The world just watched some of the most sophisticated AI systems ever built require careful sandboxing, monitored, bounded, tested before they were trusted with real consequences. That should tell us something we haven't fully absorbed yet: if systems built by the most capable engineers on Earth need boundaries and oversight, unsupervised human beings navigating the same technology need them even more. Not just children. Employees learning to use AI at work. Professionals le

Most of the response to AI in schools so far has been tools and policy. Every district has an acceptable-use guideline. Every ed-tech company has a new feature. What's still missing almost everywhere is the actual teeth behind any of it, the trained behavior that makes a policy real instead of a document nobody reads. That's the gap the Artificial Intelligence Institute set out to close. Not another policy. Not another tool. An actual training program, five classes, five hou

Most conversations about AI in schools are still speculative. Ours isn't. For two years, the Artificial Intelligence Institute has worked inside real classrooms, not surveys about hypothetical future use, but direct, ongoing engagement with more than 6,000 students across 20+ school sites. What we found was sharper than any projection: AI use begins earlier than most institutions assume, with roughly 59% of fourth graders and nearly 69% of fifth graders already using it, clim

Every generation inherits a tool it did not build and cannot fully explain. Fire. The printing press. The internet. Each one arrived carrying both a promise and a debt, the promise of what it could do, and the debt owed by anyone who never learned to wield it. Artificial intelligence is the largest of these tools yet, and it did not wait for permission. It is already inside the classroom, the group chat, the college essay, the doctor's office, the boardroom. A generation is

By: Richard Awni, Founder & Chairman, Family First Foundation Twenty years ago, a school that didn’t teach internet safety wasn’t seen as behind the curve. It was seen as negligent. Every district built it in, not because a single mandate forced every one of them simultaneously, but because it became obvious, fast, that kids needed it and nobody could responsibly skip it. That’s exactly the status AI driver’s education deserves right now and doesn’t yet have. The Comparison I

By: Richard Awni, Founder & Chairman, Family First Foundation There’s a purchase order sitting on a superintendent’s desk right now for a new AI tool. There’s almost never one sitting next to it for teaching students how to use it. That’s backwards, and it’s an easy mistake to make, because buying a tool feels like progress in a way that funding training doesn’t. A new platform is visible. A ribbon-cutting is visible. A structured readiness program that quietly changes how th

By: Dr. Russell Knight, President of Artificial Intelligence, The Artificial Intelligence Institute For most of my career, verification was a professional discipline, the difference between a navigation system that works and one that quietly drifts off course because nobody double-checked an assumption. I never expected it to become the single most important skill in a fourth grader’s education. But that’s exactly where we’ve landed. Here’s why. AI is extraordinarily good at

Keynote to Address How Artificial Intelligence Is Reshaping Name, Image, and Likeness Opportunities for Student-Athletes, Families, Brands, and Sports Professionals The Artificial Intelligence Institute (AII) announced today that its Founder, Richard Awni, has been invited to serve as the keynote speaker at a special event focused on one of the fastest-evolving intersections in sports: the impact of Artificial Intelligence on Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL). The event is expe

A NASA/JPL scientist on why teaching children to think with AI may be the defining challenge of this generation, and why it can't wait for high school. By Dr. Russell Knight President, Artificial Intelligence Institute For nearly three decades, my job has been to make sure machines don't get to guess. At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I've spent my career building systems that operate where human help can't reach them, across hundreds of millions of miles, with no one avai

By: Richard Awni, Founder & Chairman, Family First Foundation Every tracker out there will tell you whether your state has an AI policy. None of them will tell you the thing that actually matters whether anyone in that state is preparing a single student to use it well. That’s the gap we built the AI Readiness Index to close. We didn’t set out to build another policy tracker, there are already several, and they don’t even agree with each other. One count says 33 states have g

By: Dr. Russell Knight, President of Artificial Intelligence, The Artificial Intelligence Institute I spent close to three decades building systems that had to reason under conditions no human would ever face, deep-space navigation, autonomous decision-making millions of miles from anyone who could correct a mistake in real time. People sometimes assume that work would make me more impressed by artificial intelligence than most people. It’s actually done the opposite. It’s ma

By: Richard Awni, Founder & Chairman, Family First Foundation Every powerful tool has two directions. A knife can prepare a meal or cause harm. Fire can heat a home or destroy one. AI is no different, and pretending otherwise doesn’t protect anyone, it just leaves the second direction untaught. AI can be used to deceive. It can generate convincing misinformation, put false words in real people’s mouths, and make something untrue look exactly as credible as something true. It

We could have softened this. For a while, we did. For the first stretch of our deployment, we talked around the numbers a little, “usage accelerates,” “students engage earlier than expected.” Comfortable language. But two years in, as both scientists and parents, we’ve come to a harder conclusion: softening the number doesn’t change what’s happening in the room. It just makes the adults reading about it more comfortable while the number stays exactly the same. So here’s the n

By: Richard Awni, Founder & Chairman, Family First Foundation | July 13, 2026 Walk into almost any district office right now and ask what they’re doing about AI. You’ll hear the word “initiative” a lot. You’ll hear “we’re exploring.” Some will point to a policy draft sitting in a folder somewhere, waiting on legal review. What you almost never hear because it almost never exists, is an actual, executable program that puts a student in front of a teacher and says: here is exac