With all the hubris of a startup founder, Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District, took to the stage in March to launch Ed the chatbot. He told parents and students it had “the potential to personalize the educational journey at a level never before seen in this district, across the country, or around the world.” “No other technology can deliver real time on this promise,” he said. “We know it will succeed.” In June, after only three months and nearly $3 million, the district shelved Ed following layoffs of more than half of the staff at AllHere, the startup that made the conversational AI assistant. District spokesperson Britt Vaughan refused to answer questions about the bot’s performance or say how many students and parents used it before the shutdown. The market is pressuring edtech providers to include AI in their products and services, foundations are pressuring school leaders to include AI in their curriculum, and teachers are told that if they don’t adopt AI tools then their students might get left behind, said Alix Gallagher, head of strategic partnerships at the Policy Analysis for California Education center at Stanford University. Since AI is getting built into a lot of existing products and contracts involving curriculum, it’s highly likely that San Diego’s school board is not alone in discovering AI unexpectedly bundled into a contract. Gallagher said that administrative staff will need to ask questions about supplemental curricula or software updates. “It’s close to impossible for districts and schools to keep up,” she said. “I definitely think that’s even more true in smaller school districts that don’t have extra people to devote to this.” Gallagher said AI can do positive things like reduce teacher burnout, but individual teachers and small school districts won’t be able to keep up with the pace of change, and so trusted nonprofits or state education officials should help determine which AI tools are trustworthy. The question in California, she said, is who’s going to step up and lead that effort?