The Rant Podcast
A bi-weekly podcast focused on pulling back the curtain on the American higher education system and breaking down the people, the policies and the politics. The podcast host, Eloy Ortiz Oakley, is a known innovator and leader in higher education. The podcast will not pull any punches as it delves into tough questions about the culture, politics and policies of our higher education system.
The Rant Podcast
Navigating the Next Four Years with Andrew Magliozzi
What happens when artificial intelligence meets human connection? Magic, according to Andrew (Drew) Magliozzi, CEO and co-founder of Mainstay.
In this eye-opening conversation from the ASU GSV Summit, Drew reveals the surprising secret behind effective AI in education: human involvement. After a decade of deploying conversational AI to support college students, Mainstay discovered that having just 2% of messages sent by actual humans triples the effectiveness of their system. Students feel comfortable being vulnerable with AI because it doesn't judge them, but they need that human connection to feel accountable.
The results speak volumes. When Georgia State University partnered with Mainstay to combat "summer melt" (students who commit but never show up), they saw a 27% reduction in melt and a 4% boost in enrollment. When they expanded to supporting students through graduation, they helped approximately 1,200 students avoid dropping out.
Drew takes us behind the curtain of AI implementation, sharing the moment when GPT-4's release prompted him to tell his team to "stop everything" and pivot their entire approach despite having patents on their previous methods. This adaptability highlights a crucial lesson for educational institutions navigating today's AI landscape: focus not just on what AI can do, but what it should do to amplify desired outcomes and close achievement gaps.
The conversation explores AI's potential to transform education fundamentally – from providing personalized, on-demand learning experiences to shifting assessment from summative to truly formative. Drew envisions AI not as a replacement for educators but as an "Iron Man suit" that enhances their capabilities.
Whether you're an education leader wondering how to approach AI implementation, a faculty member concerned about its classroom impact, or simply curious about how technology can make education more personal rather than less, this conversation offers valuable insights about the human-AI partnership that's quietly revolutionizing student success.
Curious about how AI and human support can work together to transform your institution's student experience? Listen now and discover why the future of education technology isn't about replacing people – it's about empowering them.
Mainstay.com
eloy@4leggedmedia.com
Hi, this is Eloy Ortiz-Oakley, and welcome back to the Rant Podcast, the podcast where we pull back the curtain and break down the people, policies and the politics of our higher education system. In this episode, I sit down with Andrew Magliazzi. Andrew, or Drew as he likes to be called, is the CEO and co-founder of Mainstay. Mainstay is deploying human-centered AI to support more learners across the country and to help them be more successful in their higher education journey. Drew and his team have worked with institutions across the country, some of which many of you know. They were part of the great work that was happening at Georgia State under the leadership of Tim Renick using data to better inform the institution and give them more tools to help students succeed in real time, giving them information and nudges. They need to understand what is holding those students back, and so I get to talk with Drew about how Mainstay is deploying AI today. What are some of the issues that they're wrestling with, particularly now with the avalanche of AI that's sweeping the country, and there isn't an institution in America who isn't being bombarded with questions about how they're going to use AI. So Drew walks us through his thinking, talks about some of the pitfalls, and we also talk about how higher education leaders should be thinking about deploying AI and not just going after the newest shiny object in the marketplace. So before I get into my conversation with Drew, I just want to take a moment to say that this interview was recorded at the most recent ASU GSV Summit back in April in San Diego, and, of course, the ASU GSV Summit was as audacious, as big and as amazing as always. A lot of tech on display, particularly AI. You can't turn the corner anywhere in that conference without hearing something about AI. So AI in education is certainly the issue front and center at the ASU GSB conference. So it was great to run into Drew to help us dive into some of the issues that we were hearing about, that we're seeing and what we can expect going forward.
Speaker 1:Every institutional leader should be thinking about how to deploy AI and, in particular, not just how to approach purchasing AI, looking at the tools that are available, but to stop and think about what problem they are trying to solve in their institution. Some of the best use cases right now really are all about how to make the institution more efficient, more effective, about how to make the institution more efficient, more effective, lower the cost of the education, particularly now when there's so much pressure on institutions to perform better, to deliver greater ROI and to show value. Using AI to make the operation more efficient is certainly one of those use cases being able to look at all the data across the institution, pull it together in a relevant format and make it available to faculty, to staff, to administrators, to use in real time. Also, giving more and better information to students, helping them make better choices along their higher education journey and, of course, as Drew will talk, helping personalize the experience for learners, providing them support that they need 24-7, throughout the day, through some of these chat bots or other AI-type agents that we'll talk about.
Speaker 1:So a lot to consider. Higher education leaders need to be thinking about this, need to be exploring this, need to be doing this in a way that is conscious of what they're trying to achieve, before they go out and buy the latest shiny object on the shelf that you will see at ASU GSV or that you will see walking onto your campus with a salesperson telling you how wonderful their latest tool is. So, with that backdrop, please enjoy my conversation with Drew, ceo and co-founder at Mainstay. Drew, welcome to the RENT Podcast.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me, Eloy. I'm excited to dig in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's great to have you here. We're here at the ASU GSV Summit in San Diego. At the ASU GSV Summit in San Diego the annual pilgrimage to this mecca of technology, education, technology and this year is no different. There's 7,000 plus people roaming the Hyatt Hotel here and lots of conversations. I can't help but see everything on the billboards, everything on the presentations. Every company has AI tagged into it and, of course, you've been doing this work for some time, so I'd love to to get into it with you. But first, for our listeners who aren't familiar with Mainstay, tell us about the company you know, some of its origins and then and then we can talk about you and how you got into this field.
Speaker 2:Sure thing, thanks, yeah, 7,000 seems like an understatement down there, by the way. Yeah, so Mainstay. We've been at it for about 10 years and we've been deploying conversational AI for college success. The term chatbot has become a four-letter word, so we refer to AI-powered coach and essentially we tap into not only the power of AI to automate conversations but nudge science and the ability to coach people with the science of coaching to get them to complete the learning objectives they set out for. So basically, we're an AI-enhanced coach at every student's fingertips, primarily over text message. We sit on top of data systems and we push messages to them based on the barriers that they might be facing, the deadlines and whatever the data suggests needs to be done, and we don't just tell them what to do, we invite them into a conversation and you know, over the years we've done gosh at this point, 13 randomized control trials to prove that its outcome is effective.
Speaker 2:But I often tell folks the most important research study we ever did was the one that had the least impact because it was the one time we did not have humans in the loop, and it's really interesting. Students tell us this all the time and, for context, last year we engaged about 5 million learners across America and they tell us they feel that they can be vulnerable with a chatbot because it's not judging them Right. But the fascinating thing is, if there is no human in the loop, they are not accountable to it. So it's the sort of what is the careful balance, and in our experience, it's about 2% of the messages have to be sent by a human, and usually a human that has a preexisting relationship with the student, to get the best outcome. Actually, having a human in the loop triples the effectiveness of our product.
Speaker 2:So the second thing we are is a conversation co-pilot for advisors and educators, so it tells them who to talk to when and gives them a suggestion on what they might say, and we use generative AI in those places. And the third thing we are is for leaders Word Insights platform. Hey, what if you could listen to the sort of whispers from all across your campus and understand, hey, what are my first gen students saying? What are my fellow students saying? What are my seniors saying? What's their sentiment, what's tripping them up and what's got them motivated? And so it's a good way to systematically listen at scale and so that's what we are to the sort of three primary constituencies of a university and we work with schools, state and national nonprofits focused on college access and success, and a handful of companies also doing workforce upskilling and reselling. So that's us in a nutshell.
Speaker 1:So how did you get started with this work and what's your background? Drew?
Speaker 2:My background. Well, my parents met on doing VISTA, so there's public services almost in my DNA and I suppose I always wanted to do a double bottom line business. Before this, I'd run a tutoring company and felt like I was bringing inequity to the system, so I started a nonprofit, but the left hand didn't know what the right was doing and you know I deliberately let those go to do one thing. That was double bottom line, and my co-founder comes from the higher ed industry as well, and so we knew we wanted to make a difference in students' lives. We knew that unless we had a positive return and investment, we were never going to be a must-have, and we were really familiar with the behavioral science data about if you engage people in this way over text message, you can move the needle, and I had a thesis that I thought I could automate a lot of this with AI and machine learning, and luckily we met the leading national researcher on the topic of summer melt and then met Tim Rennick at Georgia State.
Speaker 2:And Summer Melt is a pernicious problem in higher ed where it's a leaky funnel where students say they're coming and don't show up. Right, you know it well. And at Georgia State it was around 20% of students who committed were not following through and they were familiar with all the nudge science research. They estimated that to do that work by hand would have required a call center of a dozen people. And so I showed up and I you know so, not when I was a kid saying Tim, I think we can automate most of this, so you shouldn't have to hire anyone. He asked me is it going to work? And I'm terrible salesman, eloy. I said I have no freaking idea, tim, let's find out. And they must have been really desperate because they said yes.
Speaker 2:And we had then, lindsay Page, run a research study and you know, fast forward nine months. The results were pretty awesome. Right, we dropped their melt 27 percent, boosted enrollment 4 percent, and this is the 50-50 treatment control, like equal audiences half got it and half didn't, and the ones that received the treatment were much better performers. But that also was well, the sort of headlines were at the time. We were called Admit Hub is a summer melt solution, tim, you know, never losing his eye on the prize said you know, thank you, but getting people over the threshold is not the goal, getting into the finish line is. Can you do this? To persist to a degree, and the naivety of course I said yes, and that was a probably an order of magnitude harder problem, right, because of, rather than getting everyone to show up at the same place in time, you're getting people to go on 10,000 different pathways. Right, but fast forward. I think it was two and a half years. We ran another study and this time actually this is an interesting study At the time it was mid-summer the treatment group was two and a half percentage points above the control group when Tim and team made the decision to end the control conditions, feeling that it was unethical to continue them to the finish line.
Speaker 2:So we actually might have gotten even a better impact. But even two and a half percentage points at a school like Georgia State is something like 1,200 students who otherwise would have dropped out or stopped out. So since then we've gotten, you know, we've worked with a couple hundred institutions. We've also gotten into the academic experience, helping in large lecture forces with high DFWs, and Tim talks about this better than I will, but he really. We've really maybe done the most exciting work there reducing DFW rates for Pell-eligible students by 50% and really boosting academic performance again. And so I heard Tim talk recently at a conference and we've done a lot of RCTs together and he even said and we're going to do 21 more RCTs in the next three years. I hadn't heard it quite in those terms, but I'm excited.
Speaker 2:Tim is running around today, so maybe I'll grab him right after. Yes, he'll tell it how it is. That's great, but yeah, that's. I mean. Georgia State is one exciting part of the innovation story, but it really all the work we've done is take the technology and have a deep partnership with someone who's not only willing to tell us their problems, right but really open up the kimono and show us all that's going on and let us in in a way that we can do something better together than either of us could do alone.
Speaker 1:Right, let's dive into some of the technology, because you know the examples that you just mentioned. Georgia State that's been, you know, some time ago now, yes, and before this world AI buzz is sort of taken hold, yeah, and now people hear the terms all the time. People in higher ed hear the terms. They're feeling pressure to adopt some sort of AI solution. Let's go back to some of those early experiences with Georgia State. Tell us about the technology you were using then. How would you describe the technology and how were you using that, along with the data that you had To actually produce, the results that you saw in those studies?
Speaker 2:So most of what we do is over text message and the superpower that we have is two directions. One is we look at the data and when you have a hold on your transcript or an academic hold, or haven't submitted your immunization form've watched the data and reach out to you directly. But the key is we don't just tell you it turns out by the way just a brief aside in human psychology and teenagers, the least reliable way to get a teenager to do something is tell them they got to do it. You kind of ask them about it.
Speaker 1:I don't think we need a randomized trial.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly Anyone who's ever met a teenager. And so when you say some of these things and open the door to a conversation, a lot of questions come back. And in 2016, 17, we actually were one of the earlier adopters of the transformer architecture. Same thing ChatGPT is based on, but not a large language model. We were doing a teeny, tiny language model. We didn't have the resources to train you know, hundreds of millions of dollars but we trained a model based on the questions and answers we were seeing and had seen and some great data we got from the folks at Georgia State and it was enough to get going.
Speaker 2:And in about 2018, Google released an open source model called BERT Okay, and it was actually the sort of dawn of this open source king green explosion, of these LLMs, but in a small way. And so we took that and we fine-tuned it, and then it was actually when GPT-4.0 came out, was when I had the moment, and actually I honestly think most leaders need to prepare themselves for the rapid development of this technology and understand what the conditions are going to be for them. To say what I said to my team, which is stop everything. What got us here is not going to get us there. We threw away our model and we adopted GPT-4.0 as the core brain of our system and we have not looked back.
Speaker 2:That was a tough call. I'm sure it was. I mean, we had patents, we had multiple patents on how we trained our model and it was no longer relevant or necessary. It was actually holding us back, and so it took a moment to say like we can't do it this way anymore and it's now cheaper, it's better and it has unlocked a whole realm of conversation we could never have dreamed of having with students before. But the real power is being able to push conversations to people Right is being able to push conversations to people Right, and now we can push any generative AI conversation you can imagine to somebody at their fingertips on their cell phone, which might seem small, but actually the ability to do that, I think, is one of the key things why we close achievement gaps rather than exacerbate them, Because you can't just serve the students with help-seeking behaviors. You have to reach the ones who aren't raising their hands.
Speaker 1:Aren't raising their hands or aren't thinking about what questions to ask, and that happens a lot. I mean, you know, we see how it changes behavior when we're dealing with these nudges in all sorts of other walk of life, whether it's your banking or whether it's your credit rating or whether you know, just having that feedback just prompts you to think about what questions should I be asking. You know what is going on, who should I talk to? And it just creates an opportunity for the individual to be able to react.
Speaker 2:Yes To information right then. And there A good friend always says this about college students College students don't care until they care a lot, right, and then they don't care again. Yeah, and actually it's so true and it's human nature and you can be upset by it or you can embrace it. And actually I think the power of this technology is you can capitalize the instant the caring happens and run, embrace it. And actually I think the power of this technology is you can capitalize the instant the caring happens and run with it. Right and okay, this is the time for that conversation. Sometimes it's at one in the morning when they think, oh shit, I need to file the FAFSA, okay, well, let's do it right now. And they don't. Their desire and willingness to get things done doesn't always fit in the nine to five business hours. Yeah, that's right. Well, most things don't. Their desire and willingness to get things done doesn't always fit in the nine to five business hours.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right. Well, most things don't. So now you mentioned that moment you had with your team when ChatGPT4 came out. Yes, has there been any other moments like that, Like, for example, when DeepSeek came out and just plummeted I mean apparently plummeted the cost of training these models overnight? Have you had any of those moments since then? You?
Speaker 2:know, deepseek, because of its origins, is one that is extremely interesting.
Speaker 2:We haven't adopted it yet, but we've played with it.
Speaker 2:I don't think our customers and partners in higher ed would be comfortable with it in production, but I do think, you know, it's really fascinating, eloy, because people talk about the expense of these things and they look at the headlines and you know $500 billion is being spent, but actually it is incredibly encouraging that the open source, democratization of this technology is going to mean that it's probably not one super intelligent, large model that's going to rule them all Right, but inevitably millions of flowers will bloom and you know, ultimately.
Speaker 2:I know Apple has been, you know, pilloried recently through their performance, but it is probably each of us having our own model on a device that is tuned, trained and private, rather than needing to make API calls to the cloud. So it's unclear where it's going. But it could be a world in which the cloud everything is fashion, bell-bottom jeans, but cloud versus on-prem. And I actually see a world in which there could be more happening on the premises, with a hosted GPU and a really smart model happening, for instance, on a college campus or elsewhere, that you can own, manage and maintain and the pendulum will keep swinging, but the open source makes it possible that it's not just going to be a handful of big players that dominate the market and control all the data.
Speaker 1:So you've been working with educational institutions for some time now. Yeah, how are people reacting to the technology today? I mean, I think what I find is probably still more the 70, 30, 70 percent either still wary or don't understand how the use cases will roll out, and 30% sort of getting excited about the possibility. And I think and of course part of it is people in higher education. You know they haven't had a lot of access or a lot of experience with these tools. They had the experience of having the tools work for them from whatever provider of information they have, but they haven't figured out how to actually deploy it to make their jobs more efficient or be able to reach more people. So how do you talk about it when you get in front of educators?
Speaker 2:You know it is a fine line because at this conference especially, there's no shortage of new companies and, heck, I was one of them once doing like the hot sizzle demo. Oh, you're the old guy now. Oh, yeah, I can see the gray hairs from it and you know, I've learned a little bit over the time. But I will say, the number one question I implore people to ask is not the what, but the why of AI, and I think a lot of people are buying AI because they are afraid of missing out or they see a hot demo and it blows them away because this thing is talking to them and holy smokes. But I think one of the really interesting analogies I've heard well, actually, there are three questions I usually see people asking.
Speaker 2:The sort of least sophisticated is what can AI automate? And the temptation is to find what it can do and run with it. But I will say that what it can do is not always what it should do. The most extreme example I've ever heard is and I'm 100% confident that AI could do this with almost perfect precision, word for word is conduct a wedding ceremony. But you laugh.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no one in their right mind would want to be married by an ai and I say that and there'll be a headline tomorrow about someone I don't wait for the robot to start marrying people but it's silly because you know, the marriage is not about, you know, giving a perfect sermon, right, and the altar is about this sort of ineffable between humans, right, and so the job to be done, I think you have to be careful about it's not always about delivering word for word the right things. For instance, a teacher might be a lot like the AI clergy person, right, like is there more to the job of teaching that is beyond subject matter expertise but is also motivation?
Speaker 1:Right, absolutely, I mean we all having experience in education, think back to those teachers that really impacted our learning or our thinking about life or thinking about the world, and those are still things that are impactful the way the information is delivered, the way that the human picks up on how the learner is receiving the information and using that to either reinforce or re-explain, or that's something that I think is still only a human element, that AI cannot replicate.
Speaker 2:I think you're on it, eloy, and so really, the most sophisticated question I hear people ask is what is the thing that AI is uniquely suited to do to amplify the outcomes we're looking for and make sure we're not doing them that inadvertently widen achievement gaps, but actually maybe help close them in the process? And there are a ton of solutions. They're not obvious always and, honestly, they're rarely sexy, like usually. It's the mundane process flow that you know people are feeling like they're saying lather, rinse, repeat on email all the time. But I do think there is this weird promise that I would be wary of companies making when they say, hey, we're going to make it, so students don't show up at your doorstep anymore because we're going to take care of everything.
Speaker 2:One, the technology is not yet reliable enough to do it perfectly, so a human needs to be in the loop for supervision. But two, there are some things that only humans can do, and that is like a black mirror episode. If students stop showing up. And if the technology does get that good where it can do all teaching, learning and student support perfectly, we have more to worry about than student success, like we should be building the bunkers, right? I think skynet is coming and so I don't. I actually think hallucinations are endemic to this technology. We're never like. There's been hundreds of billions of dollars spent and there will be trillions more. We are not going to make these perfect right, but it is the flaws of the humans plus the flaws of the machine, and how we intermingle the two to make both better is the magic, and that's just hard work. I wish there was a shortcut, but it's definitely not. Set it and forget it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I hear those themes a lot when I talk to educators. They're still waiting to see you know, they're hearing a lot about the hallucinations, about, you know, random answers generated and, of course, in the media. You hear that well, you know, some of our bright minds still don't understand how this is working Right. That's not comforting.
Speaker 2:No, I, if you have fear, uncertainty and doubt, that is a good thing. I have fear, uncertainty and doubt and I am all over this Heck. There was an article, I think it was a few days ago, from Anthropic that showed that the models will lie to you. They will lie about how they came to the conclusions they came to.
Speaker 1:Well, they're getting to know humans pretty well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they are a projection of our imaginations and they are emulating us very well. The chief product officer at OpenAI has been quoted saying LLM's dream internet documents. Which is like and the internet is rife with you know Some crazy dreams in the internet. Yeah, nightmares sometimes, but yeah. So what do we expect? It will ever do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you wonder if you know, aliens just started peering into what we do here. They'd wonder what the heck is wrong with us, because humans are capable of doing some crazy things.
Speaker 2:But the truth is like, among the flaws there is tons of opportunity and there is a weird world in which we hold technology to a higher standard than humans, because by no means are we perfect. We make plenty of mistakes, but some reason we are less tolerant of a machine making them. I actually think the key is to have a growth mindset, not only about the technology but the people who use it. You ever seen the movie Hidden Figures? Yeah, it's a great movie, and there's the women who are the computers, so they do the slide rules putting the man on the moon. And then the machine from IBM shows up on the desk and they're looking at it like is this thing coming for us?
Speaker 2:And of course it's an inanimate object, but it's threatening. And eventually they sort of rally around it and they're like we're going to master this technology because it is the unlock for our capabilities. You know, the same thing is happening right now into all of our lives in a way that very rarely happens. We're used to making our muscles obsolete. Now we're making parts making our muscles obsolete, now we're making parts of our minds obsolete, and it's threatening, but the the surest way to have your job disrupted is to ignore the technology sitting on your desk right now. Right, no.
Speaker 1:So let me ask you this you are of a generation that's growing up now and knee deep in this new technology. My generation was a generation of you know being introduced to the Internet. How are you seeing this new generations coming through higher education now thinking, embracing, using the technology that I mean? Is there anything that worries you, or is it just a matter of institutions being able to keep up with the demand that the learners are coming with, because many, many folks in this generation have grown up with this technology?
Speaker 2:They're, you know. Actually, the best example it gives me hope is how I use it with my own kids. Oftentimes it'll be I'll be driving in the car and I set up my phone, so one button, I don't have to distract myself. I can ask ChatGPT stuff and they'll say Papa, what's thunder and lightning? Now, I know what Thunder and Lightning is, but I'd be hard pressed to describe it to a first grader. And hey, chachibt, how would you explain Thunder and Lightning to a first grader? And gosh, darn it, it nails it. And this opportunity to have on-demand instruction in a way that is so personalized and that now they're just like hey, papa, ask ChatGPT this other thing. Or my son is curious about the Roman Empire and we're always asking it questions and it is. I mean, we had this with Google, but it is Google on steroids Right.
Speaker 2:And the opportunity to have highly personalized education at your fingertips, which is not only exclusive to the classroom, but is something that is infused into your life in a way that our kids, my kids, are going to have the facility with it Like you know, young people have smartphones today is incredibly exciting and is the frontier of what learning will be, and I don't think we can understand the opportunity. At the same time, we've seen that new technology doesn't always bring good things Right, and the opportunity for abuse, addiction and other problems also runs a beam, and so the question I ask myself is how can we avoid stepping in the trap that we stepped in with social media and find a way for this technology not just to be relational but to also help bring people together? And I don't have the answer, but I'm very curious. One of the things we've done is all of our conversation is a three-party conversation it's the student, the bot and the advisor always, and I think there's an opportunity to have conversations that broaden the circle. And what does a group discussion look like, facilitated by an AI that could be part of a learning experience, and highly scalable and deeply engaging?
Speaker 2:You know, I think there is a frontier of possibility, or if I'm an instructor. I think this makes instructors afraid. But there's also opportunity, which is AI grading, and it is scary as an instructor to feed a rubric and say grade all these papers and yes, okay, now I see the time saving as an instructor. But actually there's another unlock, when things become instantaneous and almost free. The process of grading is now summative. How well did you do? Right? But if we could migrate this to a truly formative assessment, such that, hey, the process of this is you're going to submit this paper seven times over seven days and every time you're going to get feedback.
Speaker 1:You're going to get that feedback.
Speaker 2:And how can you?
Speaker 1:It's no different. I mean, I use and this is not a commercial for Grammarly, I use Grammarly on a regular basis. Yes, you know, it edits my emails, it edits all my writing and I've just gotten used to it and it helps me feel more empowered to improve my grammar.
Speaker 2:Yes, Because it's constantly giving me feedback in the moment, and I actually think there's something that I mean. It's hard for most folks to remember your freshman year expository writing class, yeah, but most of the time you have the opportunity to rewrite your paper and stunningly few low percentage of students will do it to get a better grade, because it's threatening and it's hurtful to have someone critique your writing. Oddly enough, it's actually less hurtful to have an AI do it than an instructor, and so maybe there's unlocks that we can find, which emerge when things become free, abundant and instantaneous. That may not be obvious initially.
Speaker 1:Right. Well, let me ask you a couple of final questions as we begin to wrap up, yeah, sure, as we begin to wrap up yeah, sure, so, based on what I'm hearing from you, you feel bullish on AI really unlocking the power of personalized learning. Yeah, what are some of the things that you are seeing on the horizon that make you bullish about AI helping more students? Because, the way I look at it is personalizing the learning and the experience for each individual, because one of the greatest challenges I've found as a learner myself, watching my kids and spending time in community colleges or the University of California is every learner is different and we build the model around, sort of you know that lowest common denominator yeah, and not everybody fits into the mold, right, and so you can see people struggling with the modalities that we are serving them, and what I'm hopeful for is that AI can help create that personalized experience and keep more learners engaged happening to us for sure, and the pace of change is overwhelming.
Speaker 2:But I can say there and everyone is saying it's going to revolutionize education. Well, no, it ain't going to revolutionize education. You are with it and so we do have. It is a collective action problem. We've got to get people using the tools.
Speaker 2:And I will say that, while I have hope, human nature typically is to sort of copy and paste and move incrementally, and actually I think this is one of these moments where the adage is AI going to make an incremental improvement in efficiency and grading or is it going to fundamentally transform from summative to formative assessment?
Speaker 2:You know, it is actually people's imagination and so far there has been a failure of imagination to really embrace it and do breakthrough innovation.
Speaker 2:Embrace it and do breakthrough innovation, and I don't know what the thing that really galvanizes folks to do it, but I can say the one excitement is that it actually puts the decision-making innovation at the edge and the people on the front lines, who are the ones that are going to have the power to make the innovative solutions that really ultimately transform the system. It's not a top-down innovation, it is a bottoms-up one and I don't know that we have sufficiently unlocked the imagination of people on the front lines, of teachers, learners. But if I know anything, I have belief in human nature and there are going to be a small number of people that make breakthroughs that impact us all and we're in like inning number one right, and there will be a small number of people that do things that are very harmful for a lot of people as well, and so the key is like how can we know what works and what doesn't, to stop the things that are failing and double down on the things that are working?
Speaker 1:What's next for Mainstay? Where do you see your company and your technology going from here?
Speaker 2:You know we talked a little bit about where the technology can go, but I look at us as a canvas for phenomenal educators. I say we are not a robot, we are an Iron man suit, and it is really the enablement of the operators who are going to do things that I've never dreamed of. But I think the big one is how can we create any Gen AI conversation, whether it's about career coaching, choosing a major things of complexity that we could never have dreamed, and not wait for someone to find it, but push it out to them at their fingertips? I I think the potential is greater than I can imagine and I need a lot more other people to match it with me. So it is not my decision. It is me creating the conditions for a lot more people to innovate. So if you're interested, shoot me an email or I promise it'll be me who responds. Where do they find more information about Mainstay? Oh, mainstaycom or Andrew at Mainstay is my email address. I always want to talk more. All right, eloy, this is awesome.
Speaker 1:Well, drew. Thanks for joining us here on the RAND Podcast. Likewise, you've been listening to my conversation with Andrew Maliazzi. He is the CEO of Mainstay. We've been having a great conversation about AI and the tools that are being developed to help more students succeed in post-secondary education. Thanks for joining us, everybody, and we will be back with you soon with more episodes. If you're following us on YouTube, hit subscribe, and if you're listening to us on your audio podcast, continue to follow us on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for joining us everybody, and we'll see you soon.
