I Grew Up in a Warehouse of School Supplies. Here’s What It Taught Me About Building a Business with AI.

This blog post is a guest feature by Nectir’s Marketing & Social Media intern, Katie Cheng. Katie current third-year student at the University of California, Berkeley, studying Cognitive Science and Data Science.

I’m Katie, Nectir’s Social Media Intern.

My favorite place growing up was my parents’ distribution company. I’d walk through a wonderland of endless cardboard boxes filled with school supplies. But it wasn’t the boxes that fascinated me; it was seeing the reality of my immigrant parents’ dream. They built a name for themselves from scratch. That's the only inspiration I've ever needed.

That inspiration drove me to take business courses and compete in regional competitions, where I developed and pitched a business idea to investors. My passion has always been helping others grow, which is why I created videos for local businesses to help them connect with their communities.

Now, as an intern at Nectir, I have a new community to connect with: universities. My background isn't in high-level academic administration; it's in entrepreneurship. I see every department and every program as its own small business, with unique challenges and growth opportunities.

What does my work at Nectir look like now?

My current project is a perfect example. I'm helping our team identify which academic programs Nectir AI can provide the most value to. So how does a business-minded intern even start? By building a business case with Nectir AI.

I've created a custom knowledge base in my Nectir AI portal with very specific documents:

• All of Nectir's current B2B case studies.
• Publicly available strategic plans from three target universities.
• Recent articles and research papers on the challenges facing higher education, from budget cuts to student engagement.

With this foundation, Nectir AI becomes my personal market research analyst. I can ask questions a generic AI could never answer:

• "Based on University X's strategic plan, which of their stated goals aligns with the outcomes in our case studies? Draft an outreach email to the head of that department."
• "Summarize the top three communication challenges faced by large humanities departments from the articles I uploaded."
• "What key performance indicators from our case studies would be most compelling to a Dean of Student Affairs?"

I'm not just doing a task; I'm building a strategy. I'm using Nectir AI to see the university landscape through an entrepreneur's eyes and find the precise points where we can provide value. This is how you build a sustainable career—by turning your curiosity into a scalable process that helps others grow. And I get to do it every day.

Frequently Asked Questions About Nectir AI

What is Nectir AI? Nectir AI is AI infrastructure purpose-built for school. It gives colleges, universities, and high schools schools the ability to deploy AI Assistants across their campus that are fully controlled by faculty and administrators, integrated with existing learning management systems, and compliant with FERPA and SOC 2 standards. Unlike consumer AI tools, Nectir is purpose-built to support structured, pedagogy-driven AI use in academic settings.

How is Nectir AI different from consumer AI tools? With Nectir AI, faculty can control the behavior of the AI: they set the prompt, define what the AI can and cannot do, choose the teaching method (such as Socratic questioning), and establish boundaries that keep students learning actively rather than passively receiving answers. Student data stays private and is never shared with model providers.

Can Nectir AI work with my school's existing LMS? Yes. Nectir integrates with existing learning management systems so that schools can deploy AI infrastructure without overhauling their current technology stack. Faculty can build AI Assistants that reference their own course materials, syllabi, and rubrics within the platform they already use.

How can I learn more about Nectir? Learn more about the specific instructors, programs, and institutions we’ve worked with by reading our case studies. Book a call with our team today to try a demo of Nectir AI.