At Lightspeed, We Don’t Just Help You Govern AI. We Hold Ourselves to the Same Standard.

AI at Lightspeed – An Approach Schools Can Trust

AI is changing what’s possible in educational technology: faster insights for teachers, faster answers for admins, faster protection for students. We’re building for that future, but we’ve also spent nearly two decades earning schools’ trust by putting safety and control first, and as technology evolves, our commitment to maintaining our central focus in these areas remains steadfast. 

Every AI capability we ship, and every AI tool we use internally, has to clear the same bar our platform has always held: strong governance, clear guardrails, and real human oversight. Schools, families, and partners shouldn’t have to choose between AI that moves fast and AI they can trust. This is how we hold ourselves to that standard. 

AI features you see 

AI functionality within the product helps you and your users, when you’re ready. 

  • Every AI feature ships off by default. Admins decide when and whether to turn it on for their district. 
  • Anytime AI is user-facing for teachers (or for students, if we ever add that), we provide the ability to enable/disable for the whole district or by grade, group, or policy, giving districts the flexibility to decide what’s appropriate and when 
  • AI supports what teachers and admins already do. It doesn’t replace their judgment. 

Example: Class Highlights gives teachers AI-generated summaries of classroom activity. Alerts includes AI-written justifications, so admins see not just what was flagged, but why. Both features ship off by default, and districts turn them on when they’re ready. 

“When we ship AI features in our products, they are released disabled by default so schools can vet them and determine if, when, and for whom they are enabled. That’s just part of the Lightspeed difference that comes from serving schools for more than 27 years.” – Jennifer Duer, EVP Product

AI behind our products 

AI turns complex data into insight you can act on, faster than any team scanning logs alone. 

  • AI operates within the same security and privacy controls as the rest of our platform. 
  • Human oversight and guardrails sit behind every layer of it. 
  • Personal data never touches the model. Not yours, not your students’, not ours. 

Example: We’ve used AI to categorize web activity and flag safety signals since before AI was something anyone marketed. It’s been refined continuously, at a scale no team of humans could sustain by hand. 

Internal use of AI 

AI helps every team, from support to engineering, do more for you, faster. 

  • Every AI tool clears a security and privacy review before any team can touch it. 
  • Everyone on staff trains on privacy and security, with AI tools and without. 
  • We don’t use customer data to train AI models. 
  • AI use is reviewed the same way any tool touching our systems would be. 

Example: Support uses AI to help close tickets faster. Engineering uses it to write, security review, quality check and ship code faster. Districts get answers, and features, sooner, without cutting corners on review. 

Schools don’t get to treat AI as optional anymore (even if they’re banning it for students). Neither do we. Speed and safety aren’t a trade-off we make once; they’re a standard we hold on every feature, every internal tool, every time. That’s what real governance looks like: capability and caution built in together, not chosen between. 

→ Learn more about our AI use and governance practices in our Trust Center 

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