2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a topic in every conversation involving technology, including in research, academia, industry, and mainstream applications. Hence, academia, industry and government organizations are collaborating in preparing the current and incoming workforce to both, develop AI technologies, and apply AI solutions towards technological advancements. These collaborations include sponsoring capstone design courses, which for decades have helped prepare students to join the workforce well-prepared for immediate contribution. As the push for AI applications rapidly intensifies, one question that arises is, how has the distribution of AI project themes in these partnerships changed over the past years? To help answer this question, this paper presents an analysis of how AI is influencing the scope of sponsored capstone projects at various engineering programs. Considering the recent era of mainstream AI, the analysis covers the six academic years 2019-20 to 2024-25, through data collected from the public websites of ten industry-sponsored capstone courses from universities across the USA. The data showed that the number of AI-related projects nearly doubled, while the relative proportion of AI-related projects increased by 43%. A measure of the unweighted mean of the AI-related projects for all programs for each of the six years showed significant growth in the adoption of AI-related projects from 9.7% in 2019 to 17% in 2024. Overall, all these programs have managed AI-related projects, and most of them had a positive adoption rate and a positive median slope, thus suggesting a positive yet broad institution-level growth trend. However, the growth is moderate compared to widespread reports on AI investments across the nation. Noticeably, most programs had a drop in AI-related projects around 2022 and 2023, but in 2024 the rise in AI-related projects was shared across institutions.