ResumeBoost is a good example of failing small. The time savings were real, but the user experience for alumni didn’t hit the mark. Rather than keep it as a standalone tool, we folded its functionality into the broader AI coaching platform used by learners. The pilot did its job: it showed enough promise to warrant further investment, and it told us where to pivot.

At Per Scholas, that entrepreneurial energy comes from people with deep institutional knowledge. Ed Hernandez, who designed our AI-Native Classroom, has been part of the Per Scholas community for roughly fifteen years. He started as a learner and later became an instructor. Then, after more than a decade of leading our curriculum and instructional development team,  Ed’s passion for AI and software products led us to create an AI solutions team and ask him to lead it. He knows where the real pain points are because he’s seen them from both sides of the classroom.

For the AI-Native Classroom, leadership’s job was to say yes, set clear guardrails and remove obstacles. But the biggest task for us was to weigh possibility against necessity. The AI-Native Classroom earned support not only because the ideas were compelling, but because they solved problems our instructors and learners actually had.