by BrainStream Chief Financial Officer Phyllis Chia-Hua Chen We have officially moved past the “Wild West” era of educational AI. Institutions are no longer just handed individual sandboxes to play with; they are looking for enterprise-grade, system-wide transformations. Canada’s leading research institute, Signal49 Research, just dropped a crucial national study that confirms this exact macroeconomic…
by BrainStream CEO Steve Alcorn Dan Burgar wrote a sharp piece in 604now about why Vancouver keeps exporting its tech talent to Seattle and San Francisco. His diagnosis is accurate: Vancouver builds companies but can’t keep them past a certain size. The capital is elsewhere. The scaling infrastructure is elsewhere. The high-paying jobs follow. He’s…
by BrainStream CEO Steve Alcorn USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy just published a detailed case study about integrating AI into their curriculum. Their instructional designer, Minh Trinh, built a framework that scaffolds students from basic AI use (summarizing readings) through increasingly sophisticated engagement—using AI as a debate partner, a mentor that asks questions…
by BrainStream Chief Operating Officer Tzu-Ying (Kimberley) Chen Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming the way people learn, access information, and develop skills. In education, AI offers the potential to create more personalized, adaptive, and accessible learning experiences at scale. But as these technologies become more integrated into classrooms and learning environments, an important question remains:…
by BrainStream Chief Marketing Officer Ya-Hui (Laura) Kao Some school systems are beginning to formally integrate AI into their curriculum. This is no longer experimental usage. AI is becoming part of structured education delivery. At first glance, this looks like an education upgrade. But from a market and go-to-market perspective, this is actually a shift…
by BrainStream CEO Steve Alcorn Molly Worthen’s essay in today’s New York Times, “You Can’t Game Your Way to a Real Education,” makes a strong case against gamification in schools. Points, badges, cartoon confetti, lonely scrolling for dopamine hits—she nails why turning math class into a video game hasn’t worked. She’s right about all of…
In 1984, educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom published a study that haunted education for 40 years. Students who received one-on-one tutoring performed two standard deviations above those in conventional classrooms. In plain terms: a student at the 50th percentile, given a personal tutor, outperformed 98% of their traditionally taught peers. Bloom called it the 2-sigma problem:…
by BrainStream CEO Steve Alcorn Jean-Christophe Bélisle-Pipon’s op-ed in today’s Vancouver Sun (“There is no such thing as ‘Sovereign AI’“) makes a point that anyone trying to build an AI company in Canada has been feeling for a while: the federal government talks about AI sovereignty while routing the actual work through American firms. OpenAI…
by BrainStream Chief Financial Officer Phyllis Chia-Hua Chen Over the past year, conversations around AI in education have noticeably shifted. As a CFO at an EdTech company, I see this not just as a technology trend—but as a market maturity signal. Not long ago, the focus was on what AI could do. Demos were impressive,…
by BrainStream Chief Marketing Officer Ya-Hui (Laura) Kao For a while, the concept of “unlimited artificial intelligence” sounded like a revolutionary deal. Users paid a fixed monthly fee to gain unrestricted access to powerful tools capable of writing, coding, analyzing, and automating. However, unlike traditional software services where the cost to duplicate code is nearly…
