From the ATLIS Annual Conference 2025

Join Christina Lewellen and Hiram Cuevas as they speak with Vriti Saraf, co-founder and CEO of Ed3DAO, about the intersection of AI and education. Vriti discusses the need for educators to move beyond superficial AI use to foster deeper cognitive abilities and critical thinking in students. She also explores the concept of "portrait of a teacher in the age of AI" and the challenges and opportunities AI presents for independent schools.

Resources

• Ed3DAO
• K12 Educators
• Teach For America
• Mount Vernon School
• X Prize
• Full Steam Forward
• Merlin Mind
• Anthropic

Ed, welcome to Talking technology with Atlas,

the show that plugs you into the important topics and trends for

technology leaders all through a unique Independent School lens.

We'll hear stories from technology directors and other

special guests from the Independent School community,

and provide you with focused learning and deep dive topics.

And now please welcome your host. Kristina llewellen,

hello everyone, and welcome back to

talking technology with Atlas. I'm Kristina llewellen, the

president and CEO of the Association of Technology

Leaders in Independent Schools.

And I'm Bill Stites, the Director of

Technology at Montclair Kimberly Academy in Montclair, New

Jersey,

and I'm Hiram Cuevas, the Director of

Information Systems and Academic Technology at St Christopher

school in Richmond,

Virginia. So hey, Bill, on this episode, we

have a present for you. We have a gift that we are hand

delivering, yes, and that is that we know that you are being

pulled in a million directions at the Atlas annual conference

and you missed the opportunity to record a podcast live on the

stage when we were in Atlanta with one of our main stage

keynote speakers. So we recorded it, Hiram and I did, and now

it's our present for you.

Well, thank you. I was fearful that I was going to

miss out, and indeed, I did. So I'm eager for my present,

yes, well, it will be dropping. You'll get

to listen to it fresh like the rest of our loving listeners.

This podcast is with Vritti sarof, and certainly, if you

were in Atlanta, you remember her. She was also part of a

panel discussion that we did on our day two keynote, but we

pulled her aside because she is the co founder and CEO of Ed

three Dao, and it's a nonprofit organization that up skills

educators on emerging technologies, and she really

does that through a lot of research based pedagogy. So

she's helping a lot of educators across the country and the world

wrestle some of these big issues that we're all dealing with and

that I know our tech leaders wrestle on a regular basis.

She's also the founder of K 12 educators, which is a design

studio and a consultancy to help with some of this work, and from

that they incubated the ED three Dao platform and organization.

Vritti started her career as a Teach for America teacher. So

she has that background. She was based in Brooklyn, New York, and

we talked with her a little bit about that. She has since served

as a professor and a dean, a director in public and private

and charter schools, both here in the States, but

internationally across K 12 and higher ed. She serves in a bunch

of advisory roles at X Prize, full steam forward and me

premiere Bitcoin. So she is definitely a thought leader in

all of these emerging technologies. It was such a

privilege to sit down and talk to her before we launch into

that recording. Hiram, do you have any recollection or

thoughts about our conversation with her? Because it was pretty

impactful to me,

absolutely. Thank you. Kristina, yeah, one of the

things that she mentioned that I'm very excited about is the

portrait of a teacher concept that her organization is looking

to grow and foster. And I'm excited that there's going to be

a potential relationship between her organization and Atlas. So

with that, there's some really interesting and transformative

things that are going to be coming down the pipe. She

left a fingerprint on my brain for

sure. You know, we only had a limited time with her to kind of

squeeze in a lot of conversation. And in that work,

she was talking about the portrait of teacher. I felt like

there was so much more to unpack there. And so everyone in the

Atlas community just stay tuned, because we will absolutely be

walking that path with reedy and learning more as our

relationship unfolds. But in the meantime, I think that this

recording is a wonderful way for us to introduce the broader

Atlas community to Vritti Saurav and the work that she's done. So

should we launch into it

now? Absolutely stay tuned, folks. This is

fabulous. Yeah, and here

you go. Bill our present to you. I hope you

enjoy it. Let's go. We are recording live from our Atlanta

conference, our 10th Anniversary celebration, and we are sitting

here today recording in the morning on day two, we just did

our general session, and a lot of folks went out to the karaoke

bar last night, but I can't believe how many people actually

showed up. Must be the great topics we had

absolutely and we got to see Peter Frank, our very

own. Peter Frank, really kill it.

Yeah, our producer, Peter Frank, was

karaoke. We may have to put that video in the show notes. All

right. So today we have Welcome to our pod, one of our keynote

panelists from this morning, we had such a great conversation

about everything from quantum computing to the future of AI

and how pedagogy is being affected. So we are excited to

have Vritti Saurav with us today. Vritti, thank you so much

for being with us. Thank you for having me so you are the co

founder and CEO of Ed three. Dow. Yes, tell us a little bit

about this nonprofit. What is it all about?

We try to help educators upscale in emerging

technology using research based pedagogy. We have a pet peeve

right now with AI. We believe that AI is being implemented in

classrooms on a very superficial level, and we really want

educators and students to understand how to think with AI,

not just use AI. We have three areas of operation, and one of

them is we build courses in partnership with universities

and districts, where we have educators learn about emerging

technologies on their own pace. And we have a community of

practice with about 2500 global educators that exchange best

practices with each other and connect with each other on

emerging tech. And then we have an R and D arm where we solicit

funds to push projects that are going to help education get to

the next frontier. And two of the projects that might be

interesting to this conversation, one is on

competency based assessments, and the other one is on the

portrait of a teacher in the age of AI,

oh my gosh. That gives us so much to dive

into. I don't I almost don't even know exactly where to

begin, but I kind of want to start with something that you

mentioned in the keynote, which is that there's this surface

level interaction with AI. Help me unpack that a little bit.

What do you consider surface level interaction with AI? And

what are you hoping that educators will instead get a

little deeper with so

one of the greatest things about AI is that it can

do so much for you. It's the llms, the large language models

are becoming so advanced that they can do a lot of dynamic

thinking. Yet the way that we're actually using AI right now,

whether it's Chat GPT or some of the branded things like magic

school or school AI, we're using them to make more efficient the

practices that we already do to maintain the status quo of

schooling, and because we are currently in a system, whether

it's you're a public school or private school, Independent

School, where there's a lot of bureaucracy that we need to

adhere to, like testing and things like that, we find that

teachers are really struggling to keep up. Teachers are trying

to survive every day, trying to make sure that they can meet the

demands that we currently have, and with AI, what they're seeing

is a solution to meet those demands as a solution to make

more efficient what they're already doing, but not

necessarily to innovate and move the education system to the next

frontier. And so what I'm seeing right now is educators using AI

for lesson planning or for tutoring or for creating project

materials, things like that, but they're not necessarily using it

to enhance their own cognitive abilities or to help students

enhance their cognitive abilities. And one of the things

that I'm afraid of, which hasn't, you know, there's no

data on this yet, but I wonder if there might be soon, will the

use of AI in the way that we're using it right now actually

cause cognitive atrophy? That's really interesting concept

there. Yes,

we talk a lot about burnout being

mitigated with the use of AI. So that's kind of that surface

level. I totally buy what you're saying about it getting to that

next level. But is there some benefit to starting with, like

the simple wins? Oh, absolutely,

yeah. So it's real important that we try to

approach this technology in a very low hanging fruit sort of

way. But the problem is, we're staying there. We're not

actually moving past it, and llms are getting so much more

advanced so fast, but we're not able to keep up, one because

it's too hard to keep up, but also because we're not actually

moving past our own biases and inclinations to stay where we

are, and we're really trying to meet the demands of what we

again, are being told to do, rather than actually trying to

advance our

ecosystem. It's really interesting. So some

of the educators that are doing this well, like, do you have

certain models that you sort of hold on the pedestal and say

they're doing it well, they're

doing it correctly Well, I mean, if we look at the

two students today from Mount Vernon, oh my gosh. So

incredible, so incredible. The way that they were thinking

about the usage of AI. They were really trying to build their own

comprehension and critical thinking skills through the

interaction of AI. They weren't just saying, Hey, make this

movie for me. They were saying, Oh, they gave me a movie name

that already exists and a plot that already exists. Let me

actually change this, because that's not what I want. I don't

want to steal IP and let me think about how I can actually

adapt this so that it represents me, right. Another conversation,

you know, Patrick mentioned earlier, is, how do we really

engage AI in a way that helps us with our own identity, and how

it actually helps us build our sense of self? So one of the

things that I really like to do with any LLM that I interact

with is, instead of asking it what I would do in a difficult

situation, I tell it what I would do, and then I ask it,

what are my blind spots? What are the different perspectives I

should be considering? What would happen if this would

happen creating simulations, and that makes me smarter, because

the next time I'm encountering a problem like this. I can think

about the things that AI has advised me to do to basically

improve upon my decision making next time, right? Yeah, it's a

coach, right? Absolutely.

So the depth of your prompts, to use a line that

you mentioned during the keynote, is helping you

establish that making meaning for the next step that you're

trying to accomplish. I'd like to take a step back, because as

I was reading up on your work, I noticed that you did a Teach for

America stint, and I actually worked with underachievers in

science education in the state of Virginia, had a grant to work

with them as well. How did that journey influence where you are

today?

Teach For America fundamental changed my life. I

was a very different person before TFA, and the thing that

TFA did for me, which is something that I think we, you

know, as parents, I actually just became a mom, and it's

something we as parents often think about, but don't often

allow to happen, which is the idea of struggle with Teach for

America. The thing that it taught me, because it was such a

difficult program, I had never taught before. I had never

worked in inner city before, and when I worked with these

students who were so motivated and so interested, but had come

from very difficult backgrounds and were showing some of that

behavior in the classroom, I had to work really hard to come up

with 10 different solutions to engage each one of the students.

And I couldn't give up, right? It was the first time in my life

where I couldn't give up, because I had other people, 30

students, relying on me, right in my past before TFA, if I gave

up, the only person that would be disappointed would be me. And

so TFA fundamentally changed my understanding of resolve and

persistence and grit and all that. It really taught me to be

the person that I am today and really live with the struggle

and really try to be a solutions oriented person. Now, going back

to this parent comment that I just made, oftentimes, we engage

with our students, and we want to solve problems for them. We

want to give them the easy way out, because we don't want to

see them struggle. But the beauty of being human is this is

a little philosophical. It's the ability of suffering. Humans are

uniquely able to suffer AI is not AI cannot suffer. And so

that's one of the fundamental differences between AI and

humans, and that's what humans really are able to have over AI

and are able to continue using in order to make meaning of AI,

back to the GFA experience, what I've learned and how that's

shaped my experience of AI now is that journey that you have

with struggle, productive struggle, with the ability to

suffer, but then come out of it. Is really what is driving my

exploration of AI into making me cognitively more strong, rather

than just relying on AI to do the heavy lifting for me. If you

were entering Teach For America today

with those 10 different types of students or those 30 humans

relying on you in, what ways do you think you would use AI to

lighten the load a little

bit? That's a really great question. So I

taught kindergarten, Oh, wow. And I would not implement any AI

apps in the classroom with my students, because I don't, you

know, this is my personal belief. I would not expose my

kindergarteners to screens. That's just not something that I

think is, you know, good for human development. But of

course, there's other research out there around that, and

everybody has their own opinion. What I would do, though is I

would use AI to think about my centers. I would use AI to think

about how I might be able to create autonomous bots to be

able to carry out different sort of courses of action. If I gave

it certain amount of data, I would use it to create literacy

materials that were more personalized for my students. I

would probably use AI to analyze the data that I was getting.

There's so many ways that I think I could have been so much

more efficient with AI. So it's an extension of you, an

extension of me,

and really, I'm noticing that thread of making

meaning is permeating throughout that entire conversation that we

just had

about with Atlas. I spend a lot of time on

the road, and it's not often that I end up in faculty facing

I'm more often with administrators and leadership

teams, but on occasion, when I'm with faculty, I generally kind

of approach it like, let's start with getting you comfortable

with tools so that you at least know where it's going, and you

know not about the tools you're using with your students, but

the tools to make your life easier, like, let's give you

your Sunday afternoons back. Let's use this as a way to

mitigate burnout and get through your mundane tasks a little

easier, a little quicker. And maybe that's a starting point.

Because, you know, if we try to equate it with the internet,

it's not like we became experts at the Internet overnight. It

took us time to figure it out and unpack it, and that's a lot

of the great work that you guys are doing. So now I want to

circle back to what you mentioned about competency based

work that you're doing. So in all of this, you know, this

morning, we talked about, okay, what skills are students going

to need to navigate the world and being discerning consumers

of AI, like we saw from these students from Mount. Vernon,

they're clearly on that path. But when you think about this

from like a skills based overall or a competency based kind of

approach to teaching, where does AI fit in that? How are you

thinking about those things?

One of the things that I mentioned during the

panel was that we have to look at AI through a critical

thinking lens, sure. And the reason why I harp on that over

and over again is because no matter what the technology is,

if there's a student or a teacher that can critically

think about it, then you don't have to worry about the

cheating, you don't have to worry about the policies, you

don't have to worry about any of that, because you're able to

make sense of the technology through that lens. And so when

we think about competencies, sure we have the AI, you know,

foundations, right? You should learn about LMS. You should

learn about their strengths and their weaknesses, the biases,

the IP protection, all that kind of stuff, because that will help

you use the systems better. But I think the fundamentals of

critical thinking, of being socially aware, self aware,

understanding those, what we call durable skills, are going

to be so much more impactful for a student's future than just

understanding how to use an app, right? So I would definitely

like focus more on those competencies that are evergreen,

those durable skills before I even think about technology.

So do you think there are any soft skills that

AI can help students with? Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, there are several skills, right? So even

if you think about self awareness, for example,

sometimes it's really hard to be self aware and be honest with

yourself, and it's really hard to talk to another human who you

might think might judge you if you have an AI bot where you're

actually engaging with it and actually feeding it tons of

information about yourself, hopefully it will be data

protected, and you're able to ask it questions that you know

you wouldn't be comfortable asking another human, then

you're going to learn more about yourself engaging with that bot

than you might talking to another human and being

reflective with those practices, because AI is adaptive, that

reflection will then yield a different response from an LLM

the next time you engage with it. So all of those things

building upon each other definitely could help you build

those skills. And I'm

so grateful that you mentioned the data privacy

aspect of AI use in schools, because so often our teachers

are equipped with that information. Just yet. I think

the increase in awareness for cybersecurity and data privacy,

just in general, with a lot of the applications that we're now

using within schools, this is just another layer of support

that we need to provide our teachers, because we do start

throwing a lot of information into these bots, it could get

very interesting quickly in terms of the PII that might be

available. Yeah, the unfortunate

part is that there aren't any great solutions out

there just yet. You can have a local iteration of an LLM and be

able to store all that data locally, which is probably the

best solution right now. But the problem with that is, if you're

storing it locally, then it won't be as adaptive, and it

won't bring in the new version of the algorithm that might

actually help you make meaning of that data. So it's a little

bit of a difficult situation right now, but I'm sure there

will be a solution to it, because AI is so ubiquitous,

there is going to be people that figure out that

solution. Are you seeing any applications that are

kind of leading the charge in that area? There

are a few education llms, Merlin mine comes to mind.

Anthropic comes to mind because they try to focus a little bit

more on data privacy. But I don't think any of them really

are building fool proof models, just because AI is really hard

to understand right now, even by experts. And what is happening

with that data is a little bit unknown. We're on the cutting

edge,

folks, yeah, now you know that here at Atlas,

we're primarily an organization of technology teams that are

supporting our educators, and one of the things that I often

hear from our community is that teachers are overwhelmed.

They're juggling too much, and there's just it's like the wall

is up. There's no bandwidth. Even if this could save them

time, even if this could make their lives easier, even if it

could be an extension of them serving their students, there's

not a lot of receptive Yeah, oh, yeah. Give me another thing, any

advice, thoughts, inroads, yeah,

there's two ways you could potentially approach

this. One is if you approach a teacher through the pedagogy

perspective and say, let's talk about what you're doing right

now, especially if they're implementing really good

practices that are student centered. And you know, what is

the problem of practice that you're having? Don't even talk

about AI what is a problem of practice? Use design thinking to

basically help them unpack that problem of practice, and then

bring an AI bot and say, Hey, you mentioned that this was an

issue for you. Well, here's an example of how it could be

better. That's one way, especially because it really

lowers the barriers when you're talking about pedagogy. The

other way is a little bit more insidious, which is talk to

students first. So basically, interview students, engage

students and parents about. How they might want to or how they

already use AI, or how they might want their classroom to

change, and if you get enough coalition from students and from

parents, well, a revolution often starts from bottom down.

Yeah, and so that's really what could change the perspective of

teachers when students are starting to

demand it. That's interesting. Do you think

that it's the teacher's role to kind of be forward and future

focused, or do you think that it's more the tech leaders and

the administration, the leadership who should be looking

at the horizon to figure all this out?

I think one of the things that educators are often

falling short of, to be honest, is the concept of futures

thinking. So I think educators are often thinking, Well, how do

I get my student really prepared for the next grade? Or how do I

get my student to pass, or, you know, do really well within high

school or grade school or whatever it is, the thinking

varies, sort of like within a one year to five years. But if

we can get educators to think 10 years, 20 years, what is my

student going to be like when they're 25 years old, what

workforce are they going to pursue? How are they going to

lead a fulfilling and successful life? And I think their

instruction would actually be far better, and I think their

connection with a student and their understanding of the world

would be better, and they would also be more eager to integrate

technology. It's from the motivation of why you're doing

what you're doing. Teachers, because they are forced to think

about just one year because of all these bureaucratic systems,

they're thinking about, well, how do I survive this year? But

if there are asked to think about the next 20 years, then

maybe they'll say, Okay, well, if I need to prepare my student

to be thriving in 20 years, well, then I have to start

preparing them for that future, and now I have to start

integrating technology into

it. So you mentioned 20 years of thinking

about employment, but what about that next level, that higher ed

lens, in terms of AI use and preparing the students today who

are in high school that in three to four years, they're going to

be in a landscape of higher education learning, and we

should be preparing them with AI tools and AI functionality.

Yeah, there's two ways to look at that. One is if

you want students to be agentic in higher education, which is

generally our goal, because we don't want them to go into

college not being able to support themselves and be able

to have like, good habits of mind and all that to be able to

independently succeed. We want them to build those agency

skills in the classroom, right? So to your point, yes, all of

those things would be really helpful, especially if they want

agency with AI, agency with technical things like that. But

the other thing to think about is, right now, there's a huge

trend towards kids not going to college at all, to university,

right? Students are choosing to have gap years, or choosing to

pursue alternative vocations, or choosing to not go to university

at all. And so the question necessarily, is not, you know,

how are you going to be successful in higher education.

The question is, how will you have a fulfilling life in the

world? If you're familiar with the concept of ikigai, it's a

Japanese framework that basically talks about your

purpose. There's four factors to identifying your purpose. One is

finding what you really love. The next is finding what you're

really good at. The next is finding what you'll get paid

for, and the fourth is finding what will help the world and

what the world will actually be prepared for. So those four

things put together, help you find your purpose. And I think

in the past, we focused on students either just finding

their vocation, being able to make money, or just finding what

they love, like not all four, not all four. It wasn't

comprehensive, right? And all four of those really help you

identify. You know, what will help you lead a fulfilling life.

And so if in school, starting in kindergarten, we can start

helping the students start to identify, or start getting close

to what their iki guy is, then they can start making a path

towards that fulfilling life, developing that passion.

I know that now I have one other thing that

I sometimes bring up on the pod, which is that I have one of my

four daughters much older than your child, between 19 and 23

all of them college age, and one of them is pursuing education as

her profession and her calling, and they're not talking to her

about AI in college. Your thoughts on that? Her professors

do not bring it up. There's no conversations about it. She's

using it because I'm her mom, yeah, and I tell her about cool

tools, yeah, what do you think?

Unfortunately, that is the landscape right now. Most

people are too afraid to talk about AI one because it's a very

changing technology. There's a lot of advancements being made,

and a lot of people don't know what to do with it. Yeah, this

is why we're working on this concept of a portrait of a

teacher in the age of AI. So if you've heard of a portrait of a

graduate schools love that phrase, okay, perfect. Yeah. And

it's a really great mechanism to identify what competencies your

graduates are gonna need. We're. Right? But we don't often talk

about the relationship between a student and a teacher when

you're actually trying to embed these competencies into your

work. If you want a student to be agentic and critical thinking

and fulfilled, then you need a teacher to be agentic critical

thinking and fulfilled, right? But we don't often talk about

that. So to your point, if we want students to be ready for

the workforce, we need teachers to be ready for the workforce,

and they're not. So I think

it's interesting, because that may be symptomatic

of the education school in other schools, my daughter's in the

architecture school at Virginia Tech, and they're using AI

frequently. I know engineers are using it frequently. Coders in

computer science using it frequently. I do think it

mirrors something that our other co host, Bill Stites and I had a

conversation about with our wives. They're both teachers,

and teachers often feel like they're cheating when they use

AI in the classroom. We've been trying to overcome that mindset,

and it's that very superficial thought about how AI can be used

within the educational environment. And I think it

still permeates.

Well, do you guys remember when we started getting

access to the internet and when we were asked to do a research

report and create a bibliography? We referenced

Wikipedia and we referenced, you know, other sources that we got

off to the internet that felt like cheating, too, right?

Right? Until now, which it isn't how many of us actually go to

libraries anymore, right? Most of us actually access our

information off the internet. I think this is a time thing. I

think right now we because the technology is changing the

paradigm for how we engage with each other and with information,

that it's really creating this like barrier for us. But I think

within time, given, like, three years, five years, it's not

going to feel like cheating anymore. It's going to feel like

something that we do, and it's the best sort of resource out

there for us to use.

So Brad, can you actually paint for me that

portrait of a teacher? What does that look like with your

technology kind of focus? And I think that the part of the

question I like to get to, if you don't mind, is, what can our

tech leaders do to help paint that portrait of a teacher?

Yeah, so the project that we're engaging

with, it was funded by an organization called learner

studio. We are engaging in a year long R and D study,

basically where we're interviewing policy makers,

teachers, administrators, to basically identify what are

those competencies that we think teachers might need in the age

of AI, including people in the workforce. So not directly

linked to teachers, but directly linked to students, because

whatever, again, a student experiences, is what the

competencies teachers have. And so we're creating this big

research study where we're identifying what those

competencies might be, but we're also identifying what are the

things that teachers are doing every day, right? Is there a

giant list of the things that teachers are demanded to do

every single day? We're just compiling that to see. Well, how

might that shift in the age of AI, right? What are those tasks

and those skills that will fundamentally change when AI

agents become much more popular, and so how might that then shift

the portrait of a teacher? So we're taking this in phases.

We're doing some data gathering, then we're crafting a framework

using an advisory committee as well as a brain trust of

hopefully 500 educators around the world, and then we're going

to go back to those educators and say, Hey, so this is what we

came up with based on all the data that we gathered. What do

you think of this? And then we're going to come up with

that. So to answer your question, I don't know what the

answer is interesting. And the reason I don't know what the

answer is is because it's not my opinion. It shouldn't be my

opinion. It should be quantifiable and qualitative

data gathered from the people that are actually doing the

work. So

if people are interested in following

along at home in this really cool project. Where can they

find this information? So

we're gonna post invitations to join the brain

trust and the committee and all that kind of stuff on our

website, Ed three.com and we welcome anybody who's interested

in this project. And we want to make this an open source

project, so whatever is produced is actually going to be

available to everybody that was a part of it and to the general

public. We really want this information to be out there, and

we want people to be able to use this to create their own

portrait within their local level, because portraits do need

to be contextualized for your local situation. And we want

them to be able to impact their hiring decisions, their

professional development decisions, their evaluation

decisions, to make sure that now they're building this cadre of

teachers that is going to be prepared for the future.

Love it all right, so we'll definitely keep

a close eye on that and follow along. Is it for public facing

primarily, or are you looking for a mix of all types of

teachers?

It has to be a mix of all types of teachers. It has

to be a mix of independent, private, charter and public. We

have a great community. We

do have a good community with that, so we

can definitely walk that path with you. All right, so one of

my last questions for you, as we kind of start wrapping this up,

is I'd love to know what you are bullish and bearish on. In terms

of AI. So what do you love and what are you really concerned

about?

I love the potential for innovation with

AI. I think AI agents are going to really change how we engage

with each other and with the information that we consume and

learning in general. I think agents because they're able to

adapt every decision and autonomously execute every

subsequent decision. It's going to create these chains of

decision making that are going to be very impactful for the way

that we operate on a daily level. So I'm very bullish on

that awesome the bearish part, I'm really concerned about the

data privacy and AIP stuff. I do think that there is opportunity

for blockchain to be a potential solution for this, because

blockchain is decentralized and because it is immutable, I

wonder if it's possible to put our data and our IP onto

blockchain so that we can have more accountability for how it's

being used in an LLM, so that's a really interesting way to

potentially solve that problem, but I'm not quite sure how that

would manifest,

right? But you're concerned. That's what

you're watching us too.

Now I'm always about stealing all the

intellectual capital people have. What agent are you using?

Which LLM Am I using? Yes, I use a lot of

models. I actually don't use just one, because different

models are good for different things. Different things.

But do you have a specific agent? Are you using an

agent? Oh, currently, I

haven't seen any apps that will create an agent

for you that are perfect yet, and so I'm experimenting with a

bunch of different ones, but I haven't landed on one yet. All

right. Like to dabble myself a little

dabbling, but being careful what you put

into it. Right? Absolutely, 100% so as the reality being that we

are in a conference with a bunch of tech folks, what questions do

you think technology leaders should be asking at this

conference, and also just of themselves, and as they move

through this early, what I say, adolescent phase of

AI. I think the main question is, how do I

improve my own cognitive abilities with AI? How do I

improve how I think with AI rather than what I do with AI

again? Like the thing that I don't want us to experience as a

human race is for our cognition to decline because we're letting

AI make all of our decisions for us. And so I think the main

question is not, you know what app is cool, or how can I offset

some of this administrative work to AI? All those things are

fine, and you should do that. But I think the bigger question,

especially with brilliant people around you, where you can really

start to engage with other people and nitpick at deeper

issues is, how do I get smarter using AI?

That's a good question. Hiram, do you

feel smarter with AI? I

do. I do. I mean, I started using gems within

Gemini to specifically cater to the type of request that I'm

after. So every time I throw in a prompt, it knows exactly what

I'm looking for, whether it's for Looker studio or whether

it's for the Google administrative dashboard, it's

been very, very helpful to restrain the type of information

and actually have it develop the output that I desire.

It's awesome. I love it. Well.

Vritti, thank you so much for coming and sitting down with us.

I know that you have a lot of demands on your time here at

this conference and in general. So I'm so grateful that you made

time to come to the Atlas conference. It was really

incredible to have you here. You're stellar on the panel,

stellar on our pod. And I'd love to have an open invite when you

start moving down the path of the project that you're working

on with the portrait of a teacher that is so fascinating.

And I really think that there is a lot of work that our

technology leaders can do to support what those outcomes are.

So please open invitation. Come back and talk to us about it.

Once you've got some more of that data pulled together, we'd

love to hear about it. I would love to thanks so much for

having me. Yes, thank you.

This has been talking technology with Atlas,

produced by the Association of Technology Leaders in

Independent Schools. For more information about Atlas and

Atlas membership, please visit theatlas.org if you enjoyed this

discussion, please subscribe, leave a review and share this

podcast with your colleagues in the independent school

community. Thank you for listening. You