Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
AI as an Extra Set of Hands: Redefining Classroom Roles with Matt Miller of OKO Labs
Matt Miller is the CEO and Co-Founder of OKO Labs, an innovative EdTech company developing human-centric, pro-social AI to power collaborative learning in K-12 classrooms. With a background as CTO and VP of Labs at Amplify Education and VP of Product at Flatiron School, Matt brings deep technical expertise and a passion for leveraging technology to solve real-world educational challenges. Holding BS and MS degrees in Computer Science and Intelligent Systems from Columbia University, Matt co-founded OKO in 2020 to address the critical need for scalable, engaging, and equitable small-group learning solutions, starting with a focus on math intervention. He leads OKO's mission to foster not only academic growth but also essential skills like teamwork and communication, driven by a commitment to evidence-based practices and rigorous R&D.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- Why small group learning is a critical—and underserved—area in K-12 education
- How OKO uses AI to foster real-time collaboration and discourse among students
- The benefits of integrating AI to support, not replace, educators
- How rigorous research and efficacy studies shaped OKO’s product design
- Insights into OKO’s 30x classroom growth and founder-led sales strategy
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:03:07] Origin of OKO: Solving the challenge of small group instruction
[00:05:17] Using AI bots to facilitate collaborative student learning
[00:10:18] What a typical AI-powered OKO math session looks like
[00:14:47] Research partnership with WestEd shows strong early results
[00:19:42] Making efficacy a sales advantage in founder-led growth
[00:25:59] Combining grant funding and equity to scale responsibly
[00:31:37] Defining a new edtech category: small group AI instruction
[00:36:22] Future plans for subject expansion and deeper SEL integration
[00:40:14] Vision for AI-enabled, pro-social, human-centered classrooms
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[00:00:00] Matt Miller: They are earning back time and focus to the most precious commodities for educators. So they're then able to reach an individual learner or a small group that needs their personal attention. Some educators who start to circulate and observe, and there are then learning a lot more about how their students are engaging with one another.
And so educator. Not only love what they see when their kids are on OKO and the ways in which kids are engaging, but they also very much appreciate that extra set of hands and several more scalable sets of hands that can really help them differentiate through small group work.
[00:00:47] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood. Childhood K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all here at EdTech
[00:01:02] Ben Kornell: Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter, and also our event calendar.
And to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel. Early access to events. And back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod.
[00:01:27] Alex Sarlin: We are here with Matt Miller. Matt Miller is the CEO and co-founder of OKO Labs, an innovative EdTech company, developing human centric, pro social AI to power collaborative learning in. K 12 classrooms with a background as CTO and VP of Labs at Amplify Education and VP of Product at Flatiron School.
Matt brings deep technical expertise and a passion for leveraging technology to solve real world educational challenges, holding BS and MS degrees in computer science and intelligence systems from Columbia University. Matt co-founded KO in 2020 to address the critical need for scalable, engaging, and equitable small group learning solutions.
Starting with a focus on math intervention, he leads KO's mission to foster not only academic growth. I. Also essential skills like teamwork and communication, driven by a commitment to evidence-based practices and rigorous r and d. Matt previously co-founded the Community-Focused Stories bookshop and Storytelling lab in Brooklyn, and he now makes his home in New York's mid Hudson Valley with his wife, two children, and a lively contingent of pets.
Matt Miller, welcome to EdTech Insiders. Thanks Alice.
[00:02:40] Matt Miller: Really glad to be
[00:02:41] Alex Sarlin: here. We have been waiting for this conversation for a while. You and I have been in, in conversation about what you've been doing with OKO for many months now, and it is such an interesting way to use AI in the classroom. So before we get into anything else, give us a little bit of an background on how you came up with the idea of OKO Lab's, small group AI facilitated instruction, and what it's been like building it since the middle of the pandemic.
[00:03:07] Matt Miller: The idea for Roca really came from educators when I was at Flatiron school and starting to figure out what was gonna come next and thinking about how education was truly gonna be impacted by the coming wave of AI technologies. I knew I needed to be rooted in like the real problems that educators are facing in the classroom.
So I.
If set of showed up to help one day, and I heard from them this extremely common sentence was, oh, a small group and small group work is such a powerful. Technique for differentiating instruction and reaching each and every learner with exactly what they need at the right moment. But what I learned was that it was really hard for educators to pull off and do well at the time.
This was very early days of the pandemic. There were staffing challenges they did not have the paraprofessionals, the teaching assistants, the facilitate. And what I also saw was that the ed tech interventions that are out there, the tools available to help, are really clustered around supporting the whole classroom model of instruction, the sage on the stage, or supporting an individual learner in a one-to-one model, which in each of those have their place in our education system.
But there was this. Critical gap in the middle of small group work. And so that's what I just leaned into. My entrepreneurial alarm bells were going off. Ding, ding, ding. And I was like, gotta lean into this problem space.
[00:04:52] Alex Sarlin: Part of what was such an interesting insight for me from that is that AI is really not often used in that context.
And as you're saying, entrepreneur bells ring because this concept of pro-social ai where you're using AI to facilitate small group conversations among students. Really isn't what most people think about when they think about AI in the classroom. Tell us how people have responded to it as you've been growing and going out with KO in classrooms.
[00:05:17] Matt Miller: They've been responding really well and we hear all the time that, oh wow, like nobody else is doing that. Nobody else is applying AI to the challenge of collaborative work and small group work. And you know, our thesis at the beginning was that it's like such an obvious use case. Like it's such kids need to be connected, they need to be in conversation, engage in discourse, conceptual understanding.
Reasons that it's important. And by our calculation, nobody had done it because it was hard. And so it really seems more than anything like an execution challenge. Now, fortunately, over the time that we've been working on it, the technologies that we have available to us have become increasingly powerful.
You know, we've been able to really enrich the experience, make it more engaging, more responsive, and also just. Learning. So I would say it's, you know, it's been going well. It's been well received, and I think the overwhelming reaction we get when I speak with education leaders, district leaders, and school leaders and classroom teachers as well, is like, oh my goodness, I'm so glad somebody is doing this.
Because we need our kids to not just be isolated on. Yes,
[00:06:37] Alex Sarlin: the isolation narrative or the sort of concept of personalized learning, which can mean many things, but I think what a lot of people envision when they think about differentiated or personalized learning is every kid is learning on their own with an AI tutor or an AI assistant, or an ai.
Bot of some kind, and that is so different than what the experience is in an OKO classroom. Before we get into, I know you've been doing really interesting research. You've worked with Jeremy Rochelle, who is, you know, a superstar in the EdTech space, as well as Lawrence Holt, but before we even get into the actual research and the pedagogy behind it.
Tell us a little bit about what does an OKO classroom look like? What is happening in the classroom where you have small groups being facilitated by an OKO Labs bot with multiple devices?
[00:07:20] Matt Miller: Yeah, great question. So today our focus is on math intervention. It was an important like market entry point for us.
A lot of need there. So entry.
Typically educators either during an intervention block or during an extended math block. Sometimes during a regular class time and sometimes during pullout groups, educators are able to select in their dashboard what are the skills and standards that each of my groups need to focus on. And they don't need to roster their groups.
They just get a group code for each of those groups. And then the kids during small group breakouts will get around a table or a cluster of desks. They type in a group code, they don a headset. They're each on their own device. Typically Chromebooks, anything with a webcam and headphone jack. We use the.
Interactions. We use the headset obviously for voice interactions and each student is on their own device 'cause they're able to interact directly with digital manipulatives, tools and you know, assessment practice items over the course of the Elko activity. So once the kids, each type in their. Group code, they're then immediately launched into a live synchronous activity with their peers who are around the table.
That is facilitated by OKO. And OKO is very intentionally designed to get kids looking up from their screen and interacting with one another, engaging in discourse. So one example of a learning activity and. Surface for me by Jeremy Rochelle, he implemented it in pals, was originally conceived by a Chilean researcher named Miguel Nesbaum.
Jeremy wrote about this in thousands building. So in. OKO presents an assessment or practice item. Again, aligned to standards and skills selected by an educator, and first prompts the group to try it on your own. Don't talk to your friends. See if you can work it out. No worries if you're having trouble, but see if you can give it a try.
And then OKO will prompt the group and say, oh, interesting. You guys all didn't agree. See if you can discuss and work it out together, what the answer might be. You know, the first time we did that in a classroom with kids, that was like a magical moment because the kids were like, oh, let, and they started talking and interacting with one another.
And so that's a lot of what we see in classrooms when kids are using OKO. I hear from. Educators all the time, and I see it myself when I visit classrooms that kids are arguing about math and we love it and like that's what we wanna see. We wanna see that productive engagement, that discourse that we know leads to deeper conceptual understanding of the math.
So yeah, that's a little picture of what an OKO session looks like.
[00:10:18] Alex Sarlin: So kids are sort of going in and out. They have a computer in front of them and they do have a headset on, but they're not just engaging with the headset. In fact. They're engaging with each other around the table. By design. They have to be engaging with each other because they're convincing each other.
They're walk, working through the problems together, and then by the end of the session, or by the end of each each question, they've sort of come to a consensus and the OKO facilitation. I think it removes choices. Right? And then
[00:10:43] Matt Miller: That's right. So, yeah. So OK has a number of ways of hinting, prompting, nudging to cultivate that, you know, kind productive discourse.
Sometimes it's ok knowing who may have answered it right and, and nuding them to. Share their thinking. Sometimes it's, you know, detecting that a conversation has veered off topic and redirecting, and sometimes it's, if the group has not converged or is converging on an incorrect solution, it's, you know, eliminating an incorrect answer.
And saying, saying, oh, like, lemme give you a hint. This is not the answer. Now see if you can enter discussion mode again.
With more like standards aligned content, context rich, you know, mathematicals that, that speak to the concepts need to rely on in order to the particular problem. So a lot of exciting work ahead there too.
[00:11:41] Alex Sarlin: Part of what I really like about OKO is that you have these centralized facilitated experience and the content at the is really at the center of it, which I think is really, really interesting.
You have this situation where teachers can set what questions are being developed for each group. You have a library of items, of course, and this consents building and these other sort of mechanisms that people can do allow students to really. They sort of give you them the opportunity to connect with each other, but in an academic context and actually talk things through and argue and debate and discuss, which just feels so much more positive vision of what AI, an AI facilitated classroom can look like.
And it doesn't feel like it has any threat to the teacher. It feels like, as you said, you, you talked to lots of teachers figuring this out and what to do, and it's just extra hands. It's like the ability to be in many places at once to sort of set. Stage for all sorts of interesting discussions. I'm curious how teachers react to that feeling of, oh, this isn't what I thought AI was gonna look like.
[00:12:42] Matt Miller: Yeah. Yeah. We hear a lot from educators that when they get their students up and running with OKO and they're running three five, we have one like power user doing like seven simultaneous groups on AKO. They are earning back time and focus two of the most precious commodities for. Reach an individual learner or a small group that needs their personal attention.
Some educators who start to circulate and observe, and they're then learning a lot more about how their students are engaging with one another and how they're developing in their math progressions. So educators not only love what they see when their kids are on OKO and the ways in which kids are engaging, but they also very much appreciate that extra set of.
More scalable sets of hands that can really help them differentiate through small group work.
[00:13:40] Alex Sarlin: I think it's a really exciting vision of what AI infused education can look like. The sort of teacher at the center of this, almost like orchestrating like a conductor, the whole classroom where they say, I.
This group is over there doing deep diving on this particular math standard and they have facilitation and I've set this all up in advance and then this group is discussing this and this group is gonna really dive deep into this and I can circulate and I can find patterns and I can use this time to make sense of, I just think it's an exciting vision and after, you know, interviewing many different people about AI and education, OKO really stands out to me.
When we made our map of K 12 use cases, OKO was really. Pretty much alone in its category of this small group facilitation for K 12. Very few companies have really cracked it. There are some researchers who have been really looking deeply into it, but not very many people have made it into working product.
So let's talk about the research. You mentioned Jeremy, Rochelle, and you've been working with a lot of really great partners in making sure that OKO is built with research at its center with efficacy studies. Tell us about how you're making sure that KO really is pedagogically sound and, and makes, and, and works.
[00:14:47] Matt Miller: Yeah, so from the very beginning we've taken a, a very research backed approach. Obviously starting with that customer development based like insight from user research around the need. But then very early on we partnered with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, and we did a series of workshops with researchers, including Jeremy and others in the space and.
For our approach to collaborative work and just small group work as a powerful intervention tool. But we also did co-design with kids and with educators. We got in with kids and we imagine the sorts of games that they would. Find fun in classroom environment or outside of a classroom environment. And I mean, that was an, an amazing experience and we're actually still working closely with the Coy Center.
We're about to enter into a new round of co-design sessions with them around some of our forthcoming work. So, you know, deeply rooted in that sort of qualitative and very user-centric research. As we progressed, we also were. Win A-S-B-I-R grant, small business innovative research grant from education department from I, and when you win an SBIR from I, you kind of don't win without a efficacy study like a feasibility study.
In addition to at least some structured like usability studies, so we partnered with WestEd there and it's been a great partnership. We're also still working very closely with WestEd on the bulk of our research agenda and through that work. Not only engaged in classrooms, in structured usability tests, you know, OKO was, was maturing at this point.
We're starting to see it really work and see kids engaged, you know, sustainably durably in classroom activities, but we also got to then implement it. Over initially, our, our first study was like a three to four week implementation, really focused just on one slice of content around fractions and do some post-analysis and, okay, all the research basis, all the co-design, all the, you know, the.
Theory around how this was going to engage, delight and educate kids, like, let's see if this actually works. I remember like sitting with bated breath for the results of that first implementation study, and we were just thrilled to see really exciting learning gains on pre to post, even with a short implementation.
We also did pre depose survey. We used a a, a validated survey, instruments selected by WestEd, our researchers, that showed decreases in math anxiety when kids were using OKO. And we also did a lot of qualitative work with classroom observations and educator interviews, student focus groups that showed just very high degrees of engagement.
Very high degrees of collaborative work, which was thrilling. So we really, you know, through that early formative experience, we're just hooked, kind of hooked on research and hooked on evidence as kind of a barometer of, are we getting this right? Are we building something that is effective? And fortunately, I think as we've grown, that's been a huge asset and a differentiator.
Not only are we differentiated by being alone in that category of. AI facilitated small group collaborative work, but we're also differentiated, I think, with a research backed approach and having an evidence base even in the early days. So it's something that too often is neglected or deferred. Oh, we'll get the evidence later is something I hear a lot of founders say, and I get on my soap box whenever I can about it.
[00:18:32] Alex Sarlin: Let's actually double click there because this is something we've talked about a lot on the podcast and I think it, it, it is a, a controversial subject from. Founders not controversial as much. It's just confused subject because it can be expensive, it can take time. It can take energy to do randomized control trials, to work with research partners like you have been doing, and people are not always sure if there's a return on investment there if they, when they go out and even if they get great results, like you're showing, they get learning gains.
They get. Qualitative gains, decreases in manage anxiety. They don't know that that's going to translate into actual sales down the road. And so when you're trying to figure out where do I put my time and money, my very limited time and money, I'd love for you to make that case even more clear. I think this is really tricky for a lot of people.
We've talked to so many founders and a lot of them really say, I wish I could spend time making sure that everything is efficacious and that it, it's, it's all working exactly the way we want it to, but I have to be building product. I have to be raising money, I have to be spending my time, all these other places.
Tell us more about how you made that decision, and specifically because you've been doing founder-led sales. What does it look like when you're in the room with a, a procurer with a potential buyer and you bring out this type of evidence? Do they go, how do they react to it?
[00:19:42] Matt Miller: Definitely positively. So I think that, you know, from a need.
Perspective in the market. Sure. There are lots of examples of product-led growth-based companies that are great marketing machines and you know, have beneficial products like net positive products for the market in general, but don't have the data and that there, so there is that growth path and that that is possible.
We see those success stories. I am often in conversation with district leaders and an early question is, okay, this is great. It sounds wonderful. Like I understand the theory behind it, but what does it work? And so I have a great answer for that, which is, here's our third party validated research, and here's our research agenda and how we're building that out over time.
Threading the needle. For us, the ability to focus on research early on is inextricably linked to the sources of funding that we have pursued. So going for federal research RD grants, we've also been fairly successful in closing some philanthropic grants. These are some of the best sources of funding 'cause they're both non-dilutive, they're.
Very impact oriented and they're requiring the evidence building. So it was a very aligned set of funders that we, that we courted early on. We also have courted equity invest, so we've also raised capital predominantly from Angels and some smaller. Impact oriented institutional investors. Actually we're now, you know, have some bigger ones as well.
We've specifically courted the funders who are more impact oriented and value that evidence and, and they're out there. So for us, you know, the, the ROI for that. Research based approach has, you know, borne out in our ability to raise capital. It's also borne out in our ability to enter the market and grow pretty quickly.
Really only started going to markets, really figuring that out in earnest in the past year or so. And a number I love to share is that in the past, like six months or so. 24, 25 school year. We went from a handful of early kind of founder led customers that were really conversions from our research partners, schools, districts.
We were working with in our early r and d. And our classroom footprint has grown by 30 x in that time. And you know, we have. Next month in the International Society of the Learning Sciences, computer supported Collaborative learning journal, peer reviewed paper on KO's early RD, and you know, our research study with WestEd's, co-authored with WestEd.
So we've now got the assets that we can share that really help move those conversations along in a time in our market that really favors. Incumbents favors. Companies that are further along when school systems are facing budget pressure or even just budget uncertainty, they become more change averse.
And so having something that helps you break through is I think, really important in this moment and research, and also are collaborative human, human-centric, pro-social application of ai, I think have really helped us cut through during that period.
[00:23:10] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's really interesting to hear you outline that.
It almost feels like, I don't want to overstate this, but as I hear you talk about it, it almost feels like there's this parallel path to some of the path that many people accept as sort of the standard EdTech growth route, right? Which is grow as fast as you can ship the features that you need to get people to buy it.
Make your buyers happy. Make sure there are dashboards in there as you're getting traction, go to the VCs and raise money to grow further. And you know, you don't have to worry too much about the efficacy and impact. It's expensive and nobody, there's like this whole narrative that's sort of one side of the ed tech ecosystem and I think everybody probably has their own vision of, of companies that come to mind when they think of that.
And, and it, as you said, it's not like this is just. Negative. It's not like this is something that's like a broken problematic system to, at its core, although there is something a little funny that impact and efficacy, you know, always takes the backseat. Uh, we all understand that's something a little strange.
But then you're on a really different path. It's a path where you're working with SBRR grants from, from IES. Obviously that whole world is a little bit in flux right now. You're working with. Philanthropic funding. You're working with both funders and investors who really care about impact upfront. They wanna make sure things work, they wanna make sure that everything is being developed in conjunction with end users.
And it's sort of like, I think a lot of people think of that route as like, well, that's the research route. That's the less businessy version of this and, and it will have. Negative effects on growth rate or on marketing or on your ability to, to continue to raise, because you might not be able to say, we have so many customers so far, because you start with a small research group.
What I'm hearing you say is it may not be as much of a penalty. In fact, there may be some really strong, positive differentiators and there's some really. There's some major pros in working with people who are impact driven in working to get your research in line before you start scaling and bringing partners.
I mean, you mentioned just in passing. Oh, our, some of our early customers were transitions from our research. Well, that's in and of itself is a. A pro of working with people. If you're working with schools, they're seeing the effects. They're seeing the impact. They, well, they, they, they're your early customers and they're ambassadors already.
So I'm trying to put the pieces together of what you're saying, but maybe you can even put a finer point on it. Like if you are an ed tech founder listening to this right now, and you're thinking, okay, it feels like maybe there's these two different routes, the sort of VC route, growth, growth, efficacy.
Everybody wants it to be there, but it's not number one philanthropic, non-dilutive capital, which we should not gloss over. It's a huge deal. Tell us a little bit about the pros and cons of the approach. You've, and especially now because you've been really in the trenches doing founder-led sales growing 30 x, that's a really impressive number.
Like if you were an EdTech founder right now, or you're talking to an ed tech founder who's like, you know, two years behind you on this path, how would you explain these sort of two different paths?
[00:25:59] Matt Miller: I think first and foremost is they're not actually mutually exclusive. And you know, because I have, in the same way that we see the companies that are all growth, all go to market and evidence is, you know, in the backseat.
I've also seen an another mode, which is exclusively research backed. You know, let's get to our full RCT before we even think about commercialization. And I think it's sometimes a criticism of some of the like federal funding for r and d and the SBIR program that there's not as enough of an incentive to commercialize early s.
The, you know, sort of funding from the education department became uncertain. And so far, knock on wood, it seems like it's gonna continue flowing. We're about halfway through our phase two grant, and so our fingers are crossed. Some of my cohort are freaking out because they're not commercialized, they're not in market, and they've taken this exclusively.
Based approach and have not been transacting over the course of their, you know, sort of incubation and product development cycle. So that is, call it a failure mode, but I think that's on the, on the far side of the, of the spectrum. And I think the way I describe our path is very much a middle path. Like we, you know, have pursued both equity financing and, you know, non-dilutive capital.
To.
Ride and continue building out the product on some of the non-dilutive capital. We didn't go to market in earnest, but we were throughout that period, engaging with the market, engaging with educators, engaging with school system leaders, figuring out what that approach would be, what our positioning would be, narrowing, sharpening that tip of the spear in terms of how we would enter.
Definitely don't think about them as mutually exclusive, but when pursuing non-dilutive capital that is supporting your r and d agenda, you also have to be very discerning. So we're very careful to pretty much only ever go after. Grant opportunities, funding opportunities that are squarely on the fairway.
If you are even like, you know, two, three degrees off of true North with where you're headed with your product, with your business, that very quickly turns into a big distractions. There's, there's a lot. You can find funders out there who will fund all kinds of things,
what they're looking for. Still on your fairway, you're gonna end up with problems. Distraction is like the worst cancer for entrepreneurs. So a few pointers there, but, uh, I think we've managed to thread the needle and as are excited about the progress that we've made.
[00:29:01] Alex Sarlin: So rather than thinking about it as two different paths, it's almost like two lanes on a road and you can combine elements of it.
You can combine the, some of the equity investing, some of the go-to market speed features, uh, thinking about how to adapt your product to a market. On some level and, and commercialize. You don't have to do it purely at the expense and not, and totally push off research and push off impact and impact investment, impact research.
You can weave some of them together, but I think your point is really, really good because there is a lot of philanthropy funding out there. I. About very specific things. People come with these specific, you know, theories of change and they say, oh, we're looking for people who do this exact thing. And then suddenly you get all these proposals of, oh, all these people happen to do this thing.
But really what's happening is that they're all sort of bending in different shapes to make it look like they do. And it can be a little bit of a poison pill for some people because they can get the money, but then suddenly they're forced to build something or to focus on some part of their business, which is not what they really wanna do.
I think you are in a really interesting space because you're doing something that really is. Somewhat open field running. This idea of, you know, small group facilitation with AI is just, I know I've said this a few times already, but it touches on so many aspects of research that people are really hungry for.
You know, how can AI foster human relationships? How can it help peers collaborate? How can it decrease anxiety and work? How can I build skills like. Teamwork and collaboration is a lot of pieces that are sort of baked into what you do that allow you, I think, to be able to work with research without bending outta shape.
[00:30:32] Matt Miller: We haven't had to become contortionists in order to pursue this path. For sure.
[00:30:36] Alex Sarlin: I think one thing that's also been really interesting about your story, and I'd love to hear you talk about this, is a lot of our, our ed tech founders who listen to the podcast who, who we interview on the podcast. They do start with founder-led sales, but often they're in a space where they're direct competitors and they sort of can go out and say, you may have talked to this person and that person, and we do this and here's why we're different.
And people sort of have a paradigm to set things in. In some ways, it feels like you're creating a little bit of a segment of the AI education ecosystem, and you have to explain to people and help them under, I mean, they know what small group instruction is, of course, but the idea of small group instruction with ai.
It's a little bit of like a, creating a market or helping people understand a new idea for other entrepreneurs who may be also feeling like, Hey, I'm trying something new with ai. I'm doing something that's really different. How do I get it into the market and get people to get their head around and actually wanna try it and, and take a chance on it, even though it isn't something that a lot of their colleagues may have tried yet because it's a new idea.
[00:31:37] Matt Miller: Approach to innovation. In my days at Amplify at Flatiron School with, you really need enter a market in a manner that really minimizes the need for behavior change on the part of your. Customer, your user, and that extends to the buyer as well. So for OKO kind of the light bulb moment and what I think what enabled our, our rapid growth enabled me to be successful as a founder slash seller was really figuring out our positioning and where in the education system, where on the budget, like do we fit?
And so while yes, taking a unique approach entering. With a very narrowly defined ideal customer profile. So our ICP is, you know, the head of math instruction, the head of intervention, student services, anybody responsible for RTI. And so when we find those people and we say, do, do you have challenges with intervention?
How do you do intervention today? Of course there are incumbent technologies. There are a. There. And so those, you know in a way, like we don't have any competitors in K 12, although we don't not, we want, we have to assume we'll at at some point, but we are in fact competing with the status quo. And that's all the one-to-one intervention tools.
All the intelligent tutors, you know, with kids kind of isolated on machines and it's also interventionists. Critical and important, and we wanna see more of them. But there's a supply issue there and a cost challenge even with getting enough interventionists to address all of the needs that exist in classrooms today.
So while we are unique in our solution, we found the point of entry in the market that is very clear there is there is a budget line item for math intervention. And especially right now as. School systems were very focused on closing literacy gaps that widened during the pandemic. Often at the expense of math.
They're now saying, uhoh, we have a math problem. We're starting, starting to see a lot more attention there in the number of states, you know, starting to specifically catalyze increased attention on math intervention. So I think that's really helped us. I.
Is that when we have our entry point, we have math intervention and we say, oh, and you're doing small group work. And it's like, oh yes, we, we love small group work, but we have a lot of trouble doing it. Well, or, oh, we're not, but we'd like to. We know it's important and we say, oh, well we have a solution for that.
It's what we're focused on. And while it's a novel, you know, sort of problem space for ai. Solve in education. It's not a novel pedagogical approach. We're not bringing in something completely foreign, but we are enabling something that school systems wanna do more of. So I think that's helped us a lot.
[00:34:38] Alex Sarlin: That's a fantastic point, and I actually think that ties really well into your product background and the point you made about, you know, not demanding a lot of behavior change, you know, by asking teachers, by coming to this. Entire idea through a, you know, finding actual pain points and needs in the classroom.
You can walk into classrooms and say, we know that you wish you could do more small group, or that you do it, but you wish you could, it would be easier and you wish you could do more groups and you wish you could differentiate the groups. You know That's true because that was the pain point that launched the company.
So that's a great point that even though your solution. May put you in a sort of different category than many other AI tools. You're coming in solving a real pain and focusing on math is also really smart. I mean, one of the things that I, I find very interesting, and we've talked about this in the past, is that there's nothing about OKO that is actually math exclusive.
I mean, you can very easily imagine the same dynamic you just mentioned about. A group of, you know, four or five kids around a table, they each have their own computer. So they all have access to a problem. But what if it's a reading? What if it's a chapter of To Kill a Mockingbird? And they're trying to discuss, you know, what scout's, uh, motivation is and they're trying to convince each other and they're trying to figure it out.
I mean, that's a beautiful vision of a small group facilitation. And then there's an AI saying. This person said this and this person said this, but you know, could it be both or you know, why do you think this? Can you find a quote to support that? I mean, that's an amazing, that has nothing whatsoever to do with math.
You have not gone there yet, but I. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about the future of what you think this kind of small group facilitation might look like. Whether it's more subjects, whether it's more technology, like being able to do more voice recognition or facial recognition, or anything else that you're sort of thinking about it.
What do you see as the future of this small group collaborative learning led by ai?
[00:36:22] Matt Miller: Love that you make that observation, Alex. And it's been a part of the vision from the beginning that we are really all about collaborative, pro-social, human-centric work in schools and connecting kids, fostering, togetherness, communication, collaboration, and that really transcends.
Subject area that transcends age and grade level. It transcends like use cases, whether it's intervention or core or enrichment and extension work. So that is a hundred percent where we are tacking and it's at times challenging to maintain focus on our, on our math intervention. Like I wanna get on.
Really starting to apply this more broadly across subjects. And you're right, you know, like the consensus mechanic that I described earlier. It could be anything. It could be civics, it could be ELA, it could be science. So that is a hundred percent a part of the roadmap and the sort of market development plan.
But what I.
Gain with the math supplemental that we have today in the market. We then need to grow that math offering to encompass more use cases. You know, enhance support for special education context, English language learners, you know, flex into more tier one and core instruction use cases, flex up.
Really see us spending a lot of time tilling the soil of mass because there's so much to do there. But there definitely is a point at which we, you know, feel that that's off to the races, that we start to branch out into more generalized collaborative work across subjects. And they're even sort of integrated cross-curricular applications that educators, school leaders are starting to ask us about.
Like, oh, can we also do this in science class and bring in those math concepts? And so, yeah, very much. Excited to go there. And it does take, this is part of my product discipline. It does take like focus, it does take attention on, you know, sort of making sure that you've completed the swing on, you know, first at bat before you start running around the bases and celebrating.
[00:38:36] Alex Sarlin: The whole time you were saying that, I'm like, I can tell you see all the, all the opportunities, the core of supplemental, the different tiers, the, and the different subjects. The playing field is very wide, but as you said, the budget line item. It's math intervention and that's how you wanna go to market, and that's how you're gonna get in into schools and get people to understand what this whole concept is.
And I think that does take a lot of discipline. I admire it as a product person myself, who is always jumping at shiny new things. It's just, I'm really. Admire your ability to see all the different places this could go, but stay disciplined, stay focused on where you're at, and getting people to understand this really exciting new way to use ai.
So I, I know we're almost at time here, but I just wanna ask, because you think about this so much, a broad question about, people talk so much about. What the future of an AI and education will look like. You know, I've been thinking about it a lot for years, but so many people are really trying to get their head around it.
I feel like you've come to it from a different angle than almost anybody I've talked to and one that, especially almost anybody who's actually has a product, there's a lot of researchers who are starting to think about, hey, what. Could a classroom look like if the classroom were AI enabled? There was AI facilitation, but not that many people have thought about it from an actual product perspective.
Put on your real futurist hat for a moment. Let's just go all out and say, five years from now you walk into a classroom. I. You know that Elco has been, been growing and building all this time and it's gotten competitors, it's gotten, there's a whole collaborative space. What is the most exciting thing that you see in a classroom that relates to AI and collaboration?
What is your sort of out there moonshot vision of what this could look like?
[00:40:14] Matt Miller: For me, it's really about the outcomes. It's really about what we're seeing with learners and that we're able to develop simultaneously academic competencies and the critical life skills, uh, collaboration and communication, teamwork.
All too often there's a false dichotomy. Like I go into schools and it's like there's SEL time and then there's academic instruction, and those lines have to blur. Like all learning is social in some regard. You know, there are definitely times for solo work, but to really truly assimilate, being able to communicate and engage in discourse with peers is just critical.
So I see that really elevated, more prevalent. Five years down the road, that is what's happening. And we are producing as a school system, whole humans that are full spectrum, happy, healthy, you know, great communicators, great collaborators. And there's a role that AI is playing in building that future. And it's sort of a part of the fabric of education within school.
School in personal time and time. And so. Experience that doesn't separate those things.
[00:41:30] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. Integrated, happy, healthy, collaborative, pro-social classroom is not kids locked onto their screens. It is all sorts of social interactions at all levels. And AI can work at all of these levels, right? It can work, it can work with individuals, it can work with small groups and it can work with withhold classes.
And of course you didn't say this, but, and the human teacher remains central. The classroom, of course that is percent. Hundred percent, yes. You know, I'd love to like, I wanna sort see this, I wanna like do a little video of what this looks like. You know, kids doing something together and each, there's a different personality, AI in this corner.
In this corner, and they're all. This one's really excited and like sportsy, and this one's really cerebral and is teaching chess in the corner of the people who wanna do it and helping me and making sure that the people who lose don't feel too bad. And the people who win are really good winners. And I mean, it's like such an exciting vision of what a, a classroom might look like.
And even with a single human being or one or two human beings, you can feel like you're in a, a really populated. Space with lots of adult human beings. I mean, even with only a few adults, you can have this enormously social experience, which is really exciting.
[00:42:42] Matt Miller: Yeah, I mean, I think you touch on a critical point, which is that the role of the educator does not go away.
It may change. They may, they may focus on supporting that whole human and their whole development. They may focus on the, the sort of orchestration of a variety of learning experiences and knowing where some, you know, one-to-one solo work is necessary. There's still a place for whole classroom instruction and.
Models. So there's a hundred percent, you know, critical role for educators, but they're better supported by a more human-centric, pro-social manifestation of AI in the classroom that is working with. Them and working with the learners, meeting them where they are, meeting the groups of, of learners where they are much more sensitive to those, those group dynamics of social dynamics and able to, you know, support their growth in myriad ways.
I
[00:43:39] Alex Sarlin: love it. That's really exciting vision. Matt Miller is the CEO and Co-founder of OKO Labs. That's OKO. You should definitely check out their site online. They really are doing something completely new in the classroom that I think is directionally where we're gonna see a lot of AI and education going.
He was the CTO at Amplify Education, VP of product at Flatiron School, and OKO has grown 30 x over the last year. Thanks so much for being here with us, Matt Miller from OKO Labs. Thanks Alex. Really loved it. Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community.
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