AI is a backend algorithm developed by Youtube to connect user videos to the appropriate audience. AI is chat bots that provide timely customer service and direction to users across multiple platforms. AI is the intuitive cloud spreadsheet that provides immediate analysis and trends to its human programmer. It’s the digital nervous system that ideates original designs for car companies, based on thousands of past models.

In other words, true AI doesn’t work against humans–it works with us, in a blended environment that draws upon a combination of abilities that provide for the best outcome.

Or put more simply, AI is both a machine that collects data; and a system to understand it.

Although misunderstood and still in its infancy, companies that have managed to incorporate AI show impressive results. Companies with at least 20% revenue growth use AI in 60% of their overall operations and automation, as compared to companies with negative growth that only automate 35% of their processes.

In order to adequately prepare students for a future blended workforce that is part human and part AI, schools must mirror the same environment within their ecosystems. In other words, schools must provide environments that couple the creative intelligence of humans with the analytical intelligence of computers and robots.

There are five major shifts that AI would allow if incorporated in schools:

  1. Stand and Deliver Instruction —> Facilitation/ Coaching
  2. Developers of content—> Developers of learning experiences
  3. Siloed Classrooms —> Virtual Social Networks
  4. Textbooks and Set Curriculum —> Blended Courses and Customized Design
  5. Hierarchical Top-Down Network —> Lateral Virtual Global Network

AI doesn’t have to scare us. By slowly and consciously embracing it, we can start to make the shifts necessary for the 21st-century classroom.

Read the full article about AI in education by Kyle Wagner at Getting Smart.