AI strategist, author and keynote speaker
Dan Fitzpatrick helps leaders and organisations make confident decisions about AI strategy, readiness, governance and organisational change. He writes for Forbes and is the author of The Educators' AI Guide 2026, The AI Classroom and Infinite Education.
Drawing on 21 years in education as a teacher, senior leader and strategist, he advises leadership teams in the UK and internationally and founded aieducator.tools.
He works with schools as an AI keynote speaker for schools, through school AI strategy consulting and with AI training for schools.
AI usage figures rise whether you are leading AI well or badly. Here is why the numbers on your dashboard are not a measure of AI maturity, the four things leaders confuse with progress, and three questions to put to any AI number before you report it.
Two thirds of office professionals have used AI at work believing they were not permitted to. Blocking it first takes away your visibility without changing the behavior. A way to diagnose what you find, and the three decisions that follow.
Most letters home about AI list tools and promise safety. Parents want three answers instead: what AI is doing in their child's day, what their child will still do without it, and where they come in. Here are the six lines a letter needs, and the ones no template can fill for you.
A new vendor standard can settle what a supplier promises to do with student data. It cannot decide what an AI tool is for in your school, who owns it or what would take it off the list. Approval needs both halves in writing.
School leaders told the Commons Education Select Committee this month that they are desperate for clearer AI guidance. It will not settle what you do this term. Here are the five things a leader actually needs to know, and a test for whether you know enough to decide.
AI use has already spread through your organization one person at a time and changed almost nothing about how it works. Scaling adoption is not a persuasion problem. It is a transfer problem, and there are four specific transfers to make.
Appointing an AI lead is not the same as owning AI. The decision, the delivery and the expertise are three different jobs with three different owners, and merging them is why AI quietly stalls. A test for leadership teams before they name anyone.
Let an AI agent run unattended only where a wrong result would be noticed, noticed in time, and could be put back. Here is the test to run on each agent already working inside your organization, and the six lines to settle before the next leadership meeting.
Ofqual is settling the exam hall. Nobody is settling your mocks, homework and predicted grades. A three-question test for sorting every assessment you already run into the ones that still prove something.
Two schools can hold the same AI policy and be led in opposite directions. Good AI leadership is observable, not documentary: here are the five things you would see, and the Decision Trail that separates leading from announcing.
Washington bars AI from deciding IEP eligibility but allows it to draft IEP language. England says the same thing in different words. Dan Fitzpatrick reads the rule underneath both, and offers a three-question test for drawing the line in your own organization.
Teacher opposition to classroom AI is rising. Dan Fitzpatrick explains why the skeptics are often right, gives leaders one question that finds what each skeptic is actually objecting to, and shows what to do with the one who will never be persuaded.
