Are schools ready for the AI-first era? 

AI has collapsed the gap between invention and adoption to where what used to take years to ripple through the economy now happens in months. Tasks that once required layers of coordination, oversight and approval can be done in an afternoon. The pace of this shift is unlike anything we’ve seen in human history, and I know that not as a headline but as a fact of daily life.

I build with AI every single day at work, and I can say with confidence that what used to take six to eight months and two engineers, a marketer, a designer and a product person I can now do by myself in one or two days. I’ve done it dozens of times this year, from standing up full back-end infrastructure and scaling virtual environments that run two dozen agents I coded from scratch, to automating recurring processes that each would have taken double-digit hours every time, to designing and deploying front-end customer-facing prototype experiences for thousands of users. This is not a drill. We are here.

The transformation is happening so fast that most truly do not know what is happening in the background. Companies are redeploying human capital into capital expenditure and investing in systems over people and technology is rewriting the rules of productivity faster than schools can revise a curriculum. The distance between what we teach and what the world demands is widening each week. It presents as both an incredible opportunity for those who thrive in adaptation and incredible risk for those who freeze in the discomfort of being forced to reinvent themselves every nine months. 

Our education system was initially designed for the age of industrialism and evolved for knowledge work. Those skills mattered when success meant producing predictable outcomes on an assembly line or in a spreadsheet. What it doesn’t reward nearly enough are the skills this moment demands: adaptability, active questioning, systems thinking, creative problem-solving, and interdisciplinary literacy. Is the lesson moving forward less about how to compete with or exclude the machine and more about how to leverage it for velocity? The foundations of knowledge and context of human history remain vitally important, but how information is acquired and applied has shifted underneath our feet.

Being future-ready means learning how to learn. It means understanding that mastery is temporary and that learning is constant until the day we die. Future-ready kids will need discernment, collaboration, design sense, ethics, data literacy and emotional intelligence. They’ll need to know how to ask good questions and how to prioritize in a world of constant  distraction.

We need to prepare our kids to be master iterators, to be resilient in failure well past what you or I would have tolerated, and especially this, to challenge everything and ask “what if” and “why,” and be OK with the burden it places on us to create the space for those questions to evolve into insights, tests and more questions. The classrooms that matter most will be the ones that cultivate curiosity, courage and the ability to start over without shame.

This isn’t only a challenge for educators, it’s also a responsibility for parents, policymakers and communities. Every new technology shift changes what we build but also how we think, how we relate to one another and how we define value. We can’t outsource our children’s future to algorithms, but we also won’t protect them by pretending those algorithms don’t exist. If we want kids who can thrive in this next era, we need to model the same humility we ask of them and show them that learning is never finished — never stop admitting you don’t have the answer and go out and learn something new. Personally, it’s one of my favorite things to do.