The Frontier Awards: What They Are, Why They Matter, and Who Won!

In February 2026, we announced something new and intentionally bold. 

The Frontier Awards were created to recognize the people who don’t wait for permission to move AI forward. The ones who build the Agent, push past skepticism, and turn pilots into production. Since then, we’ve seen exactly why this program needed to exist. 

With nominations now officially closed, it’s a good moment to step back and clearly answer a few questions:  

What is the Frontier Awards program? 

 The Frontier Awards are Cloudforce’s inaugural recognition program celebrating individuals and partners who are driving real, measurable impact with AI. 

Grounded in Microsoft’s definition of a Frontier Firm, the program honors people who go beyond experimentation—embedding AI deeply into operations, transforming how work gets done, and delivering outcomes that scale. 

This is not a popularity contest or a marketing checkbox. Every nomination goes through a rigorous, expert-led evaluation process focused on: 

  • Depth of AI integration 
  • Measurable business impact 
  • Innovation and AI-first thinking 
  • Community, advocacy, and ecosystem contribution 

The goal is simple: recognize work that actually moves the frontier forward. 

Who the Awards Are For? 

The Frontier Awards were intentionally designed to be inclusive of the full AI ecosystem: 

  • Customers & Practitioners driving transformational outcomes in the public sector and beyond 
  • Microsoft Partners collaborating with Cloudforce to deliver shared innovation 
  • Change-makers at every level, from technical builders to adoption champions

Sometimes, the hardest work often happens quietly. This program exists to bring it into the spotlight. 

This year’s awards span seven categories, each designed to recognize a different kind of frontier leadership: 

  • 🛠Technical Hero: Honoring individuals who go above and beyond to solve complex challenges, improve reliability, and ensure mission-critical success. 
  • 🔄Change Champion: Celebrating those who lead transformative change, inspire teams, and challenge the status quo to adopt new ways of working. 
  • 📣Amplified Advocate: Highlighting AI superfans who promote innovative utilization, share success stories, and grow the AI community through advocacy and referrals. 
  • 🚀Adoption Accelerator: Recognizing customers who rapidly scaled AI tools and embedded them into daily operations with measurable results. 
  • 🤖Best Agent / Use Case: Awarding creativity and strategic thinking in implementing AI to solve real-world challenges. 
  • Customer of the Year: Spotlighting a customer who exemplifies excellence across adoption, innovation, advocacy, and measurable business impact. 
  • 🤝Partner of the Year(Microsoft Employees Only): Celebrating those who drive shared innovation and meaningful impact through partnership. 

Each category was awarded one finalist and one winner—selected because the work stood up to scrutiny. 

Why the Frontier Awards Matter 

AI doesn’t transform organizations on its own. People do. 

The Frontier Awards exist to celebrate those people—the builders, champions, and advocates who make AI real, usable, and valuable. By recognizing excellence through a credible and rigorous process, we’re doing more than handing out awards: 

  • We’re validating the work that actually drives outcomes 
  • We’re sharing stories others can learn from 
  • We’re strengthening a community of practitioners pushing AI forward together 

Yes, winners receive a jaw dropping award…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

…global recognition, digital badges, and bragging rights—but the real value is acknowledgment that the work mattered. 

Who Won? 

The moment we’ve been building toward is here. 

After a rigorous, multistage evaluation process led by Cloudforce executives, Microsoft leaders, and respected voices from across the AI industry, the Frontier Awards finalists and winners have officially been selected. 

Each nomination was reviewed against the same high bar that defines a Frontier organization—depth of AI integration, measurable business impact, innovation mindset, and contribution to the broader community. The individuals and teams chosen stood out not because their work sounded impressive, but because it delivered real, lasting results. 

Below, you’ll find a spotlight on each finalist and winner—recognizing the builders, champions, advocates, and partners who are actively shaping what AI looks like in practice today. Their stories represent what’s possible when vision meets execution. 

Finalists: 

Change Champion — Finalist 

Lana Soboleva | Director, Digital Enablement, Temple University Health System 

When Lana Soboleva joined Temple University Health System, she assumed ownership of nebulaONE® at a pivotal early stage. The platform had been live for less than a quarter, operating as an early MVP centered on a single agent, requiring scale, refinement, and clear architectural direction to realize its full potential. Lana quickly recognized the opportunity and took decisive ownership of the platform’s technical and product direction. 

While onboarding into a large academic health system and managing a broad portfolio, Lana transformed nebulaONE® — branded internally as Sage AI — into a reliable, scalable, and enterprise-ready platform. She addressed foundational technical challenges, partnered closely with the Cloudforce technical team, and established governance and usage guidelines to support responsible AI adoption. 

Today, the platform supports a growing catalog of functional agents, including Marketing Copywriting, Financial Document Analysis, Foreign Language Translation, Document Summarization, and File and Image Processing. Lana also introduced agentic workflow orchestration, enabling users to interact through a unified interface while leveraging multiple agents behind the scenes. 

A colleague highlighted Lana’s development of advanced prompt frameworks capable of extracting and structuring data from large datasets and generating executive-ready outputs in Excel and PowerPoint — delivering actionable insights that help identify bottlenecks and reduce risk. 

All of this was achieved in under six months. Lana’s combination of technical depth and strategic vision has positioned Temple Health to scale AI capabilities in a disciplined, enterprise-focused manner — a quiet but unmistakable shift across the organization. 

🚘 Adoption Accelerator — Finalist 

Lawrence (Loren) Hudson | Chief Technology Officer, Information Technology, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth

At one of the world’s most prestigious business schools, where invigorating innovation meets enduring tradition, Loren Hudson navigates both with impressive skill. Loren Hudson walks it with uncommon skill. As Chief Technology Officer for Information Technology at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, Hudson has been instrumental in transforming AI from an emerging capability into an embedded, operational asset — advancing the adoption of Cloudforce’s nebulaONE®, and the Amos AI platforms as part of Tuck’s broader exploration of how AI can support teaching, learning, research, and operations across a complex academic environment. 

Hudson is recognized for a rare combination of technical fluency, strategic vision, and intellectual curiosity. Rather than treating AI as a standalone experiment, he consistently challenged existing assumptions and workflows, asking how these tools could fundamentally enhance decision-making, operational efficiency, and learning outcomes. This mindset enabled rapid experimentation followed by disciplined scaling — moving quickly from pilot concepts to repeatable, production-ready use cases. 

What sets Hudson apart is his ability to frame AI adoption through a rigorous academic lens. His use cases are not only technically sound but also pedagogically credible, ethically grounded, and aligned with institutional missions. By grounding innovation in research-informed thinking and real-world academic scenarios, he has helped bridge the gap between theoretical potential and operational reality — increasing stakeholder confidence and accelerating organizational readiness for AI adoption across Tuck. 

His collaborative leadership style has been equally impactful. Hudson engages colleagues as partners in exploration, helping to foster an environment for thoughtful experimentation. His work has supported a broader cultural shift at Tuck, where AI is increasingly understood not as a standalone tool, but as part of a larger academic, operational, and strategic evolution. Hudson engages teams as partners in exploration, fostering an environment where innovation is both encouraged and disciplined. The result is a cultural shift: AI is now viewed at Tuck not as an experimental add-on, but as a strategic, academic, and operational asset. In a landscape where many institutions are still debating whether to adopt AI, Loren Hudson has already helped one of the world’s leading business schools chart its course — a testament to the kind of thoughtful, mission-aligned leadership that Cloudforce’s “AI for All” vision is built upon. 

 Customer of the Year  Finalist 

David Gindhart | Associate Vice President of IT & the AI Essentials and AI Studio teams, Penn State University

Penn State’s rollout of nebulaONE® reflects a deliberate, team-driven approach to AI adoption—one that treats AI literacy and AI capability as inseparable. Dave Gindhart, Associate Vice President for Administrative IT, and Crystal Ramsay, Assistant Vice Provost for the AI Center of Excellence, intentionally linked their respective initiatives—AI Studio and AI Essentials—so that education and hands-on access advanced together. Faculty and staff weren’t simply given new tools; they were given the knowledge and confidence to use them responsibly and effectively. 

In just 86 days, the AI Studio and AI Essentials teams delivered nebulaONE at AI speed and Penn State scale—reaching approximately 30,000 faculty and staff. A full student rollout is planned for fall 2026. 

The AI Essentials and AI Studio teams are a broad, cross-functional group whose members contributed extraordinary effort and focus over the past several months, often alongside existing roles and responsibilities. Their collaboration reflects a shared conviction that meaningful AI transformation doesn’t hinge on a single champion—it requires collective ownership, disciplined execution, and leadership willing to link initiatives rather than silo them. 

Together, this work embodies the kind of mission-driven partnership that makes “AI for All” possible—sustainably and at scale. 

🛠 Technical Hero — Finalist 

Gabriel Ruiz | CTO & Director of IT Operations, UCLA Anderson School of Management 

Gabriel Ruiz has been with UCLA Anderson for more than twenty-five years, and when the school embarked on its AI journey with Cloudforce in April 2024, he stepped up to own the entire technical implementation — making UCLA Anderson among the first higher education institutions in the country to bring nebulaONE® to production. Gabriel serves as CTO and Director of IT Infrastructure & Operations, and it is worth noting that AI is not his full-time responsibility; he leads infrastructure and technology operations for the entire school. 

Navigating UCLA’s rigorous security and compliance requirements, Gabriel drove the integration of the Anderson Azure tenant with the central campus Azure tenant to enable single sign-on and seamless user access. He personally championed early access to leading AI models, including Anthropic’s Claude via AWS Bedrock, developed onboarding materials and led tailored hands-on training sessions for teams across the school. 

The results speak volumes: today, the platform — branded internally as AnderBRAIN — supports over 40 official AI agents and more than 315 personal agents created by individual users, serving approximately 500 faculty and staff and 2,200 students. As CIO Howard Miller noted in his nomination, “We would not have a single production AI agent at Anderson without Gabriel’s contribution.” Gabriel didn’t wait for a roadmap — he built one. That is exactly what a Technical Hero does.

📣 Amplified Advocate — Finalist

Mark Bramwell | Chief Digital and Information Officer, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford & Director of Strategic Digital Partnerships, University of Oxford 

Few voices in higher education carry the weight of eight centuries of institutional legacy — and fewer still wield that influence to champion the future with such conviction. Mark Bramwell, CDIO of the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and Director of Strategic Digital Partnerships for the wider University, has been one of nebulaONE®’s most visible, vocal, and strategically impactful advocates since the platform’s earliest days. 

Bramwell’s career in technology leadership spans decades of transformative work. Before joining Oxford, he spent nine years as Head of IT for the Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation with a £20 billion endowment, and prior to that served as Head of IT Development at WHSmith. A Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS), he has been repeatedly named in the Global CIO 200, World CIO100 and UK CIO 100 and was recognized among the UKTech50 most influential IT leaders in the UK. He has also served as Chair of the UK Corporate IT Forum, Non-Executive Director of the Houses of Parliament and House of Lords and Royal National Orthopedic Hospital, and as a Trustee of the Brandon Trust. 

At Oxford, Bramwell has been instrumental in positioning the Saïd Business School — and the broader University — as a global leader in responsible AI adoption. Under his leadership, Oxford piloted nebulaONE® with approximately 200 research, teaching, and professional services staff, building on an initial deployment at the business school. Bramwell noted: “AI adoption is rising rapidly, and offering inclusive access to a range of secure generative AI platforms, tools and agents is a key part of our evolving digital approach”. His impact extends well beyond Oxford’s walls: Bramwell has actively engaged with external stakeholders at CIO-focused conferences to showcase nebulaONE’s benefits, influencing other UK educational institutions to explore similar innovations. Working in tandem with his colleague Jyotveer Gill, he has organized workshops for Oxford’s AI Champion Group, equipping key stakeholders with the knowledge to maximize the platform’s capabilities, and surfaced valuable internal metrics that have directly enhanced Cloudforce’s approach to data and product development. 

Bramwell has communicated the dual responsibility AI presents to academia: universities must adopt AI to become more efficient while simultaneously preparing students with the AI skills they will need for the future of work. When the world’s number-one-ranked university speaks about AI with this level of clarity and commitment, the sector listens. Mark Bramwell embodies the Amplified Advocate Award — and Cloudforce’s mission of “AI for All” — by ensuring that Oxford’s voice is not just heard, but leads. 

🤖 Best Use Case/Agent — Finalist 

Daniel Razo | AI Engineer, Utah Valley University 

If you’ve visited Utah Valley University’s website recently, chances are you’ve already met Wilson. Not a person — an AI agent. Ask Wilson, the public-facing AI assistant prominently featured on UVU’s homepage, has become one of the most highly trafficked AI agents in higher education — and the person who built it, supports it, manages it, and continually improves it is Daniel Razo. 

As an AI Engineer at UVU, Razo is the hands-on architect behind Ask Wilson, a nebulaONE®-powered conversational agent that serves as the university’s digital front door. Positioned directly on UVU’s main website, Ask Wilson provides real-time, AI-driven assistance to prospective students, current students, faculty, staff, and the broader community — answering questions about admissions, programs, campus resources, and more. It is a centerpiece of UVU’s broader digital transformation strategy, which President Astrid Tuminez has championed as essential to the university’s mission of providing accessible, student-centered education in an increasingly digital world. 

What makes Ask Wilson remarkable is not just its visibility — it’s the ambition of putting a generative AI agent on the front page of a major public university’s website, where every interaction is a reflection of institutional quality and trust. That kind of deployment demands precision, reliability, and constant refinement. Razo delivers on all three. He doesn’t just maintain Ask Wilson; he evolves it — tuning responses, expanding capabilities, and ensuring the agent meets the diverse needs of a university community that spans more than 44,000 students. UVU’s investment in AI is well-documented: the university was recognized by EdTech Magazine for its AI-powered tools enhancing student services, and Ask Wilson sits at the heart of that recognition. 

Among colleagues, Razo’s dedication is unmistakable — and his energy is infectious. When he’s not moshing, he’s prompting, and the entire university knows it. His work on Ask Wilson represents exactly what the Best Use Case/Agent award celebrates: a creative, strategic AI implementation that solves real-world challenges at scale. In giving every visitor to UVU’s website an intelligent, always-available guide, Daniel Razo has helped make Cloudforce’s vision of “AI for All” not just aspirational, but literal — one conversation at a time. 

🤝 Partner of the Year — Finalist 

Tracy Woods | Solutions Engineer Manager, Microsoft  

Tracy Woods has been one of Cloudforce’s most impactful advocates within Microsoft. As an SE Manager, Tracy has walked Cloudforce into many rooms that would have been really challenging without her advocacy. She has walked through the doors of Cloudforce to shed her industry wisdom to our internal teams for our own professional development. What stands true across every environment is that Tracy is consistent, passionate, and genuine — a combination that is extremely rare to find. 

Tracy’s ability to open doors, build trust, and champion the nebulaONE® platform within Microsoft’s vast ecosystem has been instrumental in expanding Cloudforce’s reach and impact. Her work reflects the best of what the Partner of the Year award celebrates: shared innovation driven by authentic belief in the mission. Tracy’s contributions remind us that the most powerful partnerships are built not on transactions, but on trust — and on a shared commitment to bringing “AI for All” to every institution that needs it. 

Winners:

🔄 Change Champion — Winner 

Dr. Charmaine Madison | Vice President and Chief Information Officer, George Mason University 

Dr. Charmaine Madison arrived at George Mason University in August 2024 bringing over 30 years of federal government IT experience, including more than a decade with the Central Intelligence Agency where she served as deputy chief of the IT Enterprise Group. A retired cyber operations officer with the U.S. Air Force, she holds a doctorate in strategic leadership from Regent University and multiple master’s degrees7 . She now serves as Vice President of Information Services and CIO, overseeing the university’s technology infrastructure and serving as its technology leader in integrating the emerging AI ecosystem. 

Since her arrival at GMU, Dr. Madison has been a champion for the potential of generative AI — a champion for its adoption across faculty, staff, and students, and a pragmatist around what it takes to drive success. The results have been extraordinary: as of the blog post, George Mason has achieved a 3x multiplier of average daily users of its AI platform when comparing 2025 to 2026. 

Dr. Madison’s ability to forge solid relationships with strategic partners and build consensus across multiple organizational levels has been instrumental in transforming AI from a peripheral experiment into a central pillar of institutional strategy. Her combination of executive vision, operational discipline, and genuine commitment to equitable AI access embodies the Change Champion award — and Cloudforce’s mission of “AI for All” — in its fullest expression. 

🚀 Adoption Accelerator — Winner 

Paul Wolff | Director of the Faculty Consulting Group, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School 

When UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School set out to bring generative AI into the heart of its academic experience, it needed someone who could bridge the gap between cutting-edge technology and the daily realities of teaching, learning, and institutional operations. Paul Wolff has been that bridge — and then some. As Director of the Faculty Consulting Group at one of the nation’s top-ranked business schools, Wolff has led the instructional and educational development side of BlueChipAI, UNC Kenan-Flagler’s branded deployment of nebulaONE® by Cloudforce. 

From the platform’s launch in September 2025, Wolff moved with purpose and consistency. He organized and led weekly training sessions designed to educate the entire Kenan-Flagler community — students, faculty, and staff — on generative AI capabilities, data security, privacy, and ethics. These weren’t one-off orientations; they were a sustained, structured commitment to building AI fluency across the institution. He delivered one of the BEST Customer Advisory Board Spotlight’s the community has ever seen and continued to drive growth in platform utilization. 

Beyond training, Wolff has been the creative engine behind BlueChipAI’s expanding library of AI agents. He developed “official” agents to support teaching, learning, and operational efficiencies, and collaborated with Cloudforce to build custom agents capable of specialized functions — including classroom simulations where students practice negotiation and sales pitches. Early successes under his leadership include an executive program feedback analysis tool, an undergraduate FAQ hub, finance and HR response agents, and a job-interview simulation tool that directly enhances career readiness. 

What makes Wolff’s work especially noteworthy is the institutional context in which it sits. BlueChipAI was launched in alignment with UNC Chancellor Lee Roberts’ strategic priority on AI and supported by the Provost’s AI Acceleration Program, with Dean Mary Margaret Frank noting that the platform prepares the community “to use AI creatively, confidently and ethically”. Wolff’s role in translating that vision into weekly practice — agent by agent, session by session — is precisely the kind of disciplined, mission-aligned adoption that turns institutional ambition into institutional reality. His work exemplifies Cloudforce’s “AI for All” mission: making the world’s most powerful AI tools accessible, secure, and genuinely useful for every member of a learning community. 

 Customer of the Year — Winner 

Howard Miller | Chief Information Officer, UCLA Anderson School of Management

Howard Miller is, in many ways, the person who proved what nebulaONE® could become. As CIO of UCLA Anderson School of Management — a role he has held for over seven years, bringing more than 35 years of IT leadership experience across manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and higher education— Howard made it a priority to move AI from the periphery of operations to the center of institutional strategy. 

Working with Cloudforce beginning in February 2024, Howard’s team designed and deployed a suite of generative and agentic AI tools, starting with the Capstone Assistant and Syllabus Agent. The initial implementation delivered a 75% increase in student engagement within three months, and the Capstone Agent alone contributed to a 75% increase in FEMBA program enrollments. Today, UCLA Anderson has deployed more than 20 production AI agents across faculty, staff, and students. 

What sets Howard apart is not just adoption and innovation, but advocacy. He regularly participates in reference calls on behalf of Cloudforce, speaking candidly with prospective customers — and according to Cloudforce CEO Husein Sharaf, Howard has “single-handedly” brought about a dozen new universities into the nebulaONE® community. As Howard himself has said: “The thing I like most about Cloudforce is that while we can continue to go back to them for help, we also have the ability to be autonomous because they trained us on how to use their platform”. Howard Miller is the Customer of the Year because he didn’t just adopt AI — he championed it, scaled it, and inspired others to follow. 

🛠 Technical Hero — Winner 

Jason Hall | Senior Information Services Developer, University of Lincoln 

When the University of Lincoln set out to expand its AI capabilities through a strategic partnership with Cloudforce and Microsoft, it was Jason Hall who served as the technical backbone of that transformation. As a Senior Information Services Developer, Jason played a central role in the design, setup, and implementation of Newton (aka nebulaONE)— Lincoln’s AI platform, turning a strategic ambition into a reliable, production-ready service. 

What distinguishes Jason is the breadth of his impact. He migrated Lincoln from a single bespoke policy AI platform to nebulaONE® within just three months, eliminating approximately £70,000 in specialist development costs and extending AI capabilities from 200 users to 2,000 staff — with plans to scale to 20,000 students this spring. His careful system engineering ensured that the platform met Lincoln’s security, governance, and data protection requirements from day one. 

But Jason’s contributions extend well beyond Lincoln’s campus. He has been a prolific contributor to the broader Cloudforce technical community — authoring knowledge articles for ServiceNow, proactively testing new features, meeting with UCLA Health to introduce them to ONEchat, and consistently raising feature suggestions that have shaped the platform’s development. He even invited Cloudforce to participate in an on-campus AI day for staff and faculty alongside Microsoft, fostering a culture of learning and innovation within the academic community. 

Jason Hall exemplifies the spirit of the Technical Hero award: delivering exceptional outcomes for his institution while raising the standard of the nebulaONE® platform for everyone. His work is a testament to what Cloudforce’s mission of “AI for All” looks like when it’s built by someone who genuinely cares about getting it right. 

📣 Amplified Advocate — Winner

Wendy Wong | Director, Enterprise Support & Client Engagement, Florida Atlantic University 

Some advocates are loud. Others are everywhere. Wendy Wong is both — and that is precisely why she is the inaugural winner of the Cloudforce Frontier Awards’ Amplified Advocate category. As Director of Enterprise Support & Client Engagement within the Office of Information Technology at Florida Atlantic University, Wong has spent the past year turning owlONE — FAU’s branded deployment of nebulaONE® — from a promising pilot into a university-wide movement. 

Wong’s career at FAU spans more than two decades, beginning as a web developer in 2002 and progressing through roles in application development, project management, and quality assurance before assuming her current directorship in 2022. A proud FAU alumnus, she brings a rare combination of technical depth and operational discipline—backed by her Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, Salesforce expertise, and CSM/CSPO certifications. That foundation proved essential when FAU partnered with Cloudforce to deploy nebulaONE® — and Wong became the person who made sure the entire university knew about it. 

Her advocacy has been relentless and multidimensional. Internally, Wong organized faculty-centered workshops, open labs, and hands-on AI PlAIground sessions designed to meet instructors where they are — building confidence through practical, real-world use cases rather than abstract demonstrations. She launched a dedicated owlONE website that centralized access, documentation, and examples, making self-service adoption seamless for the entire FAU community. She built and shared centrally available agents aligned to instructional and operational needs, enabled personal agents and ONEchat to lower barriers to entry, and proactively met with functional offices across campus to demonstrate real-world applications. Her sessions at FAU’s Teaching with Technology Showcase invited faculty to exhibit successful use cases and participate in agent-building sandboxes — turning adopters into advocates in their own right. 

Externally, Wong has been what Cloudforce CEO Husein Sharaf described as “a consummate promoter of owlONE in every interaction with her peers, her community at FAU, and the broader Higher Ed ecosystem”. The numbers tell the story: from April 2025 through February 2026, owlONE processed more than 281 million tokens, and achieved a 4x increase in user adoption between the Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 semesters. Those results did not happen by accident — they happened because Wendy Wong made sure every corner of FAU’s community understood not just what owlONE could do, but why it mattered. Her work is a masterclass in what it means to amplify a mission — and a living example of Cloudforce’s commitment to “AI for All.” 

🤖 Best Use Case/Agent — Winner 

Thomas Scherz | AI Engineer, University of Cincinnati 

There is a particular kind of builder who doesn’t just create tools — they create ecosystems. Thomas Scherz is that kind of builder. As an AI Engineer at the University of Cincinnati, Scherz is the driving force behind some of the most innovative and pedagogically grounded AI agents in higher education today — and his winning entry, the Study Pal agent built on nebulaONE®, is a masterclass in what happens when technical sophistication meets genuine care for students. 

Study Pal is not a simple chatbot. It is a multi-agent system built on an agentic workflow that orchestrates three distinct agents — a base agent, a code interpreter agent, and a test prepper agent — working with Dr. Valentine Johns to provide a holistic study companion for UC students. What makes the design exceptional is its pedagogical philosophy: rather than simply answering questions, Study Pal employs the Socratic method, guiding students through the learning process with structured questions that build critical thinking and genuine understanding. The architecture was praised by Zack Hamilton, Cloudforce Cloud Applications Engineer, for its sophistication and design quality. Study Pal is part of UC’s broader Bearcats AI Ready! initiative, which has embedded AI-powered Socratic Tutors across multiple high-impact courses, reaching thousands of students. 

But Study Pal is only one chapter of a much larger story. Scherz has delivered over 40 custom agents at UC — and counting — spanning everything from course-specific Socratic tutoring experiences to accessibility tools that empower staff to create accessible versions of their documents. He has toured every college at the university to speak in person about the transformative power of AI and nebulaONE, and has worked one-on-one with professors and academic units to build agents tailored to their specific needs. Björg Prodan, Director at the University of Cincinnati, described him as “inspired and passionate about AI and in particular about how nebulaONE can transform education and empower users,” noting that “his efforts have been invaluable in our launch of nebulaONE”. 

At a university that has gone all-in on AI — with BearcatGPT now available to all students, faculty, and staff within UC’s secure Azure environment — Thomas Scherz is the person making sure that “all-in” means something real, one agent, one professor, one student at a time. His work is a powerful embodiment of Cloudforce’s “AI for All” mission: not AI as abstraction, but AI as a study partner sitting right beside you. 

🤝 Partner of the Year — Winner 

Charles Rice | Principal Solutions Engineer, Microsoft 

Charles Rice has been a cornerstone of the Cloudforce and Microsoft partnership. As a Principal Solutions Engineer at Microsoft, Charles has supported Cloudforce at every stage of the nebulaONE® journey, from participating in customer calls to delivering agentic workflow presentations. As his nominator shared, “He is always ready to help and such a great resource for the company as a whole.” 

Charles has also served as a trusted advisor on nebulaONE’s technical and product direction, helping Cloudforce align its architecture, agentic workflows, and customer needs with Microsoft’s evolving AI platform. Equally important, he has acted as a vital bridge into Microsoft’s product group and engineering teams, connecting Cloudforce with the right players, guidance, and roadmap context at critical moments. 

What sets Charles apart is his consistency and versatility. Whether providing deep technical insight on a customer call, leading a strategic presentation for a prospective institution, or solving complex challenges behind the scenes, Charles brings both expertise and a genuine commitment to shared success. His contributions have directly strengthened the connection between Microsoft’s AI capabilities and Cloudforce’s mission to deliver secure, equitable AI to institutions worldwide. Charles Rice exemplifies the Partner of the Year award and the collaborative spirit that makes “AI for All” more than a slogan. 

Original Blog: Breaking New Ground: Announcing the Frontier Awards Program – Cloudforce

Anna Harding
Author

Anna’s professional journey began as a high school math teacher, where she combined clarity and care to help students succeed. She then advanced to roles as an assistant principal and a district-level data administrator, where she led with both vision and precision. With a deep love for technology and all things efficiency, she brings clarity and structure to even the most complex problems. Whether she’s streamlining workflows or uncovering insights through data, Anna is fueled by a strong work ethic and an unshakable commitment to integrity. She’s as passionate about people as she is about process, building meaningful relationships and fostering collaboration wherever she goes.

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