Week in Edtech 6/3/26: OpenAI, Anthropic & xAI Race Toward IPOs, AI Upskilling Booms, Handshake Surges, Global EdTech Prize Opens Applications, and More! Feat. Vikas Pota of T4 Education & Keri Dixon of Wilson Language Training

Join hosts Alex Sarlin and guest co-host Matt Tower of Whiteboard Advisors as they explore the latest developments in AI, workforce learning, edtech innovation, and literacy instruction.

✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:03:24] OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI prepare for potential IPOs
[00:07:45] Anthropic surpasses OpenAI in valuation as enterprise AI adoption grows
[00:08:59] Byju Raveendran’s legal challenges raise questions about edtech governance
[00:11:23] Handshake’s growth contrasts with Chegg’s struggles in the AI era
[00:14:03] Coursera, Udemy, and the future of AI-driven workforce upskilling
[00:19:10] The debate over AI’s impact on jobs, careers, and the labor market
[00:25:41] AI enables the rise of highly scalable one-person companies
[00:27:32] The emergence of “purple collar” jobs in the AI economy
[00:31:45] Why AI upskilling may be the biggest opportunity in education
[00:33:34] OpenAI expands higher education partnerships across major university systems
[00:38:33] Embedded learning and AI-powered skill development inside workplace tools
[00:40:48] Balancing educational technology benefits with screen-time concerns

Plus, special guests:
[00:42:12] Vikas Pota, Founder of T4 Education, on the Global EdTech Prize, educator-led innovation, and the opportunities and risks of AI in education
[00:57:30] Keri Dixon, CEO of Wilson Language Training, on the science of reading, structured literacy implementation, and AI as a tool to support effective teaching

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Transcript

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[00:00:00] Alex Sarlin: This season of EdTech Insiders is brought to you by Cooley LLP. Cooley 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.

This season of EdTech Insiders is brought to you by Starbridge. 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, and 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. I mean, we've known that OpenAI has been working on this device for a while. We saw Meta announce an AI pendant this week, and they're always trying to sort of claw their way into the top tier of this right now. But I think that's just gonna be how it works at some point soon.

We're gonna just be connected. 

[00:01:08] Matt Tower: One thing that I'm sort of interested in is the rise of what I'll call like purple collar jobs. And my canonical example of this is the teenage Roblox millionaires that Bloomberg wrote about a few weeks ago. And it's these jobs that are like, you know, in any other age would have been considered total luxuries, but are now, you know, there's sufficient demand to justify a career.

[00:01:38] 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, K-12, higher ed, and work, you'll find it all here at EdTech Insiders. 

[00:01:54] 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 enjoy today's pod

[00:02:18] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to The Week in EdTech. We are here on the very beginning of June. We've got an amazing summer ahead. All sorts of things are going on even though school is basically out for the summer, and we have an amazing guest host, one of our favorites, Matt Tower from Whiteboard Advisors. Matt, welcome to the pod. 

[00:02:37] Matt Tower: Thanks for having me, Alex.

Excited to dig in. 

[00:02:40] Alex Sarlin: It's always great to chat with you, and there's, there's a lot of things to dig into today. We're also talking in this episode to Vikas Pota about the second annual Global EdTech Prize, which is, uh, really exciting. This one's gonna be in London. They-- It's always an amazing set of people that they bring together, and with Keri Dixon from Wilson Language.

So, Matt, let's jump right into the news. I think we have to start with the sort of big, it's not education technology directly, but these are players in EdTech. This week, we now officially know that both OpenAI and Anthropic are filing to go public. They're probably gonna be two of the biggest IPOs in history.

What did you make of that news, and do you think it will have any downstream effects on their role in the education space? 

[00:03:24] Matt Tower: Yeah. And then, of course, SpaceX, with its subsidiary xAI, uh, filed last week or the week before. It's hard to keep track. That's 

[00:03:32] Alex Sarlin: right. That's right. They're- 

[00:03:33] Matt Tower: So- 

[00:03:34] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, they come in twos.

[00:03:34] Matt Tower: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And so between them, we'll have on the order of three or four trillion dollars of market value added to the public markets. I think generally positive, right? I think I sort of subscribe to the it's better to have more public companies than the current trend, which has been towards companies really building themselves in the private markets.

I think it's better to have more equity available for the public. I think it adds some rigor to company lifespans that the private markets don't necessarily have, which is great at the startup phase, having more latitude to build your company. But I think particularly when announcements move the rest of the markets the way that these AI companies do, it's nice to, like, be able to trust in the accounting practices Yeah

and, and have them be very publicly accessible. So to me, it's, it's a major step in the right direction, and I hope helps either justify or calibrate the sort of AI fervor that we've had for the past really twelve, eighteen months. 

[00:04:41] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. I mean, w-what's-- one interesting aspect of it is that when these are public companies, when they have shareholders, when they have all this sort of transparency of their accounting and their planning and their projections, it could either dilute the education projects.

You know, they've all sort of been playing with education in various different ways. They've launched a number of different education products. And I include Google in that, which has, of course, been public for a long time. But you could see a world in which they suddenly have to be more responsive to some bottom lines, and they start to pull back on some of their, you know, actually pretty large, not in terms of percentage of their revenue, but still relatively large scale education endeavors.

Like, you know, we just saw this week OpenAI announce another countrywide deal with Armenia. It's not the biggest country, but when you're doing countrywide deals, that's a big thing So I could see it being that they say, "Wait, is this really ROI positive?" Or they could say, "Hey, we're doing countrywide deals through education.

This is a huge market. We're selling to all these colleges. Maybe this is actually a real moneymaker." And I-- So I, I think it might... It could go either way, right? It could go either way as these businesses become sort of accountable in some more ways to the public and to shareholders specifically. But I could also potentially see, you know, what Google's been doing all this time.

It's been a public company, but it's had these sort of google.org and all of these charitable corporate social responsibility initiatives, all of these different, you know, do good for the world initiatives, and especially for a place like Anthropic, which is sort of has some of that same DNA. I could see them really keeping a big foot in education even when they're public.

[00:06:13] Matt Tower: Yeah. I think what's sort of interesting is Homework was sort of one of the first canonical use cases of AI. 

[00:06:21] Alex Sarlin: Yep. 

[00:06:22] Matt Tower: We don't have to re-litigate the Chegg disaster, but I think it gave education a real high profile place in the AI landscape. 

[00:06:31] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. 

[00:06:31] Matt Tower: That's tampered down quite a bit over the past, really six months as the enterprise coding use case has taken off at Anthropic in particular.

Yeah. And I think we've seen a shift in, in sort of the way that education gets discussed as it relates to AI and the, the resourcing available for the education use case has also shifted. OpenAI made some high-profile hires in, in the education space, but both particularly at OpenAI and Anthropic, the team staffing the education use case are still relatively small- 

[00:07:04] Alex Sarlin: They are

[00:07:04] Matt Tower: relative to sort of education one point O, AWS, Microsoft, Apple, and Google. 

[00:07:11] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. 

[00:07:12] Matt Tower: So I don't know. I think it helps all startups that these folks will now be public and will have a public comp for AI and AI-related activity. Companies like Handshake and Multiverse and others that are sort of downstream of the major model providers, I think it gives them an additional anchor to sort of lean on in their own public market narratives.

But yeah, it's really, really hard to keep up when all this stuff is private and we're we're kind of speculating. So I, I'm just happy to have something to sort of look at on a regular basis. 

[00:07:45] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. It's been interesting to watch Anthropic. I mean, the other news, of course, coming out of this is that Anthropic's valuation is actually higher than OpenAI's based on the raise they just did and the filing, and that I think is...

I think surprised a lot of people. But Anthropic has been really, really careful sort of in how they've rolled things out. They've been really B2B focused. They obviously, the Cloud Code and CoWork to a lesser extent, but Cloud Code has been this, you know, superstar hit product that has really changed the industry.

So I think I've heard some amazing, you know, revenue projections of just like how are they-- They're just sort of making money hand over fist, especially over the last, you know, six months, and it's just shot things through the roof. It's re- it's really amazing to watch. So on the complete flip side of, of this, of this world, I had to ask you because I feel like you have been the most bearish and correct, you know, Byju's watcher for years now, and news over the last couple weeks is that Byju actually is spending some time in jail.

And I just had to get your take on it because we don't talk a whole lot about Byju anymore, and there's a whole new generation of Indian EdTech, but man, I always love to hear you talk about it and we just can't get past the Byju's escapades. 

[00:08:59] Matt Tower: Yeah, I mean, I think it's part of what I was just advocating for, right?

Of like the public markets have a level of accountability that the private markets do not. And I think that's really important for companies once they hit a certain stage of their life cycle. And the reality is like, Baiju lied to his team, his investors, the markets writ large about what the company was doing, and this is a consequence of that.

So that has always been my biggest gripe about what happened with the company, is the consistent lying, right? And trying to tell a different story than what was plainly visible and not taking accountability for his actions. So, you know, I'm not surprised. I think most of their investors will not get any restitution or, or very small amount of restitution.

And I think it just speaks to the need for stronger accountability in the private markets and hopefully earlier entrance into the public markets so that these types of disasters happen less often or are caught earlier before leaders like Baiju are able to do as substantial damage as he did. 

[00:10:07] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And you know, it strikes me, you've mentioned Byju's and Chegg and Handshake, and I feel like, you know, Byju's and, and Chegg have been really very visible over the last couple of years as real I don't know, fatality.

I don't know what you, you even call it. I mean, the AI era has sort of taken them out, taken Chegg out, and Byju's taken out by this corporate, you know, malfeasance. And Handshake, I think, has a good claim to be the sort of opposite. It's becoming one of the sort of profitable poster children of EdTech, even though it's, you know, arguably not directly EdTech as much as it was anymore.

It's really jobs and AI training in various ways. But I think people maybe are sleeping on Handshake as the sort of counter-narrative to Chegg, and if people who have been fleeing the EdTech space saying, "I'm not sure it can succeed," I love the idea of holding up Handshake and potentially Multiverse.

It's potentially heading that way as counter examples. I'm curious, you know, I always talk about the narratives on this show because I feel like there's so much in the zeitgeist, especially these days about EdTech, and a lot of it has turned a little bit negative, and we have to sort of find the right narratives.

I'm curious what you make of that idea. Am I, am I barking up totally the wrong tree about being like, "Yes, there's Byju's, yes, there's Chegg," but there's also Handshake, there's also Multiverse, there's also people sort of making it work? 

[00:11:23] Matt Tower: I think that Chegg versus Handshake and/or Multiverse narrative is interesting.

I, I think Baiju is a, like, you know, again, like we have documented evidence. We can put the link in the show notes to my documentation of not being a good leader. 

[00:11:38] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. 

[00:11:39] Matt Tower: So I think that's more of an isolated incident. I think the- That's right ... the difference between Chegg and Handshake is much more interesting in that I think Handshake played the game on the field, as is Multiverse.

And, and I think Multiverse is still earlier in that process, so we don't know. It sounds like they doubled revenue year over year, so like, sounds like it's working. They're still a little bit behind Handshake in terms of like total growth. But they said like, "Look, the AI era means we have to adapt our business," right?

And, and I think this gets at, you and I were just sort of chatting about jobs and like, is AI gonna take jobs? Is it gonna make jobs, et cetera. And my perspective is the game on the field for Handshake was Data labeling. We have this awesome set of really highly qualified undergraduate and graduate students.

Companies have a need for that. We are gonna fill that need. They played the game on the field and it's working for them. Chegg was not able to find that inroad sort of entertainingly. Like Chegg actually has a huge roster of subject matter experts in academic areas that maybe they could have utilized, I don't know, to do training runs for AI companies.

I think what we will reflect on in five or 10 years is the companies that adapted to the AI era versus those who tried to protect their existing businesses. 

[00:12:55] Alex Sarlin: Hundred percent. And, and that brings up two quick things for mind, for me. One is Google, right? So I mean, the same way that Chegg was sort of automatically right in the crosshairs of AI being a sort of service that included textbooks, it included homework help, all, all, all of these different...

And tutoring. It w- so many of the things that AI was sort of promising to do was exactly their bailiwick, and people sort of realized that very early and punished them a lot for it. I think Google also realized very early that search, that you know, we- internet search was right in the crosshairs of AI.

They've adapted so much. They've been put doing so many AI projects and, you know, I, I just-- we, we talked about OpenAI and, and Anthropic, but this week they really started to launch and promote their Spark agent platform, which in many ways people are saying is sort of the next iteration of Google's, like maybe not their search, but like sort of Google's assistantship.

Like it's an agentic platform that can do all these things for you and has obviously access to everything on the internet, but can sort of move around the internet and complete tasks for you, and they're trying to make it a much more like sort of user-friendly agent platform. And I think how big the swings are that they are taking is also very much in res- it's their attempt to play the game, as you put it, right?

To be on the field, to not be the slow-moving incumbent that says, "Oh my God, these companies just sort of ate our lunch." And then the other one it brings to mind is Coursera and, and Udemy, right? Two companies that went public during the sort of pandemic EdTech boom merged recently. And now, you know, there's news on LinkedIn that Puguh Sesaran, who's the CEO of Udemy, has now stepped down, so it seems like sort of Coursera has really basically, you know, absorbed Udemy.

They sped up the merger. They're actually merged. And I, I saw a launch of an interesting, you know, short form AI platform for the Coursera Plus subscribers that basically cuts Coursera courses into tiny little chunks and does all this kind of AI on top of them. And I'm like, these are companies that were the last generation of EdTech IPOs a few years ago, and then AI sort of came in and exploded the field, and they're trying desperately to stay in the game.

I mean, Udemy probably launched 10,000 AI courses between 2022, probably t- 10 times that, and we know Coursera did too in the 2020s. I'm curious what you make of either of those takes, like every EdTech company and even big tech companies are trying to stay on the field and not be sort of left behind and be dinosaurs in this moment when everybody, everything is sort of changing in these unknown ways.

[00:15:14] Matt Tower: Yeah. I mean, I think the question in my mind, and I think Coursera and Multiverse are a good litmus test of this, is how involved does the company and/or people affiliated with the company need to be in order to sufficiently upskill a worker? And this also gets at both Anthropic and OpenAI put together these, like, pretty fancy-sounding consortiums of basically private equity investors to do large scale AI upskill consulting, right?

Mm. And so I think OpenAI's was, like, four billion, and Anthropic's was, like, one billion, and they had every fancy name you can imagine. But they were all built around, like, how do you change large enterprises to be AI ready quickly? And their bet sounded more like a traditional, like, we're gonna send in a McKinsey-esque team of consultants to do this.

Yeah. Coursera, I think, is the other end of the spectrum of we're gonna do a bunch of short-term videos, short-form videos, and the AI might be good enough to have the upskilling work, right? And Multiverse is somewhere in between, where they're going in unaffiliated with the major model providers and trying to teach corporate teams how to use AI.

So I think somewhere on that spectrum is gonna be the Goldilocks zone. I don't know. I, I don't... I'd be curious to get your take. I don't know what that Goldilocks zone is actually gonna be, whether it's high intensity, fancy consulting teams, short-form videos or something in between. 

[00:16:54] Alex Sarlin: And I think it's one of the key questions of the age.

And I, you know, it's, it's a, it's a great segue, and we should talk in a minute about the sort of AI job displacement, 'cause I know you have strong opinions about this. But I think that it's one of these things where, and this has sort of always been true of asynchronous learning, it will work for a segment, a sort of strata of the population.

There are people who care so much, they're dedicated, they're also, I think they might be desperate, they might be really nervous about it, they might be either early adopters or people who are very fearful of, of change or who are suddenly laid off and have time. Like, there is a strata of the population that can use asynchronous or primarily asynchronous material to upskill.

You just need a lot of intrinsic motivation to do so. And then I think, you know, as you say, there's a big spectrum. There's, uh, asynchronous learning with a little bit of coaching, a weekly meeting, asynchronous learning in groups, asynchronous learning with a cohort. Then there's, you know, you go to things like Maven and the cohort-based courses and Upland.

Exactly. And then you go all the way to like, "I'm gonna come in and land my team in your... My Accenture team is gonna join your company and make sure you're AI transformed over the next six months, and it's gonna cost you, you know, $5 million." It's a huge spectrum, but I think it affects different people.

And I think, you know, Coursera's bet has always been there may be a small percentage of people, but when you have 150 million users, that's actually kind of a lot of people, right? 

[00:18:17] Matt Tower: Right. 

[00:18:17] Alex Sarlin: And I think in the AI era, there may be even more incentive, there may be more layoffs, right? We're already seeing a lot of that.

But there also might be more just sort of disruption, and I don't mean that in the sort of Silicon Valley fancy way, just like people are gonna feel completely jolted out of their normal work. They're gonna see this stuff happening all around them, and I think they're gonna realize there's no moving forward without figuring out something about AI.

And there might be a, a whole section of the learning sphere. It might be individuals, it might be small teams, it might be... I mean, I'm sure Coursera is aware it might be within the university setting. They offer Coursera for Campus for universities. So I, I think they're thinking that they will have some chunk of that.

And obviously the Udemy acquisition gives them this massive, massive, massive platform. Yeah. With 

[00:18:58] Matt Tower: enterprises specifically. I, I, I think, uh, Udemy's big value prop was they had a deeper employer relationship than... Coursera had a good one, but Udemy's was always sort of seen as, as stronger 

[00:19:10] Alex Sarlin: than- They started earlier.

They've, they, yeah, they've, they've focused on it for a longer time, for quite a lot longer. And yeah, business is always, always, uh, you know, Dhawal Shah's graphs of the consumer versus business crossed with the percentages are exact opposite with Coursera and Udemy. Let's talk a little bit about this job stuff.

I know you've been thinking a lot about it, and I think this is something, you know, we're an ed tech podcast. Workforce training is obviously part of our wheelhouse, but this sort of pending job disruption, or not, is a really big issue right now, and I think a lot of people are getting more and more nervous about it in different ways.

What do you think about it? How disrupted, how much changed is the workforce going to be because of AI in the short term? Are we going to see mass layoffs? 

[00:19:53] Matt Tower: I think it sort of depends on your definition of disruption, right? So I think if you look at total employment I don't think there's gonna be a massive disruption.

I think if you look at a given specific vocation- 

[00:20:06] Alex Sarlin: Mm ... 

[00:20:06] Matt Tower: much higher likelihood for, quote-unquote, "disruption," right? Mm. So there are definitely certain jobs, like I was, I was talking to Paxton Rader of iDesign the other day, and he was saying, "Yeah, it used to take us 80 to 100 hours to put together a really good course, and now it takes 20," because of the different AI-enabled functions that they've been able to put together over the past 18 months.

Yeah. And one way to interpret that is, "Cool, I can fire three-quarters of my instructional designers." The other is to say, "Maybe I can build a lot more courses- Right ... and, and a lot more interesting things, and I can change the way that degree programs operate," whether that's faster, including different tracks at a faster pace, whether that's doing more hands-on work.

So I'm not super worried about the instructional designer going away, but I do think their job changes a lot. And then the other aspect of this is young workers versus old workers, which is sort of an age-old problem of every generation, the previous generation likes to complain about how they're no good, right?

So like y- you know, you're a millennial like me, we were the worst job hoppers in the history of mankind, right? And that was like my whole 20s we had to deal with, you know, we didn't stick to anything long enough. And the data showed conclusively that boomers job hopped exactly the same or more than millennials.

Mm. They just couldn't remember however many years later. And it's like, yeah, your first couple jobs, you job hop all the time, and then you, like, find a career, and you find a company you like, and you stay there for longer. That's sort of the circle of life. And I think we're going through that with Gen Z now, too, and they're trying to figure out what is meaningful to them and where they wanna work.

And yes, that means they will struggle to get some jobs, and they will struggle to stay in other jobs, and that's not to, like, make little of it. It's not easy, but that is, I think, what a lot of being in your 20s is. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. 

[00:22:04] Alex Sarlin: I'm getting more nervous about this. I think, you know- Okay ... we've talked about this o- on and off for quite a while on, on the EdTech Insiders, even though it's always sort of parallel to everything we talk about instead of right at the core.

And in the past, I've been very un-flat. You know, my feathers haven't been too ruffled by what you had Dario Amodei say, half of white-collar jobs are going away. I think we-- You hear things like 10% unemployment is possible. People throw out these numbers and these predictions, and they're scary if true, and I was always like, "Hey, we've seen lots of technology that's really changed how workforce works, including the computers i-in the first place, the internet," and jobs just change.

I mean, it, it adapts. You get different kinds of jobs. People do different kinds of things. The thing that's making me a little less confident in that and a little more nervous about the job market stuff, it's two things. So one, w- you know, Ben and I talked last week about how at this particular moment, it's sort of like- You almost like get kudos as an executive if you- Yeah

are planning AI-based layoffs because it makes you look very forward-thinking. Totally. It's kind of the cool thing to do, and that's never good when the cool thing to do among CEOs is compare layoff numbers. Like, that's scary. But also, I think- 

[00:23:12] Matt Tower: Can, can I, can I just- Yeah, sure ... really quick on that? Please. I thought it was really telling that Demis at DeepMind was like, "I think any exec who does that is a dumb-dumb."

[00:23:21] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. 

[00:23:22] Matt Tower: For lack of a better way to put it. He was like, "You shouldn't be laying these people off, especially software engineers. You should be coming up with four times as many things for them to do." 

[00:23:30] Alex Sarlin: Totally. 

[00:23:31] Matt Tower: And so he, like, very explicitly said, "I am not planning to do layoffs," and I am... You know, he's probably one of the top five, if not the top guy of, like, where this stuff is headed.

Totally. And he basically said everybody who's doing that is, is going to regret it. So I, I don't know. Yeah. He's a lot smarter than I am. 

[00:23:49] Alex Sarlin: No, I mean, he is, and I've, I've seen a few different articles that take that same sort of approach. They're like, well, if you are at a status quo, you're doing X number of engineers to keep your business running and stay on your product roadmap, and then AI comes in, and you say, "Oh, I only need a quarter as many engineers," well, all you're doing is staying on your current roadmap, right?

In an era where everyone else is gonna accelerate and do 10 times more things. And, like, there's definitely truth to that, but there may be a little bit of a lagging effect on that. Like, we may be talking about that in three years, who knows? The other thing that's made me a little more nervous is just seeing the agentic technologies where people are basically saying, you know, the future of work.

I mean, you watch these Claude Code talks and just sort of see the people who are really embracing Codex and Claude Code and Google has number tools, Cursor, all this stuff, and they're basically like, "Oh, what you do now is you run these, like, virtual teams of a dozen or 100 agents. They work together.

They do things overnight. They do all these pieces, and then they sort of come up with these whole finished product." And, like, a couple years ago, they wouldn't do a finished product. They'd botch it, right? There'd be these errors. It would fall apart. They'd try to f- troubleshoot the errors, but, like, that was always temporary, and I think we're getting close to a place.

I mean, I, I see people now on LinkedIn launching, like, full web apps, launching really amazing, like, Pixar-style movies, launching stuff, and they're like, "Yeah, I, I did this in, like, a day." And I'm like, okay, when you really can, as an individual, sort of like without being an unbelievable expert, run almost like a virtual team or almost a company's worth of people, that does make me a little nervous that it's like people who train to do that will almost come in and be like, "You don't need anyone else.

That's my value prop. Pay me a lot because I'm basically the whole team. You pay for me and pay for the tokens, and that's what I'm gonna do." And I think people are sort of interested in that story right now. 

[00:25:41] Matt Tower: Yes, I totally agree, and I think there's a side topic here, and I think about this with my own EdTech funding database, which is a fully functional web app of maintaining that and growing that requires me to think at a higher level about what it is I'm doing than I, like, had had to contemplate before I could do that, right?

It requires me to think like a business owner, right? And say like, "Okay, I have to come up with the product roadmap, the go-to-market roadmap, the operational intrigue, and, and how to update it in a way that it used to be I could like hire three people to do that." You could have owners for each of those verticals.

Exactly. And now it's on me. So that requires a level of upskilling for me that frankly, I'm coming to grips with. I don't do it particularly well today. I hope this time next year it'll be way better. So that's like- 

[00:26:33] Alex Sarlin: Well, but you could out- Yeah ... I think increasingly you can outsource it to AI, like, confidently.

I don't think we're quite there. Like, I wouldn't do it quite yet, but I'm like, I'm getting close. 

[00:26:43] Matt Tower: I'm trying to figure it out. I'm like, the biggest barrier to my own adoption is how to relay what I'm thinking to, to Claude. 

[00:26:52] Alex Sarlin: Totally. 

[00:26:52] Matt Tower: There was that journal article a couple weeks ago about people who bought like special microphones so they could just talk to Claude all day, and I'm like, "Yeah, actually that sounds great."

[00:27:01] Alex Sarlin: I mean, we've known that OpenAI has been working on this device for a while. We saw Meta announce an AI pendant this week, and they're always- Yeah ... trying to sort of claw their way into the top tier of this right now, but I think that's just gonna be how it works at some point soon. We're gonna just be connected and you'll see people walking, I don't know, walking around the park, speed walking around the park all day, and that'll be their work.

Yeah. And what they're saying is what the work is. 

[00:27:25] Matt Tower: It's really gonna happen. And like, that sounds like a pretty cool job to me. I don't know. Maybe it's 

[00:27:29] Alex Sarlin: crazy. I think it's gonna happen. I, I really do 

[00:27:32] Matt Tower: But to get back to your sort of initial thrust, though, of, like, displacement, I think one thing that I'm sort of interested in is the rise of what I'll call, like, purple collar jobs.

[00:27:43] Alex Sarlin: Interesting. 

[00:27:44] Matt Tower: And my canonical example of this is the teenage Roblox millionaires that Bloomberg wrote about a few weeks ago. 

[00:27:51] Alex Sarlin: Hmm. 

[00:27:51] Matt Tower: And it's these jobs that are like, you know, in any other age would have been considered total luxuries- 

[00:27:58] Alex Sarlin: Hmm ... 

[00:27:58] Matt Tower: but are now, you know, there's sufficient demand to justify a career or at least a couple of years doing a thing.

And, you know, I think there's gonna be a lot more like that of catering to what we would have called the luxury class, but now that class includes a lot more people than it ever did before. So whether it's making stuff on Roblox or making stuff in the real world, like hand-welted shoes, the market for that might be way bigger now because people start to prioritize the sort of artisanal nature of things.

You might be able to have a career in that, whereas you, instead of being like a accountant or a paralegal or whatever. So- 

[00:28:38] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm. 

[00:28:40] Matt Tower: That's something I'm also interested in following is, is whether there's this sort of purple collar class that today exists, these artisans that exist to be clear, but might grow faster relative to other types of employment.

[00:28:54] Alex Sarlin: I mean, that's a, it's a really interesting take. I'm curious why you would call it purple collar. Just is there a fusion with 

[00:29:00] Matt Tower: color? Well, so you've got blue collar, which is the traditional, like HVAC, plumbing, et cetera, like- trades. Yeah. Then you've got white collar, which is like typing on a keyboard. Sure.

Purple collar, I, I use the color purple 'cause that was traditionally the, like, regal color. 

[00:29:14] Alex Sarlin: Ah, 

[00:29:16] Matt Tower: got it. The sort of nobility, nobility- Got it ... et cetera. So purple 

[00:29:19] Alex Sarlin: collar. That's interesting. Yeah. That's very intriguing, and I, I think when people had talked about the sort of artisanal revolution that happened at a certain era of the sort of Web Point 2.0 internet, right?

I mean, when Etsy came around or when p- Mm-hmm ... you know, Allbirds or, you know, there were a number of d- or people selling things on eBay and making a living off of it. Like, there's some really interesting sort of artisanal flashes and, and a lot of maker culture came out of that. I think it's gonna be interesting to see the sort of...

Obviously, there's a case to be made of like artisanal versus AI slop, right? Yes. It's like if everything's very AI sloppy, then something that somebody like drew by hand or created and sewed with their, you know, w- with real thread and real rope, it... There's something really genuine about that. At the same time, I think AI can be so flexible that it's just gonna keep chasing those people, right?

I mean, you can humanize, you can humanize goods just like you can humanize writing, and I think there's gonna be this really interesting play where it's like people carve out these artisanal corners and then someone chases it and makes it like fast fashion, right? Makes it a week later with AI. Yeah. It looks exactly the same and nobody can tell the difference.

It's gonna be wacky. 

[00:30:31] Matt Tower: Yes. I think what's hard is, it, it goes back to my favorite line, which is, "Change is good. You go first." Right? And, and I think, I think the pace of change is what alarms people. 

[00:30:42] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. 

[00:30:42] Matt Tower: Reasonably. I don't wanna have to think about whether my job's gonna disappear. Like, that sucks, but I think that's more and more sort of the way it's going of like, "This is what I do today."

Yeah. "This is what makes me happy today, and-" Yeah ... "I'm gonna have to reconsider that on a really regular basis." 

[00:31:00] Alex Sarlin: And I think that feeds back exactly to your question about the spectrum of where that reskilling, upskilling comes from for different segments of the population, right? If you're a lawyer at a big law firm, it's probably gonna be a, you know, somebody bringing in a consulting firm or an AI transformation firm.

If you're a receptionist in a hair salon, it's probably gonna be you on your own trying to figure out how to get AI into your resume, because otherwise you're in trouble. It's gonna be really wacky, and I think it creates really interesting opportunities for edtech because edtech lives at every section of that spectrum.

Totally. It covers all of it. If you had to invest in one segment of that spectrum, if you were like, "I have X dollars and I can only put it in one thin layer of that upskilling world," where would you put it? 

[00:31:45] Matt Tower: I mean, this is tough, right? 'Cause like there's an impact answer and then there's a- Right ... like commercial answer.

And so like commercially, we probably will have a better outcome focusing on the high end of that market and saying like, "I'm gonna upskill Kirkland & Ellis lawyers on like how to do AI incrementally better." From an impact lens, I'm much more interested in how do I generate a learning program that has just enough human interaction that it takes a body of people...

You know, we talk about like the ninety-five percent problem. If you can flip that to ninety percent- 

[00:32:23] Alex Sarlin: Right ... 

[00:32:23] Matt Tower: you've made a huge impact on the world, right? Yeah. And that might only take a little bit of extra personalization from an AI or- 

[00:32:31] Alex Sarlin: Gatekeeper ... 

[00:32:31] Matt Tower: you know, one phone call a month type of thing. 

[00:32:34] Alex Sarlin: Totally. 

[00:32:35] Matt Tower: So from an impact standpoint, I'm much more interested in that.

I think it's way harder probably, uh, at least, you know, with the models we have at our disposal today. But it's certainly where I will be following along and that would be a really fun thing to track of like, can you change five percent to eight percent or nine percent type 

[00:32:53] Alex Sarlin: of thing. That's a... I, I think that's a really clever way to look at it.

And, and what's also potentially interesting is that if you get a track record of actually effectively upskilling people, I think it's Wild West right now. It's unclear what upskilling looks like. It's the, the credentials. Nobody knows what a meaningful AI credential even is, or what a meaningful AI transformation is.

It's like it's so messy. But like you can imagine there being a real... If there are a couple of winners in that space who are like, get to be known as the actual, the upskilling solutions, I mean, they can sign Armenia, right? They can sign countries. Yeah. They can sign huge u- u- swaths of universities. They can sign...

I mean, it becomes a solution that everybody needs. So that could be very powerful. 

[00:33:34] Matt Tower: I just one... This is more of like just a fun fact than anything substantive for our discussion. But I do think it's interesting that the Maine university system just re-upped a contract with OpenAI for one point four million dollars a year.

Cal State re-upped their contract with OpenAI for thirteen and change million per year. We learned a week or two ago that Amazon spent five hundred million dollars on it, of, of Claude tokens last month. 

[00:34:03] Alex Sarlin: Wow. 

[00:34:04] Matt Tower: And so- 

[00:34:05] Alex Sarlin: Wow ... 

[00:34:05] Matt Tower: it's sort of a brain teaser of like, the scale of these things is so hard to comprehend, and that's the enterprise use case versus the education use case, and like, how do you prioritize, right?

That is what makes this conversation so interesting. 

[00:34:21] Alex Sarlin: I mean, and I think we can actually learn a lot by looking at previous transformational, especially communication technologies, right? The, the telegraph, the telephone, electricity, because these are all general purpose tools that completely transformed almost every industry, right, that they touched, the internet.

And because they transformed so many industries, the people who owned them, right? I mean, the Con Edisons and the AT&Ts, Bell, Bell just grew so fast. And that's the story of Anthropic right now. I mean, if you have one customer spending five hundred million dollars a month with you, and yes, it's a big customer, but it's probably not the only one at that level, like, you're gonna make a whole lot of money, and you're gonna get a trillion dollar valuation even though you're a what, four-year-old company.

That's crazy, but there's a few people sitting at the very pinnacle of this, and everybody needs it. And they need it at different levels, but if everybody needs it, what you're selling, it's like, boy, if they become the fuel under all coding, which is certainly what they're trying to do, I mean, that's- 

[00:35:19] Matt Tower: Crazy.

[00:35:20] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, that's cra- I mean, it, it... you can't even get your head around how large the sort of TAM for that is, right? It's crazy. And I th- and I think that's sort of where it's heading. I mean, that's why- Me too ... they're all competing for it. You would think, though, last point of that, you would think that in that world, and we've seen a little bit of this, right?

The frontier labs themselves might end up being the upskilling company, right? I mean, could Google itself, could Anthropic itself create... They've begun to sniff at it, but like could they create an upskilling platform that just becomes the standard? And then, you know, or OpenAI does that, and then they can just launch it right into their Cal State, and they can launch it right into all the countries they're in, into Estonia, and you can imagine they're having debates and, and conversations internally about this.

They're like, "Where do we wanna be on this spectrum? Because when we have countrywide deals, if we could do something amazing here, we transform a country." And then every other country's gonna want in, and then we're talking about global domination, which is really how these companies are sort of increasingly thinking.

[00:36:20] Matt Tower: Yeah. Well, and, and I think that is a direct reflection of how investors think about EdTech, right? Of like with every other technological revolution, there's still been meat on the bone for education. You know, universities were not really under threat, and it was too big a nut to crack to try and take on education, right?

It's the classic like education's a five trillion dollar industry, and yet has no public company valued over ten billion, right? Exactly. It's such a fragmented industry. No one's ever been able... I, I don't think anybody-- it, it wasn't possible to consolidate it in that way before. It wasn't a five trillion dollar industry.

It was a bunch of single digit billion dollar industries, if not hundred million dollar industries. Maybe that's gonna change. I don't know. But if I were- 

[00:37:07] Alex Sarlin: I think upskilling, I think upskilling as a use case could be the change agent there. 

[00:37:11] Matt Tower: You could probably convince me of that, honestly. And I think that's what all of the capital allocators from private equity down to VC are thinking about.

Like, is it worth investing in an education company when this might happen? 

[00:37:25] Alex Sarlin: Right. And it's, I mean, it's also, I think, worth thinking about the mindset of these companies. If they are about to become public, they're about to be awash in cash, right? And they wanna do this. Are they gonna build it entirely themselves?

So far they have been, but could they do-- I've, I've been waiting for the M&A moment where they say, "Okay, we're gonna take the best in class boot camp. We're gonna take the best in class cohort-based courses. We're gonna take the best in class asynchronous, put them all together, and then we, then we have the solution."

Like, they have the cash to buy anybody. 

[00:37:57] Matt Tower: Yeah, I mean, uh, s- sort of, I don't know if it's ironic or what it is, but typically the public markets do a, a pretty good job tampering that down. If you think about like Uber, right? When they were private, they were talking about self-driving cars and flying cars and all this other stuff, and they went public, and they basically became, you know, a marketplace.

You know, here we are ten years later, they're starting to dip back into self-driving cars, but it, it's... The public markets do have a way of sharpening focus that we'll see if the AI companies have to navigate the same way others traditionally have. 

[00:38:33] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And we'll see whether the skill level needed to operate these tools gets so far down that you don't even actually need training.

I mean, I remember talking to Drew Bend from Anthropic right after they had just launched an education product within Claude Code, and it basically, the thinking, and this is what he said at the time, maybe it's evolved, is while Claude Code is doing your coding, during that time when you're sort of standing there waiting for it to be done, it can teach you coding principles.

It can show you what it's doing and why it's doing it. And I was like, "That's a great idea." You know, there's an interest... There's something pretty interesting about that. I've been talking about it- You and I should 

[00:39:07] Matt Tower: build that. We should, we should go raise money to build that right now. 

[00:39:09] Alex Sarlin: They, they're building it already.

They, they built that. They, they... I mean, they were announcing it launched. And, uh, the, and I'm speaking to your same point here that it's like you can bake these things in because you have to, right? It's like Claude Code, at some point, they want their users to know enough, doesn't have to be a ton, but enough about coding to actually build products that work and re-renew their Claude Code, you know- Yeah

tokens and use more and more, right? So, like the training becomes part of it. You saw that with a lot of these big companies, tech companies in the past, where the training is sort of necessary part of what they do. And I think- To 

[00:39:44] Matt Tower: build the market. Yeah. 

[00:39:45] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And the question is, I mean, obviously, AI is so easy, the barrier to entry is so low that it hasn't had to be that so far.

Like, people can just sort of jump in and do it. But as it becomes literally the platform for all coding, and they're all heading there, like they need on-ramps, right? 

[00:40:01] Matt Tower: Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree. It's like both exhilarating and frustrating 'cause there's so much that,

that I just don't know. I'm like, that doesn't sound unreasonable, but I don't know if it's gonna happen. 

[00:40:12] Alex Sarlin: I don't either, and things have a funny way of disappointing you. I like-- I try to be very optimistic about this space, but wow, the last couple of years have been a downer. It feels like the education system is sort of in full reject all foreign bodies mode.

It's getting there real fast. LA is like doing screen bans, and I'm like, "Yes, you were trying to launch Ed-- You're trying to launch an AI solution for absolutely everybody that knew everything, and it didn't work. That doesn't mean you have to ban all screens." Like, come on. But whatever. It's the way of the world.

[00:40:43] Matt Tower: Yeah. Yeah. And the pendulum swings back and forth. 

[00:40:48] Alex Sarlin: It does. Any last words? We didn't talk EdTech backlash today, but it is sort of my favorite topic to talk about. Give us three sentences about where you think the EdTech world is right now and what we could do to stem the tide of the backlash. 

[00:40:59] Matt Tower: Yeah. I mean, I think LA is a great example, right, of should kindergartners have screens?

Probably not. Should fifth graders have screens? Probably. Should 12th graders have screens? Almost certainly, right? And I think, like, the trick that we are all gonna have to figure out is what's the right level of screen for the right user at the right time. And even more importantly, the screen time that there is should be directly related to instruction.

So I think once you get rid of, you know, there's always that story about the one student who figures out how to watch Netflix in class, and it's like, yeah, cool. Obviously, that's bad, but that's not, like, a reason for a policy other than the policy of not having Netflix. So I think I'm excited for the discussion to transfer towards what is the right amount of screen time for different ages and get into that nuance rather than screens are bad.

[00:41:54] Alex Sarlin: Excellent. Let's make that the final word of the episode. I think that was fantastic. So with that, we're gonna go to our guests for the episode. If it happens in ed tech , you will hear about it here on EdTech Insiders. Special thanks to our amazing guest host, Matt Tower of Whiteboard Advisors. Thanks for being here, Matt.

[00:42:10] Matt Tower: Thanks for having me, Alex. 

[00:42:12] Alex Sarlin: We are here with Vikas Pota, an entrepreneur and investor focused on education and digital innovation. He is the founder of T4 Education, the Global EdTech Prize, and the World's Best School prizes, and serves as executive chairman of the Education Leaders Forum, supporting growth and leadership across global education organizations.

Vikas, welcome to EdTech Insiders. 

[00:42:36] Vikas Pota: Well, thank you for having me once again, Alex. What you guys do is so important, and I'm really grateful to be invited back. 

[00:42:42] Alex Sarlin: Oh, that's so nice. So, and what you do is so important too. You've brought together education leaders. You've been recognizing amazing schools all over the world.

And then as of last year, you're giving out this amazing Global EdTech Prize, and this is relatively new for you. So tell us about the origin of the Global EdTech Prize. What did you see in the EdTech ecosystem that made you feel, you know, we really need to recognize amazing work? 

[00:43:05] Vikas Pota: Sure. You know, your classic argument that EdTech is not designed with educators in the room, and unless you have the educator insight and involvement throughout the entire process of creating EdTech tools, they may do more harm than good.

That's why, uniquely, the winners of the Global EdTech Prize are chosen by educators at the World School Summit. 

[00:43:25] Alex Sarlin: And that's a key goal, right? You have to connect educators and EdTech so that EdTech doesn't work in a vacuum and doesn't sort of forget the end user here. So tell us about last year's prize, some of the winners, and now the applications for the second edition of the Global EdTech Prize are now open.

What are you hoping to see this year and-- but before that, tell us a little bit about what last year was like in your inaugural year. 

[00:43:48] Vikas Pota: Yeah. I have a history of organizing and creating prizes as mechanisms to surface innovation, whether it's schools, whether it's EdTech companies, whether it's spotlighting individuals.

And these mechanisms are very useful in surfacing, but also in spotlighting what good looks like. Yeah. And what we saw last year was quite impressive in that not only in the American EdTech ecosystem, which we hear a lot about through their Tech Insiders, but also from a global basis what we saw. So last year, we had something like sixty-one tools from organizations based outside the US, and I hope to see that trend continue, which I think is very powerful.

Tech is not the monopoly of just America. There's lots of it being used around the world, and we wanna see examples of success. What I also hope to see is, you know, not just, you know, is a huge diversity in approaches to reaching the same goal. We all wanna see EdTech that actually works to close learning gaps.

What I'm most interested in is in the range of innovative approaches to tackling that one central question. By giving these different approaches a platform, I hope that we can encourage and spotlight innovation all over the world. 

[00:44:57] Alex Sarlin: I had the pleasure of interviewing a number of the Global EdTech Prize finalists last year, and- Yes

I think it was the most inspiring set of interviews- That's right ... I did all year. They were unbelievable. People in Africa, in rural India, in Ukraine, doing just unbelievable work to advance education. I sometimes feel like the American EdTech ecosystem sort of fights with itself a lot. It, it, it has a lot of hand-wringing.

And around the world, people are like, "We can educate people through technology." It's absolutely amazing. I'm curious how you react to that sort of disparity, that difference between America and the rest of the world, where EdTech is just sort of glowing with possibility. 

[00:45:35] Vikas Pota: Yeah, look, m- many of the innovations that we see that are really doing fantastically well come from other countries than America.

And of course, America has a humongous contribution that it's made to the world of technology in general. But in the world of education, the thing that perplexes me and actually makes me think a lot about is whilst, you know, American EdTech is at an all-time high and doing fantastically well, new and new companies are starting up every day, your education isn't that great, actually.

Yeah. And so when you think about it from that context is that what service are these education technology businesses serving? And what we see around the world also is people going at it to try to help and close these learning gaps, improve education outcomes, improve productivity and of the workforce and the efficiency of schools.

And I think that's a really great lesson that we can learn from around the world and apply it in our own context. So the prize isn't just for companies, after all. Yes, we have a startups category, yes, we have a majors category, but we also have a prize for nonprofits. In many parts of the world, education is a nonprofit endeavor.

But the thing that's common is all of them have-- need to show that they're driving change and grappling with the most crucial challenges in today's classrooms. You know, and of course, there are many tools out there that make big claims, but what really separates the wheat from the chaff is those that have data and evidence to show their impact, to show that they have harnessed technology in the service of learning, that they are making teaching and learning more efficient and driving better outcomes.

You know, last year's winner of the Global EdTech Prize for nonprofits, for example, is an organization called Imagine Worldwide, and it's a great example. Like, you know, its goal is to solve the literacy and numeracy crisis for millions of children in sub-Saharan Africa, and they partner with governments and communities to provide child-directed, tablet-based learning that is accessible, effective and affordable.

You know, what's really interesting is that their learning s- solution is designed to work in the most challenging environments and operates without internet connectivity And does not require grid power or highly skilled teachers. A child who has never seen technology and is illiterate can start their literacy and numeracy journey by listening to their own teacher avatar via headphones, guiding them in the national language of instruction from how to use tablets to basic literacy concepts and ultimately to fluency.

But what the clincher for us was, well, they've taken part in nine randomized control studies- That's right ... that have shown dramatic learning gains across different countries, languages, and contexts, with at least fifty percent more children meeting reading benchmarks and seventy percent children reaching expected maths levels just after thirteen months.

This is an example of an organization that doesn't just talk the talk, it has empirical evidence to back it up. 

[00:48:22] Alex Sarlin: A hundred percent. And, and I, I interviewed the founder of Imagine Worldwide last year. It was unbelievable what she has created. It's multinational, as you mentioned- Yeah ... across languages in different parts of the African ecosystem, and, and she works directly with governments and has just built this and, and is expanding based on that evidence base.

It, uh, is continuing to expand. It's unbelievable. And I think surfacing stories like that in the edtech world is one of the great benefits that the Global EdTech Prize is really offering the edtech ecosystem. I think a lot of people would never have heard of Imagine Worldwide. I certainly hadn't, and I follow the space pretty closely.

So tell us, you know, people who may be listening to this now, whether they're nonprofits, entrepreneurs or founders or operators in mid-size edtech companies, what makes the Global EdTech Prize different from other awards or recognition programs in the education sector? What do you see as your sort of differential value proposition as a prize?

[00:49:15] Vikas Pota: Well, firstly, I want to just follow on from what you said- Please ... in the last conversation, the last question you asked, was a massive difference that we make is entirely associated with exactly what you do, which is to give platform, to shine a spotlight. And I think that storytelling component is critical in moving the field forward, and that's why we've created this prize.

But you ask a really great question, which is what sets this prize, the Global EdTech Prize, apart, is that it's ultimately decided by educators themselves. 

[00:49:45] Alex Sarlin: Yes. 

[00:49:45] Vikas Pota: You know, our team starts by drawing up the shortlist that we have, which are ten for every category, so there are ten finalists in each category, a total of thirty, so top thirty that we look forward to revealing through you, actually.

Yes. But the top ten will be invited to the World School Summit in January of twenty twenty-seven, sixteenth and seventeenth of January, and it's taking place in London, where they will showcase their work before an expert panel comprising, you know, leading figures in the technology and education sectors, including investors and policymakers from around the world.

This expert panel will also narrow down from the ten to the final three per category, who then present their products and tools before the educators of the World School Summit on our plenary stage, and then educators vote by secret ballot to determine the winner of each category, and they will be announced live on stage at the culmination of the event.

In this way, experts have their say, but it's educators who have the final vote. They are, after all, the ones who actually have to use these tools. What's really great about the World School Summit is that we have the entire ecosystem of education leaders there, ranging from government ministers to edtech innovators to social impact leaders to businesspeople to school leaders and such for-- from around the world.

And that's what makes this a really valuable opportunity for edtech companies to participate in. But it is in the end the educators that ultimately decide what works and what doesn't. 

[00:51:09] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, that's a great point. And I think the international nature of it is also relatively unusual- Yeah ... in the space. I think it was Brisk Teaching was one of the winners last year.

That's right, yeah. And Brisk is a pretty well-known EdTech company in the US, but getting that global recognition saying this is actually one of the most powerful tools out there gave them, you know, a global visibility, which is really, really exciting as well. 

[00:51:31] Vikas Pota: And we've heard, Alex, from many of those that participated when they're startups in particular, they off the back of that they're able to raise money, they're able to get profile, they're invited to tenders and procurement processes around the world, which I think is really welcome, and that's what's needed.

[00:51:46] Alex Sarlin: Absolutely. I feel like this is the obligatory question, but it is I think an important one at this moment. We've gone this conversation so far without mentioning anything about AI. Some of the hand-wringing that I mentioned earlier is coming through this combination of education technology and AI. I am still personally incredibly excited about it, but a lot of people are feeling nervous about it.

From your perspective, where are you optimistic about AI's role in education and EdTech worldwide, and where do you feel like are the guardrails that we have to be careful about? 

[00:52:15] Vikas Pota: Yeah. Look, to say that I was expecting this question would be an understatement. And so AI certainly allows us to do everything a lot faster, you know, answer questions faster, study faster, write essays faster, solve problems faster, but that's the danger of shortcuts.

Right. Someone on my LinkedIn said something quite fabulous, which made me think a lot, and forgive me, I don't remember the name. They said something like, "AI is like Ozempic for the brain." And I thought that absolutely is quite an interesting thing and feature that we should talk about. It might give us quick answers, but by taking the quick route instead of doing the hard exercise, it shrinks our thinking muscles, right?

Mm-hmm. And like we've been working with HP, for example, in the landmark HP Futures Report, and last year's report brought together a hundred leading AI researchers, education thinkers, policymakers to examine skills in the age of intelligent machines. One of the key findings, which I completely agree with, is to ensure that friction remains in the learning system to protect students' learning and job market readiness.

We need to teach students how to think, avoid cognitive atrophy, and help students learn with AI rather than outsourcing thinking and falling into this yes trap. You asked me what I was optimistic about. 

[00:53:28] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. 

[00:53:28] Vikas Pota: And another great report last year was by Cambridge University Press and Assessment called Humans at the Heart of Education.

[00:53:35] Alex Sarlin: Hmm. 

[00:53:35] Vikas Pota: And it talked about how we should focus on education that builds the whole person. If AI can replace us, then we're not really teaching the right things. Education must go beyond traditional test scores to develop human knowledge, skills, and values that drives economic growth, global engagement, and ultimately leads to flourishing societies.

If we can do both these things, then I think that goes a long way in mitigating the dangers of AI in education. But, you know, there's also a cause for great optimism if we move beyond thinking AI as simply a productivity enhancer. Hmm. 

[00:54:06] Alex Sarlin: You 

[00:54:07] Vikas Pota: know, if I look at the wider impact, I think that this is best exemplified by a young lady called Valeria Palacios Cruz, who is a student innovator at a university in Mexico who won HP's World Education Medal for students last year.

She focuses on applying AI to robotics, drone technologies, and immersive environments to address, you know, the environmental and social challenges she has witnessed in her local community. She's developed drones that can remove waste from water and reseed deforested habitats and assist with emergency rescues.

If we can teach our students to harness technology for the good of their communities and the planet, then we'll have made tremendous impact. 

[00:54:49] Alex Sarlin: That's a fabulous answer, and I think a very fair-minded answer. There is the concern about cognitive atrophy, about outsourcing, about shortcutting and losing the productive struggle and the actual thinking in the education process is real, and at the same time, AI can enhance our abilities and inspire our students to do things that they never thought possible, like create drones that can make environmental impact.

It's both at the same time, and I think that's part of what makes it so, so complicated. But that's a wonderful exposition about both sides. Last thought here, just, you know, as you come into the second year of the Global EdTech Prize, what are you most excited about? You know, picture yourself sitting there at the plenary stage.

You're seeing all the final pitches. What do you feel like is going to be the thing that personally thrills you the most about what comes out of this competition? 

[00:55:34] Vikas Pota: There's a humongous value that a prize like this can drive, not for just the startups, the major companies, and nonprofits, but we as a community as a whole.

You can't detach this conversation on innovation from education, and those that are building, who are exemplifying, who are trying their best to make sure that we can improve learning outcomes, I think should be embraced and should have a community, and that's what we're creating through the World School Summit.

And if the opportunity can be productive and useful for them, then I think tick, tick, and tick in terms of our goals have been achieved. And so I would say to those that are looking to have a spotlight shone on them, go to our website globaledtechprize.com, and you've got until the 26th of June to get your applications in, and we will make deliberations from there onwards.

But what I do commit to is you can still come to the World School Summit, you can still engage in the process, and London sees a lot of activity around that time, which is when the World School Summit is. And what I will assure you is that you will have a warm welcome despite the gloomy weather in London.

[00:56:38] Alex Sarlin: But London at that time is so beautiful. There's all of these lights up for the holidays. It's such a- That's right ... it's so fun. I'm hoping to be there this year. I am really, I am truly going to do my best to make it because it sounds like, again, these are some of the most inspiring stories, the most inspiring innovators in the entire world when it comes to education and education technology.

And get your applications in now to have a chance to be there on the stage. Vikas Pota, T4 Education, the Global EdTech Prize, and the World's Best School Prizes. Thanks so much for being here with us on EdTech Insiders. 

[00:57:09] Vikas Pota: Let's give everyone an exclusive, Alex. So will you join us at the World School Summit as a judge for the Global EdTech Prize?

[00:57:15] Alex Sarlin: Oh my gosh, I would love to. Let me give you a qualified, uh, huge yes. I just have to make sure I can travel at that time, but oh my goodness, that would be an honor. 

[00:57:26] Vikas Pota: Fantastic. Thank you for that. 

[00:57:28] Alex Sarlin: Thanks, Vikas. 

[00:57:29] Vikas Pota: Thanks a lot. 

[00:57:30] Alex Sarlin: We have an amazing guest today. We are talking to Keri Dixon, who joined Wilson Language Training as CEO in 2022.

She's a graduate of Stanford Graduate School of Business and MIT, with a background in business strategy and customer success, and she champions Wilson's mission to deliver critical foundational reading and spelling skills to all children and expand educator access to professional learning that closes learning gaps.

Keri Dixon, welcome to EdTech Insiders. 

[00:58:00] Keri Dixon: Thanks, Alex. I'm, I'm so happy to be here. 

[00:58:02] Alex Sarlin: I'm so happy to have you here. So okay, we are in this amazing change moment. It's been the last few years where the science of reading has just absolutely exploded, reshaped literacy instruction. You have all of these states changing their laws, and I think Wilson is incredibly well-situated.

You've been following this for years and, and dedicated to the science of reading. So tell us about w- how the science of reading initiative has worked for Wilson and, and tell us a little bit about Wilson's background as you do, please. 

[00:58:30] Keri Dixon: Yeah, absolutely. So as you shared in my introduction, I've been at Wilson for four years, but Wilson was founded in the mid-'80s- Right

and based on the science of reading from day one, before it became such a national focus. So we've got a pretty broad lens into the shifts that have occurred over the course of the time. And Wilson is a structured literacy provider. We provide curriculum and professional learning, and again, have been doing that since the mid-'80s.

Started with a focus on dyslexia, but expanded into gen ed with the science of reading in, in the early 2000s. And so as I reflect on some of the shifts, I think the most encouraging change that I would highlight is a simple one, which is that we finally have a shared evidence-based definition of what works.

Structured literacy and an emphasis on j- explicit phonics are now the starting point versus being kind of a debate. So the majority of states, as you said, have science-of-reading legislation on the books, and, you know, what works in reading just isn't up for grabs in the way that it was a decade or even five, six years ago.

There's also just broader recognition that learning to read requires differentiated instruction, especially for students with dyslexia and other learning disabilities, and that's critically important to me and everyone at Wilson. You know, our mission is literacy for all, and as I said, we actually started focused on students with dyslexia with Wilson Reading System, but took those same principles and the underlying pedagogy and applied them in the general classroom setting with Fundations, which is our, our K-5 program, again, 25 years ago.

So it's exciting to really see that shift and see the momentum behind science of reading and just the recognition that these principles of instruction, they work for all kids, but again, with appropriate differentiation. And then what I would share is on the flip side, a big misconception that lingers is that adopting a structured literacy program, which is that kind of category for science of reading-based curriculum, is the same as implementing the science of reading.

Mm-hmm. So a program on the shelf, right, doesn't teach a child, the teacher does. And without the training and the coaching behind it, you know, a new label on the materials won't necessarily change that day-to-day instruction. And I think kind of related to that, what I would also highlight is that in many cases the, you know, rubrics for determining which curriculum to adopt are based primarily on the content of the program.

Mm-hmm. So things like ensuring that programs are instructing students to blend and segment words, or are not instructing students to use pictures as clues. That's kind of what shows up in a lot of the RFPs, and those are aspects that are really important. The problem is that now there are a ton of check-the-box, I'll call it, programs that exist, and the reality is that the how of instruction is just as important as the what we are teaching.

And IDA, the International Dyslexia Association, actually has a really great infographic that kind of outlines both the how and the what of structured literacy. So if we think of the how, things like being mastery-oriented, which means ensuring your students truly master the skill before moving on, teaching skills in an explicit and sequential way, using multimodal instruction.

You know, if you just observe a Fundations classroom, it's very experiential, right? Mm-hmm. Kids are using letter tiles, they're writing on whiteboards, they're using arms to sky write. They're not just sitting, you know, at their desk in front of a screen, right? All those things matter, but they aren't always easy to glean in an RFP process.

And then the very last thing I would highlight is just that I think there's a misconception that this is a K through three story- Mm-hmm ... uh, when I think about kind of the grade band. So nearly all of the energy, the funding, the product innovation has really been focused heavily on the early grades, while upper elementary and then also middle school just remain underserved, which is where we at Wilson are turning a lot of our, our focus to now.

[01:02:17] Alex Sarlin: Fantastic. There are so many amazing points in there, I think, to double-click on. And, and, you know, w- one I'd like-- I, I love that concept of there's a shared understanding of what the science of reading is, the emphasis on phonics, and there's a shared understanding that differentiation is key. I think you've been there for a long time, but now everybody sort of believes that.

But let's double-click on this how aspect that you're talking about, the implementation. You do a lot of professional development, and you mentioned that RFPs focus on the content of the program, but don't always focus on the training around it or the dosage or the implementation or the, like, how is this actually gonna be need to be used in classrooms to make the difference, to move the needle on reading gains that we're actually looking for.

How does Wilson approach that? Because you have a lot of experience in that professional learning part of the product suite. How do you make sure that people who are working with Wilson, as you said, that's not the program on the shelf, it's the teacher that teaches, so how do we actually get the teachers to feel empowered and have deep understanding of the science of reading, especially if their state has just changed the law and it's new to them?

[01:03:18] Keri Dixon: Yeah. No, absolutely, and recognizing that most teachers would not have learned this in their teacher prep programs. Exactly. It's kind of new, right, and different. And so we think about it as the real, you know, implementation is taking the policy to practice, taking those state legislation or mandates and actually putting them in practice and really focusing on the work of implementation science.

So for Wilson, that means partnering with districts on continuous professional development for teachers, and that means it's not one and done, right? There's initial workshops, then there's ongoing coaching. There's resources for them to be able to see it in action, see videos, get corrective feedback, and then regular conversations at the leadership level- 

[01:03:58] Alex Sarlin: Hmm

[01:03:58] Keri Dixon: about where the implementation is working and where it's stuck. So we think about driving outcomes as kind of a simple equation. Effective practice, so do you have the right program? Effective implementation, are you implementing it with fidelity? And then the last one, which I think gets missed a lot, which is really important, is the enabling context.

Do you have shared goals in the district? Do you have accountability? Have you created the scheduling? It's the simple things too, right? The scheduling to be able to have the time to dedicate on this and then do small group differentiation. Do you have data review cycles built in? All of those types of things are what drive success.

And then the third element that we focus on at Wilson also is building sustainable capacity. And so after that first year or that second year, really building the experts within the district so that you're not relying on Wilson or other partners to be able to come in when you have new teachers or there's transitions and be able to train that district.

It's to be able to build that ongoing capacity. So we have certification programs where we're actually developing in-district experts so that they're able to sustain that for many, many years to come. And I would say just to give kind of a, a proof point on this, I actually think New York City is a great recent proof point.

So they implemented New York City Reads, which was a district-wide effort focused on implementing high quality curriculum paired with professional learning and implementation support. They funded it, something I missed, but another obvious one where you gotta have the funding to support not only the curriculum, but the professional learning and the investment in the teachers.

And we've been really proud to partner with New York City, where now Fundations is implemented in the majority of elementary schools. And we were out there in the twenty twenty-four and twenty-five school year doing over a thousand coaching days for that ongoing on the ground support for teachers. That year, they drove a thirteen-point gain in third grade reading scores, and now they're on that next phase that I mentioned.

They're partnering with us to build capacity to be able to continue to support that implementation from within without needing to rely on coaches from Wilson or other partners in the future. And so they're on that exact kinda journey I described, and it's been really incredible to see kinda some of their early resorts-- results of that, that effort.

[01:05:59] Alex Sarlin: It's very easy to hear in your sort of comprehensive description of all the pieces that need to be in place, the enabling context, not no one and done, lots of coaching days, that this is a sort of seasoned approach to professional development. It's learned over time that you have to put all of these pieces in place and really be almost like a, a change partner for especially a giant district like New York.

It's not dropping something off or selling the license and saying, "Okay, we're ready to go." It's like this deep partnership with all of these pieces and helping build internal authority and helping get people off of the training over time so, so you have local experts. How would you recommend other edtech and learning startups sort of begin to accelerate that process?

I'm sure you have so much experience in this space and Wilson does. How should they begin to think about moving from that one and done, that sort of drop off training to becoming a deeper partner? 

[01:06:48] Keri Dixon: Yeah. I mean, I think part of it all starts with the capabilities that exist within the organization. So something I would say about Wilson's professional learning team and what I think for any organizations is kind of earlier stage is having the expertise on that team.

So every person on our team taught our programs in districts for many, many years, are themselves certified. Many of them are actually certified in our deepest program, which is Wilson Reading System, even though they're doing coaching more on our tier one program. So they've got this just level of expertise that allows them to show up and build trust and credibility with educators, which if you don't have that, you fall flat right away.

Yeah. And so I think just focusing on the caliber and the capabilities of the team is so important. And what we hear from our district partners differentiates Wilson because our coaches can be really flexible. They're not showing up and saying, "I only know this thing that I was trained to do on this script."

No, they've taught this program for 10 years. They know it the back of their hand, so they walk into that classroom- ... and they can be adaptive in supporting teachers and meeting them where they are, and I think that's so often missed. You're building this professional learning team and you're trying to just scale as quickly as possible, but the folks that you have on that team just may not have the level of expertise that is actually gonna then gain the trust and credibility with the districts.

[01:08:02] Alex Sarlin: I love that. E- expertise, trust, credibility, and flexibility. Putting it all together creates this really deep relationship. I love that. So I wanna deep dive on something you said that structured literacy and foundational phonics are not just a K three issue anymore. You know, there are students much older than third grade who still need lots of structured literacy.

They need interventions. How has Wilson evolved on this, and how would you, how do you see this evolving ecosystem where older children are need to have phonics, but teachers are not ready to teach it? 

[01:08:31] Keri Dixon: Yeah. It's such a great question, Alex, and, and something we're really focused on. I mean, I think first I would back up and say third grade is, is clearly a really important benchmark, and there's that well-known kind of double jeopardy study that found that a student who can't read on grade level by third grade is four times less likely to graduate by age 19.

And for students in poverty, that jumps to 13 times. So the focus on third grade is clearly well-founded, and we need to continue to build upon some of the momentum when successes we've seen there over the last five years. And at the same time, I think the problem is kind of how we've used that. This notion of read by third grade became a finish line- Right

when it was really only ever meant to be an important checkpoint. And the data shows that kind of mentality and mindset just hasn't worked for us, right? Our, our recent NAEP scores, 40% of fourth graders and a third of eighth graders scored below NAEP Basic, which are the worst reading results in the test's 30-plus year history.

So that is just a tough reminder of the need for literacy systems that just don't stop at third grade. And so a big part as we step back of the reason why, why kids slip through the cracks is also the, the, the shift in what we assess as they get older. In K through three, we do assess those foundational skills directly: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, alongside comprehension.

Typically, from middle school on, we're measuring mostly comprehension, so a student with a decoding gap or weak fluency or limited vocabulary could get misdiagnosed as having a comprehension problem. Mm. So it's really important we turn our attention here and do better for these kids and have solutions to be able to address those decoding gaps or fluency gaps, et cetera, in fourth grade, fifth grade, middle school, et cetera.

[01:10:15] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. It is incredibly important, and it's always been important, and I think now it's more important than ever. Partially, we just have these, yeah, these NAEP scores and this just real, real gaps, people reading many years behind grade level. There's also very little reading happening. You know, people have been complaining for a while there's not enough reading in the curriculum.

Kids aren't reading for fun as much as they used to be. So I think there's just a giant reading gap that extends far past third grade, and Wilson, uh, is doing really, really interesting work, as you say, to get it into tier one, to really think about this as part of what reading looks like across the spectrum, not only with interventions, but then also with interventions when you have students who truly need to deep dive and step back, and if they-- you're not gonna comprehend if you can't decode.

We know that. Really powerful. So technically, you know, this is an edtech podcast. I love talking about reading. I find it an incredibly interesting subject. But I'd love to hear just a little bit about how you think about the technology aspect of this. You know, you, you mentioned trust is key for educators, and we are in a little bit of a trust crisis for technology right now.

You have so much trust. Wilson's been around for 40 years, had s- such amazing results and evidence base. How do you use technology- Yeah ... and how do you think that the technology field can sort of rebuild that trust with teachers? 

[01:11:27] Keri Dixon: Yeah. It's such an important question too, Alex, 'cause I think, you know, I wouldn't wanna leave an EdTech podcast without talking about the importance of technology and AI.

And so going there a little bit, I think, you know, we are really focused on integrating technology and AI in meaningful ways that support educators while driving instruction in a multimodal approach that leads to student mastery for, again, where we're serving in foundational skills. Technology and AI can and should play a huge role in supporting teachers in their lesson preparation and enabling more consistent lesson delivery, serving up useful data, and therefore enabling differentiated instruction based on that data.

Yep. So I think continuing to invest in professional development for teachers will always be important, and we as curriculum providers or other EdTech organizations should also be doing all that we can in parallel to better enable high-quality instruction and consistent implementation through the technology-enabled supports so that teachers can spend their time focusing on being present in the classroom, understanding kind of what's going on with the different students, what they need to be able to meet them where they are, versus having to spend an hour prepping for a lesson, having to spend an hour diving through every aspect of data to figure out which students should be in this small group and what exactly they need in terms of additional instruction.

And so that's where we're focused at Wilson, and it's where we think in our kind of realm of what we serve in, in the school day, we think is most important, is really supporting teachers by saving them prep time and giving them really useful data to be able to enhance their overall instruction. And I think if we do that across the board, we're gonna build back trust because we are creating useful tools for teachers, not just, "Hey, here's something kinda cool," right?

That leverages AI. We're giving them something useful that actually then translates into better outcomes, which is ultimately, at the end of the day, what we're all in this to do and, and what teachers and educators everywhere are looking for. 

[01:13:27] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. Use technology to highlight data, to drive differentiation, and to just create time for the teachers to really be able to understand all of their students, to be able to speed up their planning.

But it sounds like, you know, keep that skywriting, keep that multimodal, keep those blocks, you know, a lot of not-- You obviously, you've mentioned many different screen-free activities, and it feels like that combination is gonna be a very rich one going forward as we sort of find a balance between where tech and analog, whatever you wanna call it, work together in reading classrooms.

[01:13:58] Keri Dixon: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think that balance is so important. And all of this you're hearing too is about empowering and allowing AI and technology to be a force multiplier for educators versus replacing what is so uniquely capable for educators to be able to deliver in the classroom. And so I think that is, again, where we're really focused and what I think is gonna be successful over the coming years.

[01:14:19] Alex Sarlin: It's fantastic. So just last question. This is a, this is a big one, but we'll see if we can get through it quickly because I think it's one that's important. You know, most of the listeners here are people in the edtech industry. They're people who are operators or entrepreneurs, investors. But we do have some wonderful educator listeners, some really pioneering district leaders.

What advice would you give school or district leaders who are looking at this melange of different opportunities, of different offerings, at these new laws? They want to drive through it. They wanna say, "We wanna actually move the needle on our NAEP scores. We wanna actually move the needle on reading." If they both wanna strengthen literacy instruction and support educators through that change to science of reading, what are some of the top things you would recommend for school leaders who are saying, "Okay, I wanna get-- find the signal from the noise and figure out what's gonna really, really drive results"?

[01:15:08] Keri Dixon: Yeah. I mean, I'd share three things, and I would say I think these three things are also applicable for other education edtech organizations or listeners, you know, from the business side that are listening in too because I think as we all work to better serve our districts, these are areas that, that we at Wilson are focused on and I think are kind of a through line for all successful education organizations that I've seen and partnered with on our side as well.

So I think the first is to invest in our teachers, not just the materials, right? So the science of reading, again, as we talked about, wasn't a part of most teacher prep programs, so teachers weren't taught what we're now asking them to deliver. We want them to understand the structure of the English language is a much deeper level.

I know I didn't learn those things, right? Closed syllables, vowel teams, R-controlled gra- vowels. There's a lot there that can be intimidating. And so being able to invest and provide that time and space to learn, and then therefore they've got the grounding in why it works, so they can adapt when a student doesn't respond.

So thing one, I think we've hit it a bunch, is invest in teachers. The second thing I would say for districts is to pick a strong evidence-based curriculum and just commit importantly to implementing that with fidelity. And on that, you know, we talked about it earlier, an addendum too there is- A simple one to say is don't stop teaching foundational skills at third grade, right?

Carry that explicit instruction, focusing on word structure, sentence structure, spelling, vocabulary into fourth and fifth grade. That'll allow us to really double down on the skills that the students need for the rest of their, their education. But those schools that really choose well and go deep with their curriculum are the ones that are kind of seeing the results.

And the last one I would say, and again, really important for all ed tech education partners out there to districts, is that we collectively are treating this as a multi-year commitment. It's not a launch. It's not a one and done. I think, you know, Mississippi's well-documented turnaround took a decade of coaching and progress monitoring and leaders staying the course.

New York City implemented New York City Reads in 2023. They're starting to see those payoffs from those efforts, but they know they're still a long way in their journey. So it takes time, it takes perseverance, and that change in literacy can be slow, but the leaders who kind of protect that runway and really continue the focus are the ones that I, that I think are gonna see a payoff.

[01:17:21] Alex Sarlin: Incredible advice. Really, really helpful. I love that. Yeah, implementation, fidelity, evidence-based curriculum, perseverance, and resilience and sticking with it, and then of course, investing in teachers is absolutely the core of everything reading oriented. Thank you so much. Uh, Keri Dixon is the CEO of Wilson Language Training, and she's a graduate of Stanford and MIT and doing incredible work.

We're really excited to see everything happening at Wilson. Thank you for being here with us on EdTech Insiders. 

[01:17:48] Keri Dixon: Awesome. Thanks for having me, Alex. Appreciate 

[01:17:51] Alex Sarlin: 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 ed tech community.

For those who want even more EdTech Insider, subscribe to the free EdTech Insiders newsletter on Substack.

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