Beyond the Textbook: AI Skills for Students and Educators | Dreamforce 2025

Santana, I'm co founder and CEO of America on Tech and today we want to welcome you to beyond the Textbook AI Skills for Students and Educators. We hope that you leave the session with some really, really amazing, amazing takeaways. So as we go through the session, something that we want to know is that this session includes forward looking statements. So just keep that in as the session progresses. Thank you for being here. I'm going to give Alex an opportunity to introduce himself and I'm going to give you all an overview of America on Tech. So American Tech is a national organization on a mission to prepare the next generation of technology leaders from underestimated communities. Our work has been in existence now for 11 years and we work with young people to create pathways for them into tech careers by giving them the skills that they need to be successful. You know, our work has reached over 5,300 students across the country and we currently have offices in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Atlanta. Alex.

Hey, Alex. CEO of nonprofit called the AI Education Project. And our work is basically preparing students to thrive in a world where AI is everywhere. You can call this the future, the future of work, the fourth industrial revolution. But in short, we work with school systems to do all the sort of component, requisite components of school transformation to make sure that every single student in a school building, in particular in districts and in communities that are the most likely to be left behind, have access not just to the knowledge about AI, it's not just AI literacy, but it's also all the other skills that are going to command value in the labor market. Like what are people going to hire kids to do? What are the practices they need to have? And I work, we're a really small organization because we believe that this actually rubber hits the road with organizations like American Tech. Like communities need to be supported from and within and by those communities as opposed to just flying in with like some sort of scalable solution. So I love the dichotomy here and yeah, I look forward to diving in.

Yeah, yeah, me too. And as we go to the next slide, you know, Alex, I think one thing we were doing before the prep call, well, during the prep call for this, was to ensure that we set the context for the problem that we're actually trying to solve with both of our organizations. So I'd love for you to shed some light into, you know, what is the problem we're trying to solve. Like how big is this AI problem? Is it an AI problem? Right. Why should we be actually dedicating resources to solve it?

Yeah, I mean, I think these, these, these stats are actually just scratching the servers. I mean, the point is, I would argue that basically 98% of schools are not actually preparing students for AI, and those 2% are generally students in private schools and things like Alpha School. Because we also haven't even answered what the future of work is. Nobody is really saying. It's just like, okay, people using AI, it's not that you'll be replaced by AI, you'll be replaced by someone using AI. It's kind of as far as we've gotten. And we actually need to answer the question, like, what are the career pathways that are going to be resilient? Which ones are actually going to narrow or potentially go away? And we can talk more about our solution here. But ultimately, where does the rubber meet the road, which is how do we actually build durable skills and do all this stuff that we've kind of been talking about for a long time, but it turns out it's really hard. And so I think your organization is kind of demonstrating what this looks like. And the question, I think the challenge now is how do we scale that to the, to the scale that AI obviously has, which is massive and enormous.

Absolutely. Yeah. And I would even say on top of that, too, you know, I think folks need to understand how big this problem is. Right. Like, just in New York City alone, the New York City Department of Education is home to 1.1 million students. That is just New York City's five boroughs. Right. So when you think about other school districts across the country is not just, you know, a subset of people that are not getting this, you know, resource. It is a massive scale problem. And if we really do believe that AI is the future, then we need to be investing in the future of talent by giving young people the opportunity to compete for these kinds of careers. And so, you know, I know you and I talked a lot about frameworks and the skills that educators and students are going to need to be successful in the current environment. And, and I think that we all agree that there are a subset of AI specific skills or the skills that people would call the AI skills or the AI literacy skills. And then overarching those skills are critical thinking and the human advantage. You know, the first thing is around ethics, safety, and responsible use. You know, you can't teach a student how to use AI without thinking about what are the ethics associated with the actual technology. Young people don't know what they don't know. And I think having the ability to get them to understand the guardrails that they should be using when actually being the consumers of these technologies is a non negotiable skill. And it's also context that they need to make sure that they're not just creating harm for themselves, but they also creating harm for communities that they are participating in, which oftentimes, especially at our organizations are the communities that are more susceptible for issues around engaging with AI because they're not prepared. I think the Other1 is AI context setting. It's creating the urgency among people to understand why these technologies are important. We believe that you can't just introduce the technology to a group of young people and hope that they just understand why it's important. You can introduce these kinds of tools and technologies to a set of educators and hope that they understand the importance of it. You know, educators have tons of things going on. I think sometimes the last thing they're thinking about is AI, right? And then young people also have tons of things going on. Sometimes they have jobs after school to take care of their family, they're providing extra income to their family by participating in programs that are stipended. And so what is going to make them want to actually, you know, use AI? And that is context setting for them about the importance of why these technologies need to be at the forefront of their thinking and their use. The other piece of it is data and technical literacy. You know, there are actual hard technical skills that students are gonna have to be able to leverage as well as teachers are gonna be able gonna need to be able to leverage to actually implement these technologies in a way that is helpful. You know, it's one thing to write a prompt and generate a response. You're gonna need to generate a response and then be able to look at that response and, and ask yourself, you know, is this actually real data? And if not, what are the sources that I'm going to be using to vet whether or not this is real information? And that is a technical skill that young people are going to need. And then last but not least is really human AI collaboration really getting students to see this and teachers to see this as part of their daily workflows so that they're not feeling like, you know, this is just a tool on the side, like how do you actually embed it for optimal use so that they can see themselves participating in these technologies in a way that still centers their humanities, don't feel like these technologies are meant to replace them and also give them the skills to really understand how they can use this to optimize efficiency in their work. And in their academics and in their lives in general. And I would love for you, Alex, to share a little bit more about the overarching part of this, which is critical thinking and the human advantage.

Yeah, thank you. That was like a. It's very comprehensive. And I think that's, you know, it's really important in this moment where there's lots of folks just talking about, you know, AI literacy and, like, we have to actually break it out and, like, get really concrete and prescriptive. Because, like, to your point about teachers, like, they just. They kind of want to know, like, what are we supposed to be teaching? So, aiedu, we talk about AI readiness, which is. Which is. It's a bit of a semantic strategy on our part. So AI readiness for us is AI literacy. So if you think about those four categories, roughly speaking, you need to know what AI is, understand how to use it safely, effectively, responsibly. But we believe that what really matters for students is not just, do you know how to use and harness and navigate the world with AI? While those are table stakes, there's something more. And I think the analogy that I use is if you imagine going back to 2005, 2006, let's say you're the Secretary of Education, somebody comes to you, your top advisor, and they're like, I've been talking to all the technologists. I've been in Silicon Valley. Mobile is the future. Everybody's about to have a smartphone. You're not going to do your job without a smartphone. You're not going to be able to get a job without a smartphone. It's going to be smartphone literacy needs to be our top priority. And all that's actually correct. But I would wager that nobody here has ever on their resume put, like, I know how to use my iPhone, and also I'm really good at Internet Explorer Safari. In fact, you probably would not get to their next interview if you actually even mentioned any of that. Those are table stakes. And so I think AI literacy is a little more complicated than smartphones, although a lot of the same. You know, I would argue that, like, data and technical literacy really would have been valuable. I wish that I had the opportunity to take a data science class. Class. We're seeing the ramifications of not prioritizing this blend of ethical and technical conversations. But clearly something more is required for the future of work. And so for us, the more we hone in on this question of what does the future of work actually look like? It probably isn't everybody just using AI Tools I don't think I've ever talked. I was just with a bunch of other funders and I asked for a show of hands. Like, okay, who's actually used an AI tool in the last day? No hands go up. Last week, three hands went up. Like, okay, what are you using the tool for? Oh, like writing emails. AI is, you can do so much with AI right now with vibe coding, like code free vibe coding using lovable. You can build automations where you're using a transcript and it's like auto populating to do lists that get pushed to all of your team members and like, and you don't necessarily need a computer science background to do that. I've done it myself. But there are some skills, right? It's like problem solving, critical thinking, like, should I use this tool or that tool? Do I really want to be recording every single meeting? Do I need to get permission? There's so many things baked into that and it's sort of like a. It's maybe an unsatisfying. But maybe the closest that we can say about the future of work is companies are going to be changing, that we know for sure, right? Companies are going to be changing, career pathways are going to change. The one skill that you almost certainly will need to do is to be able to get a new job because you're going to be changing jobs a lot faster. And then what really is helpful in a moment of change, companies are going to need people that are flexible and fast learners, that are problem solvers. And we believe in like the reason literacy is so fundamental to our framework is because the ethics is like, you can't just gloss over. This is not just like, oh, learn about algorithmic bias. And then like, you know, now you know that there's bias. It's like every decision you make has to be informed by this like critical understanding of where's the potential exposure to bias playing out. And like, what is my role? And like in many cases it's like not using the tool for certain. Like hiring is a great example of this. Like we don't use AI to screen our resumes. You know, you could very easily, but we just made the decision because we know about what would potentially be involved there. I forget exactly what's on the next slide, but I'm kind of curious because your organization is. It's easy to talk about this stuff in the conceptual and because we work with systems, we're always, we work with teachers. But I think it's really powerful to have those stories from the ground that are touching and feeling because everybody's kind of eager for, well, what does this look like?

Yeah, yeah. You know, I think one of the things that really jumps out at me about the students in our programs, because we are a direct service organization, the young people that we work with are between the ages of 16 to 24. And to be honest with you, there is a range of feelings that young people have around AI technology. You know, there are some that are really, really excited about it, there's some that don't care too much about it, and then there's some that are just curious about it. Right. But what we have found is that in order for us to create an AI forward student movement, you actually don't just have to start with the students themselves, you also have to pour into the families. Right. When I think about my own story as a first generation professional, first in my family to go to college, graduate from high school, and then ultimately start my own career in technology, my family was like, you can only be a doctor, a teacher or a lawyer. Right. I just fell into tech by mistake. But. But if my mom and dad were like, you should go into tech, you should go into AI, you know, I think that I would have made my decision on a boat right now.

Yeah, you probably like on a yacht or something.

Yeah, right, right, right, right. I probably be hanging with the Silicon Valley, like, you know, tech connoisseurs. Right. But the reality was that that was not my story and I fell into tech by mistake. And I think that, you know, if we are thinking that people are just going to adopt these tech technologies that I'm here to let you know that there is an I tower of AI going on right now. There are real communities across our nation, real communities across our country that don't even know the kinds of things that are existing within this industry and the kind of opportunity. So it really is, you know, on us to think about the story and the narrative that we want to create about AI. So it's not about fear mongering, so it's not about, you know, telling people that it's going to replace their jobs, but it's to empower people to know that this is an option for them should they want to pursue. The other thing I'll say is that not every problem is an AI problem. So AI is not going to solve every single thing, you know, in a workplace. Right. And I think that we have to train young people and we're training young people to really see that this is an optimized technology, not a technology that is meant to solve every single part of their lives. And so it crosses the gamut. But what we've seen students create in short periods of time in our programs, when giving the tools and resources is pretty phenomenal. You'll find that they're using AI to create things like AI powered chatbots that mirror the Personas of their abuelitas and their grandmothers to help them with college admissions processes, or they're creating like, fashion AI chatbots to help them figure out how to pull together cool fashion things for school. So it runs the gamut. Some love it, some don't like it, some are curious. And I think we have an opportunity to really nurture this through the lens of narrative shift to let people know what's possible for them.

Yeah, I think this idea of narrative is so important because, like, right now, especially in social impact spaces, the narrative about AI is very often AI is going to happen to all of these underserved kids who are going to be left behind, who are at the back of the line. They're the victims in the story. And AI is the sort of protagonist, weirdly. And the only way to do the work at the scale and speed required, which we basically have three to five years most, before this really gets bad, basically around the next recession is when investment and automation will start to increase. And so we don't have 10 years to get this right. And the only chance we have to accomplish something at that speed and scale is with a movement. And a movement can't be built or shouldn't be built on fear. And if you want students to really embrace this, this can't just be about, well, this is going to prevent you from getting automated out of a job. What is the positive story? And I think there's like, we were just actually earlier this week with, partnered with a hidden genius project and some other nonprofits at ido, at Salesforce, and we just had, like, had them go through these debates and like, AI ethics debates. And honestly, like, the kiddos were presenting more nuanced understanding of the AI. And I'll give you one example. It was a question of, like, should you use AI to help you prepare for a tough conversation with a friend? And we had kids that were talking about, like, well, you know, these models, they often will repeat back to you what you want to hear. And so actually, while you think you might be preparing, you actually might be sort of like doubling down on bad practices. Like, very few adults that we present to necessarily have that knowledge. Right. Of like, the nuances of the models. Another student's like, well, look, you know, often I'll just go into a conversation without prepping. Like, isn't it actually a sign that I'm taking this relationship really seriously and that it's meaningful? And another student's like, you know, this is. Isn't this a good conversation that you should be having with a parent? And then a student's like, well, what if you don't have a parent? Or maybe it's a conversation that's not appropriate. It was just like, I think in so many ways, if we just give students a platform, they will, in many cases, probably show us the way. But that's scary. We kind of have to hold hands with them. And I guess the thing you said, though, is, what does the wraparound support look like? Yes, the students are inspiring, but they can't do this alone.

Yeah. So then question for you. Right. Because I think what is really awesome about having this session at Dreamforce is that we are in a room full of tech leaders. We're in a room where we can create a call to action for those who want to get involved. Right. What would you say if every single tech leader was here today? What would you say to them? And I'll tell you what I'd say to them.

I mean, be honest or I'll be honest. I'll do the honesty. Yeah, you got to donate. I mean, like, you know, what our organizations don't need is, you know, partnerships and promotion. And like, we. We know what we need to do, and we need basically unrestricted capital to do it. And this is a place where, and I know this for a fact because my husband works adjacent to this industry. People are raising like $5 million pre seed rounds with just a pitch deck. And why is it that we're so willing to trust these, you know, very smart and brilliant, but young, you know, novices to the world with that much money. And we need to, I think, place the same faith and trust in our social impact leaders, especially been doing this over a decade, which is badass.

Yeah.

What about. Yeah, what about you? I'll give you.

I would say the same exact thing. And it's not because we are, I guess you can say we can't. It's not that we don't see the value in. In kind services or in the kinds of tools and resources that you can bring beyond the dollars. But I'm here to let you know that the dollars don't keep. I mean, these resources in kind don't keep the lights on. And if you. If there was a tech leader here. You know, every single one of them. I would say, like, the time is now. If you're waiting for the talent pipeline to just miraculously show up, you're going to be waiting a long time. It is your responsibility to create the workforce of the future, and you need to be doing that by investing in organizations like AIEDU and. And investing in organizations like America on tech.

Dang. That was a good close. Nice.

Thanks.