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Notes from a demonstration I gave to a successful edtech company: how a fully autonomous operation actually runs, why a new company can work this way from day one, why an established one has to manage it as change under board pressure, and why the answer is a place to play.
Edtech sells headcount. I run a governance product for UK schools on my own, with a team of AI agents that prepare everything and decide nothing. Here is how the pipeline works end to end.
A restructure I had put off for months: how the team got to forty-five, what the overlap was costing, the weekend I spent deciding who stayed, and the part I left out until the end.
An agent will approve its own output every time. So I never let it. Every agent that produces something has another whose job is to find what is wrong with it, and the last gate is always a person.
A scheduling tool knows when to post. It does not know that a product name was retired last week, that a counting claim is banned, or what schools are doing in March. Mine does, because it sits next to everything the business knows.
A daily puzzle, a courtside scoring app, and a free prompt library for school staff. None of them were built to make money. All of them changed how I build the thing that does.
Help articles that match the live product, explainer films inside them, a teaching skill that checks every claim against Ofsted and the DfE, and a weekly freshness sweep. Current is a property you test, not a promise you make.
Most of what a school data dashboard shows is published free by the DfE and Ofsted. I built School Intel to put every state-funded school in England in context, rebuilt and checked every week, for almost nothing. Before you renew a dashboard, ask what you are paying for.
