of pairing UW experts from the three universities with the team at Royal Credit Union to define the scope of a student-driven AI solution to better serve Royal customers. What made this Royal internship program unique, Dunham says, was how it challenged the long-term practice of student internships in a whole new way.
“Our students have been filling internships at places like RCU for many years — in opportunities to see how organizations operate and get a glimpse of a career in those fields,” Dunham says.
“This pilot project, on the other hand, was all about students seeking something entirely new. AI is new to all businesses at this point, and these students developed specific recommendations for how Royal could best leverage the power of this technology.”
Defining the problem statement was step one
Adam Kinnard has been with Royal Credit Union for 25 years, and currently serves as the chief technology officer. He and Dunham aligned a list of potential AI projects with the backgrounds and areas of study among the students.
From a final list of projects, Kinnard asked the Royal team to choose the one that could drive the best outcome for their membership.
“We landed on exploring the AI use cases that would help us best understand and predict member behaviors and make the most meaningful improvements to their experiences with us,” Kinnard says.
The main query the students were asked to answer was this: “Is Royal Credit Union ready to build AI models in-house to better serve our members, or should we use an existing AI platform?”
Students tested an existing AI model and created a model of their own, one built to answer the question, “What is the next best Royal Credit Union product for a given member to engage with?”
The four students who served as AI interns at Royal were:
- Emmett Jaakkola, a December 2025 UW-Stout graduate with multiple bachelor’s degrees in applied math and computer science.
- Paige Keller, a senior computer science major at UW-Eau Claire.
- Matthew Peplinski, a December 2025 UW-Stout graduate in math and computer science.
- Mariah Wastie, a computer science and data science double major at UW-River Falls.
The interns were supported in their work by faculty mentors from each campus. They were:
- Dr. Rahul Gomes, associate professor and chair of computer science at UW-Eau Claire.
- Dr. Anthony Varghese, professor and chair of computer, information and data science at UW-River Falls.
- Dr. Keith Wojciechowski, professor of math, statistics and computer science at UW-Stout.
For Varghese, the AI program at Royal was an ideal application of machine learning, one he says took student conceptions of AI from only “big tech” industries to the more practical uses that will make AI an indispensable tool in the full spectrum of a global economy.
“When AI is mentioned in the press and popular culture, even our computer science and data science students mostly think of the big tech companies,” Varghese says. “It was a formative experience for them to see how AI techniques could be used in a local credit union for very down-to-earth purposes.”
Riechers says it was encouraging that the students found successful outcomes for whichever type of AI model Royal may choose to use in the future, a model built in-house or a purchased model.
“In the end, Royal is about helping people. From this internship program, we now know we can take big datasets, gain business intelligence and ultimately listen better to create a more personalized member experience,” Riechers says.
The big picture ROI for Royal and other potential UW partners
As Royal intern Keller explains, a tremendous learning opportunity for the students resulted in a value-added outcome for Royal.
“This project was really all about Royal being able, either with our AI model or a purchased one, to take the data they already have and use it in a whole new way to improve their services,” Keller says, adding that Royal was able to get the query results quickly at a low cost and without taking credit union staff off existing workflows to do it.
Dunham is particularly pleased with the success of this cross-campus internship collaboration and the ways students and faculty mentors worked amongst themselves and with Royal.
“The big lesson from this, in my mind, is that we now know we can do it. Moving in this collaborative direction for future projects will allow us to diversify our partnership options and look for new opportunities to pool talent and resources in this way,” Dunham says.
Dunham emphasizes the value of this collaboration for students whose future careers will almost always involve working among people with a range of specific training and expertise, unlike course-related projects on a team who have had identical training.
“Everyone learns more while actively anticipating the next great tech or industry trend,” Dunham says. In the specific case of AI, Dunham says a program like this one better prepares everyone for the future.
“This AI collaboration demonstrates that some of the fears about AI can be unfounded,” Dunham says.
“AI isn’t really going to ‘replace people’,” Dunham says. "However, people in the workforce who understand AI and what it can do are likely to replace those who don’t. We’re all working to give our UW graduates that understanding.”
