LEXINGTON, Ky. (LEX 18) — The enthusiasm coming from Dr. Brent Harrison was jumping through the screen.

“I am very excited,” he said, as we discussed a big development that recently happened on the University of Kentucky campus.

Last week, the school’s Board of Trustees approved the state’s first Artificial Intelligence major, which will offer a Bachelor of Science degree. Some hurdles remain, as approval is still needed from the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

“This is something our department chair, Zongming Fei, was in favor of,” Harrison explained. “He said, ‘We have to do this; we see the desire from our students; we see the way the job market is going.'”

Artificial Intelligence is the future, according to those who’ve grasped the technology and believe in its impact and benefits. Dr. Harrison, who said the curriculum is already in place for a potential launch in the fall of 2026, says it’ll cover all aspects of the concentration.

“Pretty much anything we’re doing with AI is having that ethics component. Dr. Judy Goldsmith, one of my colleagues here, was very adamant that no matter what we’re doing, the students have to be aware of the potential pitfalls and other issues that come up when using AI,” Dr. Harrison said.

Currently, the university offers a certificate in AI training, which is useful for those who might only need some components, but by offering it as a major course of study, Dr. Harrison believes doors will be opened to its graduates like never before. It’s Computer Science on steroids, for lack of a better term.

“This is the kind of degree you could go out and be a software developer, but you would be more practiced in using these AI tools to make yourself more efficient. You could also go into things like data analytics. And, I’ll go ahead and say it, you could go into game design, game development,” Dr. Harrison said.

He also noted that the interest is much higher than he initially thought it would be. No one has (or can) declare AI as their major right now, but he anticipates many will. And he’s expecting some students to either switch majors or add AI to complete a double major program of study.

“I think the interest is there, and I think we’re going to see that, but I do expect the enrollment to pick up over 2 or 3 years,” he predicted, again pending the approval of the state’s CPE and SACS.

Artificial intelligence-powered chatbots can provide round-the-clock access to supportive “conversations,” which some people are using as a substitute for interactions with licensed mental health clinicians or friends. But users may develop dependencies on the tools and mistake these transactions for real relationships with people or true therapy. Recent news stories have discussed the dangers of chatbots’ fabricated, supportive nature. In some incidents, people developed AI-related psychosis or were supported in their plans to commit suicide.

What is it about this technology that sucks people in? Who is at risk? How can you report on these conditions sensitively? In this webinar, hear from moderator Karen Blum and an expert panel, including psychiatrists John Torous, M.D. (Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center); Keith Sakata, M.D. (UC San Francisco), and Mashable Senior Reporter Rebecca Ruiz, to learn more.

Karen Blum

AHCJ Health Beat Leader for Health IT
Karen Blum is AHCJ’s health beat leader for health IT. She’s an independent health and science journalist, based in the Baltimore area. She has written for publications such as the Baltimore Sun, Pharmacy Practice News, Clinical Oncology News, Clinical Laboratory News, Cancer Today, CURE, AARP.org, General Surgery News and Infectious Disease Special Edition; covered numerous medical conferences for trade magazines and news services; and written many profiles and articles on medical and science research as well as trends in health care and health IT. She is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) and chairs its Virtual Education Committee; and a member of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW) and its freelance committee.

Rebecca Ruiz

Senior reporter, Mashable
Rebecca Ruiz is a Senior Reporter at Mashable. She frequently covers mental health, digital culture, and technology. Her areas of expertise include suicide prevention, screen use and mental health, parenting, youth well-being, and meditation and mindfulness. Rebecca’s experience prior to Mashable includes working as a staff writer, reporter, and editor at NBC News Digital and as a staff writer at Forbes. Rebecca has a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and a master’s degree from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Keith Sakata, M.D.

Psychiatry resident, UC San Francisco
Keith Sakata, M.D., is a psychiatry resident at the University of California, San Francisco, where he founded the Mental Health Innovation and Digital Hub (MINDHub) to advance AI-enabled care delivery. He provides treatment and psychotherapy across outpatient and specialty clinics, with a focus on dual diagnosis, PTSD, OCD, pain, and addiction.

Dr. Sakata previously trained in internal medicine at Stanford Health Care and co-founded Skript, a diagnostic training platform adopted by UCSF and Stanford that improved medical education outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic. He currently serves as Clinical Lead at Sunflower, an addiction recovery startup. He also helps and advises startups working to improve access in mental health: including Two Chairs, and Circuit Breaker Labs, which is providing a safety layer for AI tools in mental health care.

His professional interests bridge psychiatry, neuroscience, and digital innovation. Dr. Sakata holds a B.S. in Neurobiology from UC Irvine and earned his M.D. from UCSF.

John Torous, M.D., MBI

Director, Digital Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
John Torous, M.D., MBI, is director of the digital psychiatry division in the Department of Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), a Harvard Medical School-affiliated teaching hospital, where he also serves as a staff psychiatrist and associate professor. He has a background in electrical engineering and computer sciences and received an undergraduate degree in the field from UC Berkeley before attending medical school at UC San Diego. He completed his psychiatry residency, fellowship in clinical informatics and master’s degree in biomedical informatics at Harvard.

Torous is active in investigating the potential of mobile mental health technologies for psychiatry and his team supports mindapps.org as the largest database of mental health apps, the mindLAMP technology platform for scalable digital phenotyping and intervention, and the Digital Navigator program to promote digital equity and access. Torous has published over 300 peer-reviewed articles and five book chapters on the topic. He directs the Digital Psychiatry Clinic at BIDMC, which seeks to improve access to and quality of mental health care through augmenting treatment with digital innovations.

Torous serves as editor-in-chief for the journal JMIR Mental Health, web editor for JAMA Psychiatry, and a member of various American Psychiatric Association committees.

AP2 is designed to “securely initiate and transact agent-led payments across platforms,” according to a Tuesday (Sept. 16) company blog post.

Google is collaborating on agentic payments with more than 60 companies, some of which include Adyen, American Express, Mastercard, PayPal, Coinbase and Revolut, per the post.

“AI agents are capable of transacting on behalf of users, which creates a need to establish a common foundation to securely authenticate, validate and convey an agent’s authority to transact,” the post said. “While today’s payment systems generally assume a human is directly clicking ‘buy’ on a trusted surface, the rise of autonomous agents and their ability to initiate a payment breaks this fundamental assumption and raises critical questions that AP2 helps to address.”

The questions are authorization, or proving that a user gave an agent authority to make a specific purchase; authenticity, or allowing merchants to be sure an agent’s request reflects the user’s intent; and accountability in cases of fraud or incorrect transactions, per the post.

The protocol can be used as an extension of the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol and Model Context Protocol (MCP). In conjunction with industry rules and standards, it offers a payment-agnostic framework for users, merchants and payments providers to transact across all types of payment methods, the post said.

PYMNTS Intelligence’s August edition of The Prompt Economy Tracker® Series explored the rise of MCP, an open standard that was introduced by Anthropic in late 2024 and has since been adopted by OpenAI, Microsoft and Visa.

“MCP is the digital equivalent of USB-C for agents,” the report said. “It defines how agents plug into data, invoke APIs, talk to other agents, and complete tasks securely and efficiently. This is the infrastructure that transforms agents from smart tools into autonomous actors inside the commerce ecosystem.”

Meanwhile, a July PYMNTS Intelligence report, “Payments Execs Say AI Agents Give Payments an Autonomous Overhaul,” revealed that agentic AI could demand new infrastructure, trust frameworks and corporate oversight.

AI agents require real-time, scalable, secure infrastructure, the report said. Legacy systems can’t deal with thousands of concurrent autonomous agents acting on APIs, analyzing data and triggering actions across systems.

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