aiEDU brings AI Literacy, AI Readiness agenda to Congress

CEO Alex Kotran emphasizes importance — and urgency — of building skills that will help students compete and keep up.

WASHINGTON — Cultivating AI Literacy for America’s students — and building AI Readiness for students, schools, and school systems is a matter of urgency — aIEDU’s CEO Alex Kotran told a Senate subcommittee. 

“If we don’t act now,” Kotran told the Senate HELP Committee’s subcommittee on Employment and Workplace Safety, “the U.S. risks leaving a generation of students behind and unable to compete.”

“The AI revolution will define the trajectory of an entire generation of students and fundamentally change the skills they need to compete in the workforce,” Kotran told the hearing. “The urgency of this challenge is hard to overstate.”

The hearing on Wednesday, September 25 was one of the first formal hearings on AI and workforce. Sen. John Hickenlooper, the subcommittee chairman and Colorado Democrat, led the hearing, thanking Kotran for aiEDU’s work in Colorado and asking him about how states should approach AI education.

Kotran said it takes a state-by-state, and in some cases, district by district approach to build AI Literacy and AI Readiness. He also shared how aiEDU’s defines AI Literacy and AI Readiness with the committee.

aiEDU defines AI Literacy, Kotran said, “as collection of skills and knowledge that a person needs to confidently understand, ethnically use, and critically evaluate artificial intelligence in a world in which AI is becoming more and more ubiquitous.” 

AI Readiness, Kotran said, is “students, teachers and school systems having the ability and underlying skills, to apply AI Literacy to their professional and personal endeavors and to apply their human advantage alongside evolving technology.”

Kotran was asked by Indiana Sen. Mike Braun, the ranking Republican on the committee, why addressing the issues was so critical. Kotran said that he was most worried about “economic displacement” if we don’t act. 

“We’re really on the backfoot in terms of being ready,” Kotran said. “(Disruption) is coming for doctors, lawyers, mathematicians, customer service managers, marketing managers.”

He added, “What I’m concerned about in the US is that we do not have a plan to talk to students about this … even when the smartest experts in the field say these jobs are going away.”

The solution, Kotran told the committee, is to be as supportive as possible of efforts at the state and local level to improve AI Literacy and AI Readiness. 

“The teachers, the professors, the schools are on the frontlines,” Kotran said. 

You can watch the hearing in full here.

Read Kotran’s full opening statement here.