I wear two hats that give me a specific view on AI in education. As a mother, I care deeply about how my children are being prepared for the future. As a marketing executive whose role includes hiring entry-level employees, I care about whether the latest generation is ready for the workforce.
What I’m seeing in schools right now gives me pause. I’m a positive person, but I think it’s important to have this conversation.
The default approach to AI in most classrooms is restriction. Limit it. Ban it from assignments. Treat it like a cheat code that undermines learning.
I understand the logic. Original thought matters. Critical thinking matters. If students outsource their homework to an LLM, they miss out on the struggle (and I mean struggle in a good way) that builds real understanding and critical thinking.
The problem is that some are teaching students that AI is an all-or-nothing proposition. Either you’re cheating with it or you’re avoiding it entirely. That framing will leave them unprepared for future jobs, especially as AI continues seeing broad enterprise adoption. It’s not realistic, and it’s a recipe for bigger problems.
WHAT I LOOK FOR WHEN HIRING
For me, candidates stand out when they know how to use AI without letting it replace their thinking. They draft faster, research more efficiently, and spot data patterns that would take hours to find manually. But they also know when to close the laptop and think through a problem themselves. They understand that AI can help you write, but it can’t tell you what’s worth saying.
That balance is delicate. And right now, it’s not being taught.
I’ve seen organizations choose to build their own internal AI chatbot to control how data flows through the system. And I’ve seen other organizations implement commercially available AI tools and chatbots. Either way, that decision requires judgment—weighing efficiency against risk, speed against safety. Every professional will face these kinds of trade-offs. Are we preparing students to make them?
LET’S START TEACHING WHAT’S RELEVANT
Education systems were built around memorization. Know the facts, pass the test. But AI has made information retrieval easy. What’s harder, and more valuable, is knowing what to do with the information once you have it.
The workforce needs people who can collaborate across teams. It needs people who can think originally when the easy answer doesn’t fit. People who can adapt when the tools change, because the tools will keep changing.
We’re still grading students on whether they can recall information that any phone can surface in three seconds. Meanwhile, we’re punishing them for using the same tools they’ll be expected to master the day they start their first job.
DON’T WAIT TO LEARN AI ON THE JOB
We can’t skip AI in education, assuming that new hires will just learn on the job. Take it from someone well-versed in hiring. If students graduate without any structured experience using AI, they’ll arrive at their first job already behind. They’ll need to learn the tools while also learning the role, while also navigating a new professional environment. That’s a lot to ask.
Worse, they’ll have spent years being told that using AI is illegitimate. They’ll feel uncertain about when it’s appropriate. They’ll either over-rely on it because they never developed the instinct for when to step back, or they’ll avoid it entirely and wonder why their peers are outpacing them.
I apply the same principle with my kids that I do with my team: Encourage them to pursue their interests, provide guidance and guardrails, and give them room to figure things out. But you can’t provide guidance if the default rule is “don’t touch it.”
WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE
I’m not saying we should hand students unlimited AI access with no structure. That would swing too far in the other direction. The point is balance—teaching students how to adopt these tools without sacrificing the critical thinking that makes them valuable.
Schools need to move from banning AI to teaching AI fluency, including how to recognize when AI hallucinates. That means showing students when AI helps and when it gets in the way. When to use it for efficiency and when to set it aside for depth. How to verify what it tells you. How to catch its mistakes.
These aren’t optional skills for the workforce they’re entering. They’re table stakes.
We owe it to our students to prepare them for the jobs that exist, not the jobs that existed when the curriculum was written.
Melissa Puls is chief marketing officer and SVP of customer success and renewals at Ivanti.