Over the last twelve months, I have sat in meetings with trust CEOs, directors of IT, headteachers and school leaders discussing artificial intelligence. Almost every conversation starts in the same place.
“Which AI tools should we buy?”
It’s a perfectly reasonable question, and it’s also the wrong one to start with.
The reality is that AI is not an IT project. It’s not another software deployment, device refresh programme, safeguarding platform or cloud migration.
Those projects have clear beginnings, clear deliverables and clear ownership. AI is different. It will influence teaching, learning, operations, governance, finance, HR, communications and decision-making. It will affect every employee and every student.
That means the biggest challenge facing multi-academy trusts today is deciding how they want AI to shape their organisation, before any platform is chosen.
Why Every Trust Needs an AI Strategy Before It Needs AI Tools
Many trusts are approaching AI in much the same way organisations approached cloud technology fifteen years ago.
A small group of enthusiasts begins experimenting, a few departments discover useful applications, and some staff adopt new tools on personal accounts without approval. Policies are written after the fact, and governance struggles to keep pace.
The real risk is that different parts of the trust end up moving in different directions at the same time.
Without a strategy, AI adoption becomes fragmented. Teachers use one tool, administrative teams use another, and students often discover something completely different. Leadership teams are left with limited visibility of what’s being used, what data is being shared, and whether the outcomes align with trust priorities.
The trusts that succeed with AI over the next five years won’t necessarily be the ones with the most tools. They’ll be the ones with the clearest answers to a few fundamental questions:
- What problems are we trying to solve?
- How will AI support our educational outcomes?
- What does responsible AI use look like across our trust?
Only once those questions are answered should the conversation turn to technology.
The Biggest Long-Term AI Risk for Schools
Whenever AI is discussed, security and safeguarding rightly dominate the agenda. Protecting pupils, staff and data must remain non-negotiable.
However, I believe the greatest long-term risk is something else entirely. It’s irrelevance.
The internet became important to education because society changed around it, and schools had to prepare pupils for that shift. AI represents a similar change.
Pupils entering primary school today will enter a workforce where AI is embedded into almost every profession. Teachers will increasingly work alongside AI-powered planning, assessment and administrative tools, and trust leaders will use AI to analyse information, identify trends and improve their own decision-making.
The real challenge is whether we prepare our staff and pupils for a future where AI is already commonplace.
If schools focus entirely on restricting AI without building understanding, confidence and capability, we risk creating a generation that consumes AI without knowing how to use it effectively, ethically or critically.
That’s a far greater educational challenge than choosing the right chatbot.
Preparing Schools for a World Where AI Is as Common as the Internet
When I speak to trust leaders, I often encourage them to think beyond today’s tools. The AI platforms being discussed in 2026 won’t be the ones dominating conversations in 2030, though the principles that guide how trusts use them should stay the same.
The most important investments trusts can make today sit with people and process more than with licences or subscriptions. They include:
- Digital literacy
- Critical thinking
- Staff confidence
- Governance frameworks
- Professional development
- Change management
The trusts creating the greatest value from AI help their people understand when to use it, when not to use it, and how to challenge its outputs.
AI literacy will become just as important as digital literacy already is.
Nobody today questions whether pupils should understand the internet, and we’re rapidly approaching a time when understanding AI becomes just as basic a life skill.
AI Governance: The Next Challenge After Safeguarding
For many years, safeguarding has rightly been one of the most important governance responsibilities in education. AI now presents a new governance challenge that sits alongside it. Trust boards and executive teams will increasingly need to answer questions such as these:
- How is AI being used across the trust?
- What data is being shared with external services?
- Who approves new AI tools?
- How are staff being trained?
- How are risks assessed?
- How are we measuring impact?
Each of these is fundamentally a leadership question.
Governance can no longer sit solely with the IT department. Effective AI governance draws on educational leaders, safeguarding teams, data protection specialists, HR, communications and executive leadership, working alongside IT.
In many respects, AI governance should be viewed as organisational governance. The technology is only one component of it. The people, processes and policies surrounding it carry far more weight.
What AI Adoption Looks Like Across a Trust
Most trusts today sit somewhere between curiosity and experimentation. A handful of teachers are exploring lesson planning and the Teach tools within the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, and some leaders are using AI to summarise reports or prepare presentations.
IT teams are evaluating enterprise-grade solutions such as Microsoft Copilot. This experimentation is positive, and it’s a necessary part of any planned training and user adoption programme, though experimentation alone doesn’t deliver transformation.
Adoption happens when AI becomes connected to strategic objectives and embedded into the ethos of the school and trust, reducing teacher workload, improving access and inclusion, supporting better decision-making, and giving staff more time for the activities that matter most.
Most importantly, adoption happens when trust leaders create a culture that encourages innovation while maintaining accountability.
The goal for every trust should be to use AI where it creates measurable value for staff, pupils and educational outcomes.
Final Thoughts
In my view, the conversation about AI in education should start with leadership, and the tools should follow from there. The trusts that thrive over the next decade won’t be defined by the AI tools they purchased in 2026. They’ll be defined by the strategies, governance and cultures they built around them.
AI is a trust-wide transformation programme, and it needs to be led as one. Like every successful transformation in education, it starts with a clear vision, strong leadership and a relentless focus on outcomes.
AI is already becoming part of education, and the question for every trust is whether its leaders are ready to lead that change or simply react to it.
Lead AI With Intention
Before your next leadership meeting, put one question on the agenda: what do we want AI to achieve for our staff and pupils? If you’d like to talk it through with Adrian, book a discovery call today.
