AI is Already in the Classroom. Now What?

The AI experiment nobody approved is already running. It didn't wait for school boards to vote, districts to set policy, or teacher prep programs to update their syllabi. It showed up in student backpacks, on classroom laptops, and in teacher planning sessions, but the institutions built around learning are still trying to figure it out.

This week we're looking at the gap between AI's arrival and education's response. Not the headline version about students cheating or schools banning phones, but the more complicated reality underneath it. Adoption has outpaced guidance, and that should sound familiar. Corporations are grappling with the same lag in governance and process.

What we're seeing in the classroom is that whether AI erodes capacity or builds it comes down to one thing: intentional design. And the same holds true for the policy and governance every company wraps around it.