By Donal McMahon, Chief AI Officer, Lightspeed Systems
Three Key Takeaways
- AI adoption is inevitable. Do it safely and deliberately.
- Build the fence and the gate: guardrails + openness = trust.
- Start with the why, pilot small, monitor continuously, and keep iterating.
Hello everyone! For those who haven’t met me yet, I’m Donal McMahon, Chief AI Officer at Lightspeed Systems. I’ve spent over 25 years working in AI and technology (including a decade at Google and leading machine-learning teams at Indeed), and I now get to focus full-time on bringing safe, powerful AI to K-12 education.
This week I had the privilege of spending time on-site at Google and then co-hosting our latest webinar with two people who truly understand districts: Rob Chambers (EVP of Product here at Lightspeed) and Jeremy Bunkley (Google for Education, former Florida CIO).
This was a genuine partnership between Lightspeed Systems and Google for Education, combining our student-safety and device-management expertise with Google’s world-class AI tools so districts finally have one safe, complete path forward.
If you weren’t able to join, you can watch the webinar here or keep reading to see what you missed.
Why the AI Blueprint Exists
Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, generative AI has grown faster than the internet, Google, YouTube, and Facebook combined in their first three years. The opportunities are clear to enterprises, districts, parents, and students alike, but so are the risks. Our opening poll showed concerns are evenly spread across cheating, cybersecurity, inappropriate content, inappropriate conversations, safety features, data privacy, and getting others on board.
That’s why we built the AI Blueprint: a very practical blueprint you can bring back to your schools and districts to implement and reach your goals with AI (whatever they should be) but to do so safe and smartly.
Download the free AI Blueprint template to get started on your path toward building safe and SMART AI in your districts.
The Five Phases of Building Safe and SMART
- Start with the Why
This really all starts with the why. What is the goal of rolling out AI in your district and your school? Is it to help your IT department be more effective (we’re all in a time where budgets are crunched — how do we do more with less)? Is it to help teachers teach better, to give them more help with instruction, to give them resources they wouldn’t have had before? Or is it to roll out to students to make sure they’re ready for the digital market and the world they’ll be working in years to come? Those are really different goals, and they may have different rollout paths as well.
- Planning
Approve and implement the AI tools that are appropriate for your goals while making sure they are safe, usable, interpretable, interoperable, inclusive, and evidence-based.
- Pilot
Our recommendation is to start with the IT department, then expand to some teachers — and include training at each step — before rolling it out to students and expanding that program.
- Expand
Roll out to more staff, more students, more tools, and more use cases — always with continued training and support.
- Monitor & Iterate
The use of AI is very, very broad. It’s a wonderful, extensible tool, but that can go in wonderful imaginative and creative places — but it also can go into areas where we unfortunately are already seeing risky behavior by IT staff, by teachers, and mostly by students as well. You need a way to make sure you have visibility and reporting on that.
The Fireside Chat – Rob & Jeremy Unscripted
(Still the best part of the day.)
Jeremy on urgency: “To not adopt it and not prepare students for it is not truly preparing them for where the workforce is today.”
Rob on the shift in fears: “Two years ago it was ‘block it — kids will cheat.’ Now the top concern is safety, cybersecurity, and data privacy.”
Rob’s favorite line of the week (stolen from a CIO): “We have to have the fence, but we also have to have the gate open.”
Jeremy on perfectionism: “Perfect is the enemy of good. Get a simple plan on paper and give yourself permission to change it next week.”
And both of them on students: involve your largest stakeholder group early, give them clear boundaries, and treat AI like any other powerful tool.
A Huge Thank You to Google for Education
Jeremy, the Gemini team, and everyone at Google for Education: thank you for co-hosting and for building tools that put student safety first from day one. We’re proud to partner with you.
Grab the blueprint, watch the recording, or just reach out. I’m always happy to help your district take the next step.
Onward,
Donal McMahon
Chief AI Officer, Lightspeed Systems
