If you’ve just come back from BETT Show, chances are you're recovering from an AI enable daze...
AI tutors. AI marking. AI lesson planning. AI copilots for everything.
It's a lot. A lot of AI and you're probably feeling a mix of:
quietly excited
deeply sceptical
or slightly overwhelmed and unsure what’s actually real
The fog of another technological hype cycle is fast descending...
Now I love AI. Not just a little. I think it's insane what it can do. But for schools, figuring out what it can (and is allowed) to do is already becoming a challenge. If you can't separate the signal from noise with your solution, you're not going to cut through with schools.
Welcome to the new hype cycle
What we’re seeing right now is familiar.
A genuinely transformative technology arrives. Early wins are impressive. Then everyone rushes to rebrand what they already have as “AI-powered”.
I was working in Apple Education at the beginning of the mobile learning craze and watched as schools bought iPads like they weren't making anymore. Then came the flood of devices and apps that swept over schools for the next few years.
I'm a big proponent of more choice for teachers and schools, but it also creates a real problem for them as the buyer.
When everything is AI, how do you pick which platform is right?
Schools don’t have an AI problem
Most schools are not asking:
“Is this product using AI?”
They’re asking:
“Will this create risk, workload, or distraction for my staff?”
AI doesn’t get a free pass on that question.
In fact, it raises the bar. Because schools are now thinking about:
data protection and training data
explainability (“why did it do that?”)
accountability when something goes wrong
safeguarding implications
long-term dependency on tools they don’t fully control
AI doesn’t reduce the need for trust. It intensifies it.
What cuts through the noise (and what doesn’t)
From the conversations I've had recently, patterns are already emerging.
❌ What’s not cutting through
“Powered by AI” as a headline
vague claims about time-saving with no evidence
black-box systems schools are expected to “just trust”
demos that work beautifully on the stand but not under classroom conditions
✅ What is cutting through
specific, narrow use cases done well
clarity about what the AI does and doesn’t do
honest conversations about limitations and edge cases
schools speaking publicly about their experience - not suppliers
While the technology is new, the same themes recur - it's about understanding schools and solving specific problems that are known pain points.
The winners won’t shout the loudest
My old company Arbor Education are doing some amazing work with AI, yet if you visited their stand, you didn't find that message front and centre. Equally, browse the website and their AI functionality is again not front and centre.
This isn't by chance. They understand the market better than most (You scale to 12,000 schools without nailing the emotional resonance of your messaging).
Browse the Arbor AI section on their website and one of their first use cases is Auto Absence Notes.
This auto-transcription tool is focused on solving a single issue which happens to be a huge administrative headache for schools. When parents call in sick, they're all calling between 8 and 9. With just a handful of staff in the office, that's a major pain to answer the phones.
Now compare this to Arbor's largest competitor, Bromcom. Their AI section from their website is vague and generic.
The use cases are listed as 'Content Generation' and 'Quick Letters and Emails.' The rest is listed as coming soon.
It almost feels like this page was written by AI. A lot of words but not enough substance for me.
The companies who will win in the AI space will be the ones who:
reduce cognitive load for teachers
integrate quietly into existing workflows
explain their AI in plain English
earn confidence through consistency
AI will be part of the product, but not the pitch because schools aren't seeking AI. They want solutions to their current pains.
A simple filter schools are using right now
There's a lot of great AI education happening within the teaching sector and a killer questions I'm seeing going around is this:
If this tool didn’t use AI at all, would it still be a good solution to my problem?
The obvious exemption to this rule is AI wrapper products around paperwork, but setting that aside, for any existing provider in the space, you already have a core product that you're adding AI into.
Take AI out and are you really delivering the impact you believe you are?
And if you believe you are, how do you prove it? 5 case studies doesn't cut it any more. When your local coffee shop is approaching 1,000 Google reviews, turning up with just a handful of testimonials is no longer enough. It looks suspicious.
When you say you're transforming 500 schools but you only have 3 testimonials
As we enter the new EdTech hype cycle, focus sharply on how your company is solving real pains (not nice to haves) and ensure you can prove it works.
