From Dan Fitzpatrick, The AI Educator
Independent thinking on AI leadership, strategy, readiness and organisational change. Grounded in research and the realities of working with leaders.
Explore the key questions
The leadership agenda
Latest thinking
60 insights
A school is ready for AI when seven things are in place: purpose, permission, ownership, capability, protection, foundations and evidence. Dan Fitzpatrick sets out one question to ask for each, a 0 to 2 score you can run this week, and why your lowest score decides.
Training is up, use is up and confidence is flat. Staff use AI when three conditions exist that a training day cannot create: permission, practice and protection. Includes the Confidence Test to run with your most reluctant staff, and what to do about the three kinds of refusal.
New York and Los Angeles pulled generative AI out of pupils' hands in September 2026. Before your school follows, here are the three questions a restriction has to answer to count as a decision rather than a default, and the four moves that separate lifting one from climbing down.
Most leadership teams are asking AI questions a vendor could answer for them. Here are the ten only they can answer, the test that sorts them from the rest, and how to work through them in one meeting.
Most AI pilots do not fail. They finish, somebody says "interesting", and nothing changes. Here are the seven leadership mistakes that leave pilots stranded, and the one question that stops them.
Every organization now has the same AI as its competitors, so access is no longer the advantage. Dan Fitzpatrick sets out the Scarcity Rule and the three skills that grow rarer as AI improves: deciding what is worth asking, judging whether the answer is good enough, and owning what happens next.
Schools cannot prepare children for jobs nobody can see. They can prepare them for a decision they will make every day for the rest of their lives: what to hand to a machine, and what to keep. Here is what that means for a leadership team, and the one question to start with.
Responsible AI adoption is not a longer policy or a slower rollout. It is seven behaviours anyone in the building can see, and the most responsible organisations are usually the most ambitious, because they have made it safe to try.
When AI adoption stalls, organisations buy training or licences. The pattern underneath is almost always a leadership problem: nobody has decided what AI is for, modelled its use, removed what it replaces or made it safe to be seen using it.
A policy tells people what they must not do. A strategy tells them what the organisation has chosen to do, in what order and why. Most organisations have the first and call it the second, which is why their staff are compliant but not directed. Here is how to tell the two apart, and which to write first.
Most AI strategies are written for the people who approve them, not the people who have to live with them. Here are the five decisions a strategy has to make before anyone will actually use it, and the one test to run before you sign it off.
Most organizations that call themselves AI ready are describing their software. Dan Fitzpatrick sets out what readiness actually means, why usage is running ahead of leadership, and the three-question test that shows whether your organization would pass.
