Accessibility at Scale: How Priyank Chodisetti and Workback.ai Cut Compliance from Months to Days

Priyank Chodisetti is the Co-founder and CEO of Workback.ai, an AI-powered platform helping edtech organizations achieve accessibility compliance faster and at scale. A repeat founder and former engineering leader at Coursera, Priyank brings firsthand experience navigating the complexity of WCAG standards and ADA requirements.

💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode

1. Why ADA Title II’s digital expansion is a game-changer for edtech companies
2. How accessibility compliance impacts procurement—even for private vendors
3. What makes accessibility such a strong use case for AI and automation
4. Why traditional audits take months—and how AI can cut that to days
5. How continuous accessibility compliance can replace one-time checklists

✨ Episode Highlights
[00:02:28] What ADA Title II covers and why April 2026 is a critical deadline
[00:05:22] How non-compliant vendors can put schools and districts at risk
[00:08:56] Why accessibility audits traditionally take 11+ months
[00:12:28] Using AI to automate audits, remediation, and VPAT reporting
[00:18:02] The shift from annual audits to continuous compliance
[00:25:04] The human impact of accessibility beyond regulation
[00:28:59] How Workback’s free pilot helps teams see value in days
[00:32:33] Priyank’s perspective on how generative AI is reshaping edtech

😎 Stay updated with Edtech Insiders! 

Follow us on our podcast, newsletter & LinkedIn here.

🎉 Presenting Sponsor/s:

Every year, K-12 districts and higher ed institutions spend over half a trillion dollars—but most sales teams miss the signals. Starbridge tracks early signs like board minutes, budget drafts, and strategic plans, then helps you turn them into personalized outreach—fast. Win the deal before it hits the RFP stage. That’s how top edtech teams stay ahead.

Innovation in preK to gray learning is powered by exceptional people. For over 15 years, EdTech companies of all sizes and stages have trusted HireEducation to find the talent that drives impact. When specific skills and experiences are mission-critical, HireEducation is a partner that delivers. Offering permanent, fractional, and executive recruitment, HireEducation knows the go-to-market talent you need. Learn more at HireEdu.com.

Tuck Advisors was founded by entrepreneurs who built and sold their own companies, frustrated by other m and a firms, they created the one they wished they could have hired but couldn't find. One who understands what matters to founders and whose North Star KPI is the percentage of deals closed. If you're thinking of selling your ed tech company or buying one contact Tuck advisors now.

Cooley LLP is the go-to law firm for education and edtech innovators, offering industry-informed counsel across the 'pre-K to gray' spectrum. With a multidisciplinary approach and a powerful edtech ecosystem, Cooley helps shape the future of education.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Priyank Chodisetti: From our point of view and vision, what we believe is if you can lower the barrier to entry to address these issues and become compliant, a lot more people will be willing to do that no matter whether there's a regulation or not. Because I know for a fact when you talk to product managers, designers, and engineers.

Nobody says I don't want accessible. 

[00:00:20] Alex Sarlin: Right? 

[00:00:22] Priyank Chodisetti: It's inaccessible to them because of knowledge, the time and investment. And our point of view is by using AI, we are making it faster, cheaper, and better. That many people will be desiring to do that.

[00:00:39] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across our. Early childhood, K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all here at EdTech Insiders. 

[00:00:54] Ben Kornell: 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.

[00:01:19] Alex Sarlin: For this conversation on EdTech Insiders. We have a very important topic. It's all about compliance, accessibility, and making sure that every EdTech company is reaching as many users as possible. Our guest today is Priyank Chodisetti. He's the co-founder and CEO of Workback.ai, a company helping EdTech organizations achieve accessibility compliance.

Through AI powered accessibility, auditing, remediation, and certification. Before Workback Priyank was a repeat founder who also experienced accessibility challenges as head of degrees engineering at Coursera Priyank Chodisetti. Welcome to EdTech Insiders. 

[00:01:59] Priyank Chodisetti: Thank you, Alex. Super excited to have this conversation with you.

[00:02:03] Alex Sarlin: I am really excited to speak with you as well. I think you're focusing on something that is both very important and sort of under reported, under examined in the ed tech space. So before we even jump into your solution, let's talk about the problem. Let's talk about what's going on right now for folks who are hearing about it for the first time.

What is the ADA Title II and why is it suddenly very important for everybody in education and ed tech to know about it? 

[00:02:28] Priyank Chodisetti: Yeah, sure. Alex, ADA Title II is part of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which covers state and local government entities that would include all the K 12 schools, community colleges, and state universities.

As many would be aware that ACT has been. Around for a long time from like since 1990, but in April, 2024. Depart- DOJ issued a landmark ruling that is extending this law into the digital space. This new law enforces that all web content, all the mobile apps, anything that people use digitally should be accessibility compliant per some technology standard.

It's spelled as WCAG, often pronounced as VCAG. So that standard is called WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Um, so 

[00:03:21] Alex Sarlin: and that's the web content accessibility guidelines, right? WCAG or WCAG. A lot of us who have worked in EdTech have sort of passed by the accessibility at times. Sometimes we've worked on accessibility projects, sometimes we've made sure the videos have subtitles, whatnot, some of the issues.

But this is a sort of a level up in terms of the compliance requirements. Tell us when this is gonna come into action and why everybody in ed Tech really needs to know about it. 

[00:03:45] Priyank Chodisetti: Yeah, the new law in the digital space went in April, 2024, like I mentioned, but they gave like a two year grace period, 

[00:03:54] Alex Sarlin: right, 

[00:03:55] Priyank Chodisetti: for people to make their products accessible.

So if you are a public entity operating with population more than 50,000 people, then the actual deadline is April 24th, 2026. And if you're serving populations less than 50,000 people, then the deadline, you have one more year, and the deadline is April 26th, 2027. One thing to note there is some slight confusion here is it doesn't matter how many people enroll in your school or your university.

Let's say your university has 30,000 enrollments. But that population where you are located, there are like 60,000 people still. The April 24th, 2026 deadline applies to you. So it is based on the population of the district you are serving rather than. The number of enrollments you have 

[00:04:44] Alex Sarlin: that is very eyeopening.

So I imagine people who are hearing this right now are saying, oh, wait a second. So it's not about the number of users I have in my app. It's not about the number of students or teachers I'm serving, it's about the population of the district, which might be many, many districts are above. 50,000 people. So that is gonna affect a huge number of EdTech companies.

And who does it apply to in practice? So you mentioned schools and community colleges, but in the EdTech space, let's talk about some of the types of EdTech organizations that should have this April deadline blocked in their head because it's gonna become serious at that time. 

[00:05:22] Priyank Chodisetti: Yeah. The law, the ADA Title II directly applies to all local and government entities.

That means all the public K 12 school districts. All the community colleges, all the state universities, and also any publicly funded institution. So because of that, even though it is a private institution, like a private school or a private university, if they receive any form of government funding, then they'll be part of this law as well.

One like interesting thing and very important for EdTech companies is, let me give you this example. If there is a school that is using a third party LM. And if that LMS is not compliant, not accessibility compliant by extension, the school that is also using that third part, LMS is also not compliant.

Because of that though, the ADA Title II doesn't directly talk about the private at tech companies. Because they sell to most of these like public entities, like schools and colleges. By extension, they must be accessibility compliant. So the way this is like playing out is when schools or colleges or universities are buying or procuring any third party software, they're looking if those products are accessibility compliant because without which they will become non-compliant.

So because of this like derivative effect, all that tech companies, almost every ed tech company. It's no longer an option to be accessibility compliant, but it becomes a requirement otherwise you lose all these procurement deals. 

[00:06:51] Alex Sarlin: That's really important to know. So just to summarize it, let me make sure I'm understanding, 'cause this is a sort of combination of the accessibility world, which can be complex and the legal world, which can be complex.

Basically the change two years ago. Was about the accessibility laws applying to distal services. So for online education, for online colleges, everything that happens online. So that applies to a number of ed tech companies that are serving people in districts over 50,000. But the even more important change is that.

Because every school, every community college, every publicly funded organization is under this law and it's going to be enforced more regularly. They have to make sure all of their vendors are compliant, which basically at that point, covers almost everybody in EdTech. 

[00:07:35] Priyank Chodisetti: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. 

[00:07:37] Alex Sarlin: So this is the nature of the beast, that it's not a beast.

I mean, obviously this is a good thing. Accessibility, compliance is a good thing. It opens access. It's great for any kind of learner. So this is a good thing, but it's a business problem internally for a lot of people. They have to figure out how to it. 

[00:07:51] Priyank Chodisetti: Yeah. It is more work that these companies have to do.

Like it is no longer an optionality. Like when you are building your product, you had to keep that in your mind. So, yeah, definitely. 

[00:08:01] Alex Sarlin: And what's I think very interesting about your solution to it, the Workback AI solution, is that, so anybody who's dealt with accessibility historically realizes that basically you have these A CAG guidelines.

They sort of double A and aa, I believe, that are different levels of. Compliance and there's this sort of set of things. You have to have the code be able to be read by screen readers. You need to do subtitles, you need to do image hre tags on images. There's sort of all these, there's list of things you have to do, but historically the way that many companies would have to become compliant is by working with third party auditors.

Sometimes they were tools, sometimes they were human companies that would check everything, say. You're 65% compliant, but here are the things you need to change and here's how it works. And that would take a long time and be this entire back and forth. And what you're changing, you're doing is saying, we can do this with AI.

This is a very specific set of guidelines. So tell us about that realization of what you're doing with Workback. 

[00:08:56] Priyank Chodisetti: Yeah, like you know that I was at Coursera, we were there together. 

[00:09:00] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. 

[00:09:00] Priyank Chodisetti: When I was at Coursera, I was managing their degrees engineering team, and that's when I first experienced in real world how the accessibility, compliance looks like.

So the entire process took us 11 months, whether you believe it or not, where we spent around four months for the auditing. The external auditors came up with a report of all the gaps in the compliance and then. The biggest cost is the internal engineering time you spend to address these issues. So your engineers have to write code to make changes that will make your product more accessible to these users.

And for that, there is verification where after the code changes are made, actually verifying whether that is fixing the issues. And finally, somebody will take all this evidence of before and after and puts together accessibility compliance report. In a standard industry accepted format called VA.

Probably you folks have heard about vpa, and with the advent of the new aa, that's when it dawned upon me like, why should it cost that much, and why should it take that much time? Like you'll be surprised at the number of meetings and coordination that happens. Like one day an engineer receives this ticket that you have to address the issue.

And usually if it is their first time, they will not have any clue. There will be a lot of technical jargon. I'm talking this even for engineers, like leave alone, like product managers or designers, right? So nobody enjoys this, and yet, like when you talk to people, everybody cares about it. Because of the impact.

[00:10:34] Alex Sarlin: Yes, 

[00:10:34] Priyank Chodisetti: but the effort, that time, the knowledge it requires, everybody gets frustrated about it, to be honest. Right. That's where I even got burned as an engineering manager, where it's my job to get it done. My knowledge is zero, and my engineers, only couple of people knew about it and that's it. And still we have to do that.

That was the biggest motivation for me, where we started questioning why like. Why should it take this much time? And when I did some research, I haven't seen any product there that is addressing the problem end to end. Most of the solutions are very piecemeal. Either they focus exclusively on auditing or exclusively on like remediating and even these processes or very, very manual.

Oftentimes these are outsourced crowd testing where. 10 to 15 people manually will go through these things and address them. So that's what we are set out to solve With Workback, which is at a high level, what we are saying is you can forget about accessibility, compliance. Just like offload all that thinking and work to us, right?

And our value prop is like, Hey, it's not just like handing off to us. The amount of effort you need to spend on your side is quite minimal. That's where we used AI to automate all the steps involved that is doing the audit. After that, writing the code to actually address these issues, and finally like collecting all the evidence and generating vpa.

We automated all these steps with AI from our point of view and vision, what we believe is if you can lower the barrier to entry to address these issues and become compliant, a lot more people will be willing to do that no matter whether there's a regulation or not. Because I know for a fact when you talk to product managers, designers, and engineers.

Nobody says I don't want accessible, 

[00:12:28] Alex Sarlin: right? 

[00:12:29] Priyank Chodisetti: It's inaccessible to them because of knowledge, the time and investment. And our point of view is by using AI, we are making it faster, cheaper, and better. That many people will be desiring to do that. 

[00:12:42] Alex Sarlin: A hundred percent. And as a former product manager, it was always a question of prioritization.

That was the thing. It was saying, this is important. It would improve impact. It would improve access. But it's this opaque process. It's this whole list of tickets that we have to generate and figure out. And as you said, it's usually, in my experience, and and I, I imagine others listening to this, there'll be like, as you said, one or two people on any given team who sort of.

Really focus on this, who are willing to sit down with the WCAG guidelines and make sense of it and understand all the pieces and understand how the code works and what needs to be done. But then suddenly, well, that one engineer has four months of sprints completely covered, doing accessibility, and they're out of the loop.

It's one of these funny moments where the desire to do good, and especially in ed tech, where we all really have the desire to do good runs, right against the business needs, and it can be really painful. 

[00:13:32] Priyank Chodisetti: Exactly, exactly. 

[00:13:34] Alex Sarlin: What also strikes me listening to you talk about this is, this is such a perfect use case for AI, right?

I mean, this is something where the regulations are complex, but they're written down, they're incredibly clear where the VPA is very standard format where the audits and where writing code is part of the process. So when you broke down all of these steps of going from audit to final reporting, I imagine that's such a perfect use case for AI.

I'd love to hear you talk about that. 

[00:14:02] Priyank Chodisetti: Exactly like you brought up a very, very good point. One thing is the standards VA standards that we are talking about, they're extremely well documented. Yes, there is. This committee updates this documentation. If you go to each v, a criteria for AA 2.1, there are 50 criteria.

If you go to the website. Each criteria is explained in like five to 10 pages of extremely detailed text, including how does a good product looks like with that criteria? What are the failure criteria Like? It literally gives you a bullet points, right? And that is what elements are really good at. 

[00:14:39] Alex Sarlin: Yes. 

[00:14:40] Priyank Chodisetti: If you give an extremely, very detailed English text LMS like are extremely good at that.

Like for example, if you give a complex math problem. Maybe that's not the forte yet for the LLMs, but interpreting the English documentation, they're really good. That's one. And also the current agents became so, so good where you can literally make them browse any website, navigate around things, click around things and all that.

So combine these two. Oftentimes we get this question. Oh, we are doing a very high quality manual testing. How does your A compare? We are like, no, like, and we even get a question, do you have like manual review on the A? We are like, no. A is so good that in fact our A finds 50% more issues when we do these audits.

Right. Couple of our customers actually did a manual analysis side by side. One of our customers have, were doing accessibility compliance for 12 years. Like kudos to them. Yeah. For them it's not even about compliance. They see it as a competitive advantage. That head of engineering said it is hands down the best remediation and audit report I have seen in the last decade.

So again, it is new. So naturally like the change, people will question it. Is it better than manual? We even found from one customer, even when you're doing manual auditing. When there were no changes to the product, they did not find any issues last year, but for the same piece of product and flow without any changes, they found like 10 issues.

The reason is, even when you're doing it manually, it's really hard to keep track of all the success failure criteria on a given day. Depending upon the performance of that person, they can do decent, better, worse. But with there you get that consistent performance doing really well. And that's what we are seeing and that's why like we are really pumped.

When people ask us, do you have manual checks in middle? We are like, no. That is the old way of thinking. It's on us to make you compliant. And we trust our, of course we are constantly testing it, but this is. Very perfect fit for the LLMs. 

[00:16:46] Alex Sarlin: It's a perfect fit. And you know, when I hear you say each of the 50 criteria have these five pages of documentation, it's not only a perfect fit for AI, it's a very bad fit for humans, right?

I mean this, that's hundreds of pages of detailed documentation that any human would have to go through to really make sense of this with all, as you say, the examples become shots, right? They become the few shots that the AI needs to succeed. So I feel like there's something very. It's like peanut butter and jelly, right?

I, it just goes together so well. This problem of accessibility, which is, as you say, everybody wants to solve it. It is important to many, many people, but it's just very bad fit for our regular human intelligence and ability. It's a huge amount of deep detail. It's all of these steps. Everybody outsources it because nobody has enough expertise in-house, or almost nobody does.

And then meanwhile, you can make an AI. Credible accessibility expert and have them do every step and they can code, and their context window is big enough to understand everything and they can review code. It's really an exciting thing. So one other question for you here is, so compliance can be an ongoing process, right?

I mean, people do these audits, they check everything, but as they launch new features, as they launch new things in their product suite, they need to check accessibility all over again. How does Workback work in that context? 

[00:18:02] Priyank Chodisetti: Yeah. Past days, I'm referring to past as solutions before Workback AI. As I was saying, it was very manual and it is time taken.

So in Coursera’s case, for example, it took them 11 months, but by the time you got your like, Hey, we are compliant. Your progress improved by one year of your engineering team's work or product team's work, and all those features become out of compliance. And usually companies go at this every one year that is recommended.

And anytime VPA is more than one year, it is not as valued. Or your procurement teams from the other side will ask for a new vpa, right? The challenge with this is it is a big headache for engineering and product leaders. They're waiting by dreading for one year, not knowing how much more work they have to do the next year for everything they shipped this year, right?

So in fact, when I talk to these companies that did VPA S for a few years, their desire is to have continuous compliance. Where from the get go, they want to make sure all the new features they're launching are compliant from out of the door. And it was just not possible or viable before. Because even if you hire somebody, like there is something called continuous deployment for the non-engineering folks where every day you are updating your website or product maybe 20 to 50 times a day and there is just no way a manual audit or review can keep up.

So with Workback, what we are doing is you can actually plug in. Our agents to your CICD, it's called continuous deployment or integration, where every time there is a change to the code, our agents can audit the actual website in the developer mode and make any code recommendations on the fly, so that way Workback is keeping this products compliant like continuously.

Just one note on that, sometimes when you're doing it for the first time. People mostly see compliance as a simple checkbox they can tick off. One way to think about it is you are never compliant as in the same way. A website can always be improved to make it better for your users and always make your product better, more accessible and compliant.

So don't see this as an official seal. Somebody giving you there is always something you can improve. That's where this whole continuous compliance mindset comes from. So 

[00:20:34] Alex Sarlin: fantastic. And you've mentioned our shared history at Coursera a couple times, and I'd love to dive into that just for a couple minutes.

It's a little bit of an aside, but I think it's very relevant to everything and Workback for many of the reasons you've been mentioning those in EdTech for a long time may remember that back in, I believe it was the mid 2010s, maybe 2014 or 15 edX. Actually flagged and actually I think taken down for a short time because of its non-compliance for accessibility.

And that was a sort of a shock wave across the industry. They were like, I don't know if it was actually offline, but it was like they got in real trouble for it. And of course, Coursera and, and Udacity and many of the other online course providers had this sort of wake up call, which instigated a lot of compliance issues.

Do you wanna talk about that moment? I, I'm curious if you remember that exact thing. I 

[00:21:20] Priyank Chodisetti: vaguely remember that that was like an eyeopener for all the EdTech companies. 

[00:21:25] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, 

[00:21:25] Priyank Chodisetti: and there are a couple of things I want to state there. One, for example, even outside EdTech, it's a common practice where companies get legally sued.

For their products not being accessibility compliant. A farmer's case, even before edX, was that a blind user sued dominoes, that they couldn't place an order for pizza on the website using what is available. That means they're not accessible and that was a very famous case that like Domino's settle with them.

Similarly, like edX case for example, they were given a take don order unless they fix all their issues. That's 

[00:22:00] Alex Sarlin: what it was. 

[00:22:01] Priyank Chodisetti: I wanna focus on that where. This is not like security compliance where if you are not compliant, like for example, if there is a security breach, there's nothing you can do. Data already left your servers.

In case of accessibility, compliance, let's say for whatever reason a part of your product is not working, then as long as a user can submit a bug. If you can address that issue in a reasonable time, not in like months, maybe in a few weeks, then you are actually fine because this accessibility compliance is making things better for your users in good faith by putting in real effort.

Even in case of the edX lawsuit, I think the DOJ gave them a timeline, like enough buffer time for them. Hey, if you can address all the issues within this timeline, you are fine. Otherwise you'll be completely like brought down. Brought in like charges and like the fines, right? That's something I want to like, use this context to remind people where, hey, like, yeah, you are trying your best to become compliant, but give a way for your users to report these issues and be prompt in addressing them.

Then you'll be fine in this. But yeah, there are legal consequences. It's not just, oh, there's a law and all the lawsuits are real. I, I was talking to another friend in a tech company. They get around six to eight, small to medium lawsuits that, uh, by showing VPA and all, they not even settle. They can push them back.

There are also troll lawyers who like Sue, not just the real users. So there are both sides of the coin to this. 

[00:23:35] Alex Sarlin: It's, it's really important to keep in mind what the potential consequences are, but also that there is sometimes grace, period. It's not binary, all or nothing. Things sort of come in and out.

And one more Coursera reference that I just wanna bring up because I think it also opens a really interesting area of conversation here. One of the things that I think we were really proud of that Coursera early on is that because it was so widespread all over the world, all so many different kinds of learners, we would hear.

These amazing stories about learners who were accessing Ivy League courses from all different places. I remember one of our user stories was about a, a user who had only use of his eyes. He was totally paralyzed from the, his entire body. He could only move his eyes and he was actually taking courses through eye tracking technology that we could actually.

Take the entire courses through eye tracking and it was like so moving. And I think, you know, one of the things that is hard to keep in mind when you think about accessibility, I at least I'll speak for myself here as an engineering manager, I sure you've had this too, is you think about it as sort of a set of requirements, as a list, as a 250 page document.

But as soon as you meet or hear about a user who is blind or disabled or has needs that they want to access your service and they can't because of what they're doing, especially in EdTech and especially when you serve young people. It just changes the whole emotional tenor of it. It takes it from this sort of legalistic document and process to, wow, we really should do this because this is, there's so many amazing people out there who are trying to access education.

I'd love to hear you talk about the sort of human side of this. 

[00:25:04] Priyank Chodisetti: Yeah. That's an amazing thing you brought in, and of course the whole regulation and all these are all means to an end. Those are not in itself. Right. One thing you also observe is sometimes. We get stuck in our jobs and think about it as, oh, it's one more thing to do, but I almost a hundred percent believe and guarantee when we actually meet the users on the other side, I'm dead sure we'll drop everything and want to do anything that takes to support them.

Probably one thing I want to like call out here is one in four US citizens are Americans. Or disable in one way or the other. It's like we'll be surprised and blown away. Just like oftentimes we see this as a black or white, like a user is. Or there's a blind user or non blind user, but there is a massive spectrum in between, right?

For example, I have a personal eye condition called uveitis because of which my left eye vision is. I lost bunch of vision there, right? Like even now when I watch on mobile simple thing, you app on Apple News, I play crossword, I play this emerging game and I can't freaking like see that I triple tap, zoom in, like scanner on, I go to restaurants.

I don't see the menu like because of the lowlight, I take my watch, use the flashlight, right? One of the engineers on my team, I didn't realize that he was colorblind on Coursera product. He was having trouble like using that, right? So if we actually observe around us, there are a lot of us who needs support, who needs these accessibility measures one way or the other, and that is a great motivation for us.

In fact, I joke with my co-founder that. The impact of Workback AI should be so much. We need to be the official sponsor of Winter Olympics, where we wanna be like not impactful. Like everybody who has any remote accessibility need, they'll be so happy that we are there because we make it so easy. Every website, every product will be doing the accessibility measures, right.

[00:27:06] Alex Sarlin: It's a great segue to my next question, which is that workback.ai uses AI to do accessibility compliance that may not be limited to education organizations. Uh, how are you thinking about other sectors in which Workback might be useful? 

[00:27:19] Priyank Chodisetti: Yeah, great question. There are other sectors where already the regulation is in place, for example.

FinTech financial technology products, health technology products, and like I was saying, because of the Domino's case, almost every e-commerce product need, like accessibility, compliance, the way we are thinking it worked back is, yeah, you are right. There is no need for us to restrict just to like one domain, but because.

We know a lot about the EdTech and we came from that. That's where we are starting. We have some credibility. We have some partnerships here, like that is playing in our favor, but as Workback grows and get into like two years, three years, that's when we want to start applying the technology to other product areas.

But to begin with, like we don't want to run before we can walk. We really want to solve the problem well. For the product areas that we have expertise in and with those learnings, that's not like we want to go into the other sectors, but you are right. It's not just EdTech, like I was saying. There are other domains where this is required and people are already doing that.

[00:28:22] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. We in EdTech appreciate that you're focusing there because I think this is a huge time saver and something. So relevant, especially with the laws coming into effect in just a couple of months. One thing that you offer, which I admit I don't fully yet understand, so I'd love to hear you unpack it, is that Workback offers a free pilot.

You allow EdTech companies to try it out and do some accessibility auditing. That is actually very unusual for the accessibility space where it's usually, you know, you sign up and it's this multi-month process. How does your pilot work? How do you. Start the accessibility process with companies who want to try it out before they become full customers.

[00:28:59] Priyank Chodisetti: Yeah. Thanks for asking that. One thing is when people are looking out for solutions, just for the audit, some of these companies take one to two weeks of scoping to give you an estimated cost of just the audit. That's where we realize like one advantage we have is speed, and why don't we let our customers see what they're getting.

In fact, like me and Arthur, my co-founder, are so excited about our product. We are like, we want more people to see this, right? And we are also very confident when people see our product. I can't see any reason why they wouldn't use the product. That's where we thought we will give the free pilot. With the free pilot, we will do audit remediation and also the vpa.

For any user journey, you sell it. The user journey can be any complexity. It can have a hundred steps, it can have 10 steps. It can be behind a login, it can be a synchronous flow where a teacher will do something, a student has to do anything. So we want two things from our customer. We want a high level description in English.

What the user journey is. And secondly, access to the code to our agent. We called it ada. ADA after the, not the ADA regulation. Once we have those two, we'll do the audit for the user journey and share all the issues on our platform. This audit will take 24 hours, then our other agent will remedy up to five issues of your choice.

So where your engineers will get, uh, code changed. We call them pull requests. And finally, we will also generate the VPA in its current state for your user journey. That way your team can see, number one, like get educated about what are all the things involved with accessibility complaints. And second, if you have doubts about this manual versus AI and all, you can see in live action, like what is the quality of the issues?

You can like manually verify them. What is the quality of code our A is generating and also how good the VPA looks like, right? And that's where we want to show the value of the platform. And after that, it's completely fine. Whether you don't use a production or not, it's okay. At least we helped you learn and we will learn something about you.

So. 

[00:31:12] Alex Sarlin: That's amazing. I see it as sort of a cross section, right? Because you're doing the entire set of steps, the auditing, remediation, even to VPA certification or preparing for certification, but for one segment of the product, one user journey of the product and, and a handful, you know, up to five issues actually doing the code to fix the issues.

I imagine that's a very appealing pilot for people. They get to see into the process, see the complexity of the process, but also identify real issues, get them fixed in real time within days. 

[00:31:42] Priyank Chodisetti: And the entire free pilot will take three to four days, and that's it. And the effort from you is send us an email and give permission, store our bot, and that's it.

We'll take care of the rest. 

[00:31:53] Alex Sarlin: We're almost at time here, but I wanna zoom out a little bit because I think one of the things that's so interesting about what you're doing at Workback, you know, we mentioned earlier it's such a natural fit for the competencies of LLMs and of generative AI right now, and I know that you have been somebody, you've been an engineer for a long time.

You've been an EdTech engineer for a long time. You've been really deep in this space, and you've sort of seen the generative AI. Revolution happened over the last three years leading up to this amazing company. But I'd love to hear you talk about what you feel like generative AI is doing writ large for the EdTech space.

You know? How has it changed the space in your mind through your particular experience, and how do you think it's gonna continue to change the space? 

[00:32:33] Priyank Chodisetti: Yeah, great question. I'm attending a bunch of conferences, ed tech conferences as part of bringing awareness about Workback AI to ed tech customers, and I'm blown away by the suite of products I'm seeing out there, especially, I'm very, very excited about the products where there are customized learning plans for the students, for example.

That's a huge promise and huge motivation for me when I joined Coursera, where. Anybody can learn the way or at their pace. That's a big promise of MOOCs. For example, when I was like going to school in my childhood, I was very knit into classes because within like first week. I probably understood like most of the concepts and I used to be bored in the classroom.

Right. And I used to joke that I was in it to, not because of my lack of attention, but the content or what I'm learning is not as exciting. That's something that at Coursera, like we made like massive progress towards, right? By customize, like learning plans for students and all. But at the heart of that, the biggest bottleneck was.

Content creation and production that will match the students, right? Yeah. Even after people decided they want to teach X in Ywe, it used to take like three to four months, sometimes even six months to produce the course. And after that, even personalizing it for student, the custom you have to do was extremely hard.

I think that is what got democratized with LLMs were. Any topic you can like instantaneously come up with where student is and meet them and actually help them learn. Like I have two young girls, anytime they have a question, like they ask me all these questions from what is a black hole to simple mathematics and.

I don't know everything. And the first thing I do is go to Claude. I use Claude and like ask these questions and take it from there. Midlife crisis probably. I'm trying to learn DJing. My co-founder is a big dj. I'm like, this is very exciting. It's maybe slightly little easier than learning guitar at this age.

So I'm actually chatting with Claude. I got like a learning plan that I want to use, right? And I'm seeing like real good products being built in that space. And that is super exciting for me. 

[00:34:51] Alex Sarlin: Absolutely. That promise of, you know, we call it personalization, customization, individualization, lots of differentiation.

That promise of education being split from being that one size fits all. There's a course that everybody's supposed to follow along the same content at the same pace, to literally generating courses on demand. Generating modules on demand. I mean, I remember an engineer ing back in Coursera had this great idea about.

Hey, for any course, what if like, there was a core spine of the course, but then you could choose a sort of specialty and dig down if you're taking a law course, maybe you're interested in medical law or international law, and, and we could branch off and you could sort of dive down into what you actually were truly trying to learn.

And it was like this amazing idea, but as you said, it would be dependent on. Going to every university and having them create these branching paths. And every branch would have, you know, fewer users than the core branch. So it would be less and less diminishing returns. And it was like one of these things that, the idea is fantastic, but the execution has been really, really hard.

And anybody who's done branching anything knows how hard that has been historically. And now we have. Auto branching. We have instant creation of content about any topic. And then, you know, in more and more different types of formats, we're starting to see video and games and songs and, and of course text and visuals and images and diagrams.

I feel the same way. You do seeing the Coursera experience of. It's amazing, but the content was the bottleneck. It just changes the entire field. If you can create content on demand for what a user is, is interested in what their level they're at, what speed they're going at, and it's become sort of baked into so many different AI products.

[00:36:29] Priyank Chodisetti: Yeah. None of these are like new ideas, right? We all, probably from the advent of education, everybody thought about this, but now they're becoming viable and practical for. To implement at scale at every school. So, yeah, 

[00:36:42] Alex Sarlin: a hundred percent. And knowing the motivation is key too. I, I remember the moment at Coursera, we sort of instituted the get to know you survey as you came into the site.

[00:36:51] Priyank Chodisetti: Yeah. 

[00:36:51] Alex Sarlin: And I would say, oh, I'm here to learn for professional reasons, or I'm a student, or I'm learning just for fun, or, I'm a lifelong learner and I'm just wanna meet other people. And, and that was intended to get a some signal on. People's motivation, but LLMs, you could talk to them for an hour about your motivation.

It could know absolutely everything about why you're there, what you're trying to learn, what you're trying to do with what you learn. If you're trying to be a DJ, to go to AHA and spin, you know, a set or if you're just learning to do it to impress your kids or you know, it can know that, and that's a huge difference in what the learning path would look like.

[00:37:24] Priyank Chodisetti: I agree. Completely agree with it. Yeah. Super exciting. 

[00:37:27] Alex Sarlin: Well, I'm looking forward to seeing your DJ debut. Maybe we can do that at a event together. That would be really fun. What you're doing is incredible at Workback. I'm incredibly excited about it and I, I hope that our listeners are sort of, their light bulbs are lighting up as they think about what accessibility might look like in this world.

You know, outside of. Long audits, 11 months, four months, all these different tickets, these, you know, all this tech that, continuously deploying automated accessibility world. It's really an exciting vision for the future of accessibility and down the road for impact, for reach for all of these EdTech companies that are out there trying to reach as many students and changes as many lives as possible.

Priyank Chodisetti is the co-founder and CEO of Workback AI. It's a company that helps EdTech organizations achieve accessibility, compliance. Through AI powered very rapid accessibility auditing. Thank you so much for being here with us on EdTech Insiders. 

[00:38:19] Priyank Chodisetti: Thank you, Alex, for having me. 

[00:38:21] Alex Sarlin: 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. For those who want even more, EdTech Insider, subscribe to the Free EdTech Insiders Newsletter on substack.