Good evening, folks, and welcome to London Business School. How many here are students at London Business School? Okay, so well, you've already been welcomed by many of my colleagues. The others here, we're so delighted you're here. There are a few more folks who are apparently in line as my colleagues are trying to get them registered and send them down. But we appreciate, as we do in class, you don't get attendance points unless you show up on time. So thank you for being here on time. This is a really special treat. This is two of the trailblazers in this combination of technology and impact are with us today, and we'll go deep into conversation about everything from the origin story to the impact they're having and what the future holds.
But before we get into that, a little preview of what's to come next week. It's been a real treat, not necessarily thanks to any grand planning on our Thiago, who's our executive director of the Wheeler Institute. Thiago and I and Ilas didn't do any planning. We just wait around for our friends to say, 'Hey, we're in town. Would you like to host?' And we host. And so next week we will have, actually she does live in town, Safina Hussein, another remarkable story, just incredible story, her own, and especially the millions of individuals that Educate Girls has helped. And that's next Monday. We have a few more such events coming up. More on that later. Thiago, if you can.
Today, though, this is a special treat because this is two of the leaders and founders of Team for Tech with us here. To my further left, right, right is Julie. Julie Klug is the CEO, co-founder, executive director of Team for Tech. And next to me here is Lila Ibrahim, who in addition to being chairman emeritus of Team for Tech, also has a day job that perhaps is keeping you somewhat busy as well, in addition to being the mom of twins.
Thank you. And so we're going to jump right in because we only have an hour. And I'm going to start with just among those who do not yet, and I can see clearly from the smiles around the room that quite a few folks know you. But among those who do not know you, can you tell us a bit about what you're doing? What is Team for Tech? What do you do right now? And you know, how that fits into the overall vision of education and impact.
Yeah, great. Well, first of all, thank you to all my long-standing and new friends for coming. It's so nice to see you here in London. I'm Julie Claggett. Yes, I am the co-founder and I've been executive director of Team for Tech for 14 years now since we started it. And Team for Tech is an impact accelerator. We work with community-based education NGOs, those who are closest to the learners and know them best, and we provide them with tech-supported, evidence-based pedagogical training and resources so that they can build durable employment skills with these learners. And ultimately, our goal is to improve socioeconomic mobility for these learners. I'll say more about it, but we've grown our community to over 1,500 NGOs across 100 countries now, and they are reaching 60 million learners.
Very good. Thank you. Now you mentioned 14 years, but of course the journey that the two of you have been involved in, including in education, goes much further back. Maybe Lila, you could tell us about the origin story.
Both Julie and I have our own background stories of how we first got interested in doing work in education and technology at the intersection of the two. Mine actually started back in the year 2000. So I am a daughter of an immigrant. My father grew up in an orphanage in Lebanon. And when I was growing up, I used to see what my father would do and design at home. He would sit at a drawing table and make these beautiful pictures that I later learned were things like heart pacemakers and car safety devices. And I thought, how could this orphan boy from Lebanon have such an impact in the world and saving millions of lives? And it went back to the fact that there was a teacher who saw a spark in him. A teacher saw a spark in this kid and made sure that he got an education. So I followed in my father's footsteps as an engineer.
I had earned some time off and I decided I was going to go to Lebanon to build a computer lab at the orphanage so that other students could have an opportunity to develop these types of skills to get a job in the future and provide a better life for themselves, their families, and maybe impact the world. And this was during my time at Intel, where I spent 18 years, and Julie and I first met.
I went to build a computer lab at this orphanage for a thousand displaced students during the Civil War. And I thought I was going to say thank you, but I'm the one who walked out a changed person.
And based on that experience of getting a room maybe a third of this size and with no electricity and having to figure out how to build up those skills was an impossible task at first. And my father just told the executive director, 'Don't discourage the girl. Let her show you what she can do.' And two months later, I left and we hired a teacher. We had the computers up and running. We had the community involved and they made it their own. Fast forward a few years back, when I returned back to the office at Intel, Julie and I had a chance to cross paths, and she has a similar story I'll let her share, but we started a program at Intel together around providing purpose-built computers that were for low- and middle-income countries. And the employees were so eager to help out that they wanted to start volunteering for our project. So what I had built in Lebanon, we got to see happen around the world with our products.
But after a while, after nearly 20 years, I left Intel and went into venture capital. And for those of you who may come from a finance background, it was really hard for me to start transacting in money and investment and investing in people and ideas. And I was looking for something more meaningful. And a part of a fellowship that I got with the Aspen Institute, I had to come up with an idea. So my friend Julie and I got together at a Starbucks on Sand Hill Road, heart of Silicon Valley, and we brainstormed the next big idea, which was how do we actually take all of our learnings, our own experiences, and build a nonprofit, and that turned into Team for Tech today. And maybe Julie, I think your story, you have kind of a similar background and probably add a little bit more color to that.
Yeah, I think we, you know, we had very similar paths. One of my first jobs out of university was teaching in a newly built secondary school in the western highlands of Guatemala. So it had just been built the year before, and up until then, students in that area pretty much stopped at grade eight because it was too expensive to move off to the city and continue their education. So with this newly built school, they for the first time could go through grade 12. And you know, we had students in their early 20s who were coming back taking advantage of it. And one of the things I did there was set up a little computer lab. We didn't have any phones, and this was in the late 90s, that shows you how old I am. But we didn't have any phones, let alone internet, but I set up just like a little computer lab to teach like word processing, digital literacy, and then stayed in touch with those students and they ended up going on to university. They got jobs at the leading think tanks in Guatemala City. They worked in the leading universities, and it just, this is what I firmly believe is that talent, determination, drive lives everywhere. And if we can just figure out a way to work through these community-based organizations to open those doors, like I've seen it time and time again that it plays out.
Now, Julie, you skipped over a few details. So you were a teacher there, and then you were at the World Bank, etc. Please tell us.
Yeah, yeah. So it's been this long journey. I feel like everyone's journey makes sense in retrospect, but you know, I loved that work I was doing in Guatemala, and then I just thought, well, you have to scale though. So then I went back to grad school and I ended up working at the World Bank, and I was writing these like 200-page reports like for a year, and I don't think I actually found out later, it's proven there are zero downloads on most World Bank reports. So I knew for a fact that I was wasting my time. And so I just said, you know, how can I do something more entrepreneurial around the potential of technology to transform education to reach more of these, you know, under-resourced learners? So that's when I pivoted, you'll like this coming from LBS, I went and got my MBA at Berkeley, and then I went to work at Intel, and you know...
Very entrepreneurial. I mean, well, it's very entrepreneurial, especially famous for innovation, but not the first name that comes to mind when I think of an entrepreneurial journey. Yeah, you were an entrepreneur within.
Yeah, I think, yeah, an entrepreneur at Intel. And the nice thing at Intel was that all of our social impact focus areas revolved around education. The founders of Intel had gotten where they were through education. And so everything we were doing was focused on education globally. And so we worked hard to launch this new program that Lila spoke about. We called it the Intel Education Service Corps because we had 110,000 employees around the world and they were always, you know, emailing us like, 'Oh, I love what we're doing in education. How can I get involved?' And there really wasn't a way for employees to get involved. And so I love to tell this story. We created three projects to start and we had 15 spots and we got HR to give us $25,000, which, you know, seemed great at the time. And for those 15 spots, we got over 500 employees who wanted to do this work. And so that was a real milestone. And the acceptance rate into the program was less than 5%. It was harder than getting into Harvard to get into this program. And so different business units around the company started saying like, 'I'll pay for it. Just take my employees to do a project.' So that's how it grew.
I also love the fact he's an entrepreneur because I think when Julie and I often talk about the fact that we never thought of ourselves as entrepreneurs, but when you look back at our careers, so much of what we did was starting new technology, new projects, new computer labs in countries that didn't have them before. And so I think being an entrepreneur gave us the confidence to be able to go off and do something on our own.
And the importance of individuals over institutions. Very, you know, your story about you meet over coffee and discover things or decide to do things, very, very entrepreneurial. Now, speaking of which, you didn't continue it at Intel, you spun out, and what was the logic for that?
Yeah, I mean, I think we saw this groundswell of interest. This was in, you know, 2012 that we were talking about starting this, and you know, all of the human capital reports coming out from the big consulting firms were talking about how the millennials in particular had this, you know, yearning for a greater sense of purpose, you know, and we saw that in the tech sector. And also we had learned things about, you know, we wanted the program to be completely platform agnostic. We wanted it to be founded in a human-centered design approach, starting with the challenges that the NGOs were facing and then finding the right solutions, not kind of hammer looking for a nail. And we knew that to actually have learner-level impact in education, that takes a long time. You know, there's a whole theory of change where you're building capacity for these NGOs and these teachers and then they're working with the learners. So we wanted to be able to commit to at least three- to five-year partnerships with these NGOs and really, you know, see it through in terms of capacity building and resources.
Now, Lila, you were at Intel. You mentioned you started as an engineer. I must say I started as an engineer, but far more quickly than you, I realized I was not cut out for engineering. You, on the other hand, Lila, just recently, was it last week, was named a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, which is a big deal. So you're a real engineer. Now, but you moved on, you went to Kleiner Perkins. In fact, John Doerr, you mentioned, was one of your early donors to what you were doing. And then you were at Coursera. So you've seen waves of innovation in education. Can you tell us a bit about that journey and then now at Google, describe your role, please.
It's interesting because I never thought that I... I thought education was what enabled my career. I never thought I would do so much around education. I think I hit that point in my life where it was just so obvious that this was part of my mission, part of my life mission. I had the opportunity to help make the investment in Coursera while I was in venture capital. There was something that was just really magical about thinking of how do you make quality education accessible globally and being able to see that evolution from investor to joining when it was around 40 people and I was the first outside executive in to helping to build the organization to pre-IPO and seeing, you know, every week at our employee town halls, we would actually have a story of a learner who had participated or taken a class and got a micro-credential and was able to do something with it. And it was really just such an empowering experience in my life to actually be able to hear from people on the ground.
I've done many projects with Team for Tech, which, you know, we tend to target younger years, and then being able to see that there are these, you know, if you can teach at a younger age, how do you build lifelong learning skills? How do you build things like curiosity and courage to be able to do something that nobody has done before, that you don't necessarily have the tools to do? And that commitment where you're showing up week after week to learn and to try to improve your life. So I think that was quite a nice way to wrap up the Intel, working on the hardware and the software and the ecosystem, to venture capital, being able to make the investment, and then growing a company.
And then I hit a point of my life where I had kind of, you know, built Coursera, gotten it to the point where it was stable enough, but I had gone in to help for a short bit, which turned into about four years. And I really wanted entering a stage of my life where I wanted to just take a beat. And I said, you know, I've got enough energy. I want to be really thoughtful of not just falling into something, but I actually think I'm mature enough in my career that I want to be very intentional about what I do next. And because I look back every time I was at a decision point, I kind of just did what sounded really cool, and it turns out it's the circuitous, but it ended up well. And I had an opportunity to interview here in London for a company called DeepMind, which at the time I went and looked on the website and it was this big, it was a black website and a little search box that said 'solve intelligence and then solve everything else.' This idea that there's so much in the universe we don't understand, and if we could use AI as a tool to understand the issues that we're facing better, that we could come up with better solutions to help advance humanity. And for me, even as a parent, thinking about the responsibility that I have to my daughters and their generation, and I felt I had been giving so much with education, but how do I do something at scale? And so we picked up from Silicon Valley and moved to London eight and a half years ago as the first chief operating officer at Google DeepMind.
And more recently, you know, my entire career has been about building technology, and then at the beginning of this year, I said, let's take a step back again and reassess where things are at. Technology is the tool. How do we make sure that humanity, that communities are ready for the technology, the technology that is here and the technology that is coming? So I moved into a newly created role called Chief AI Readiness Officer. And my idea is that we're not talking about technical issues anymore. We're talking about cultural and community issues, and how do we make sure that the technology gets developed with communities and doesn't happen to them. I think I might be the first Chief AI Readiness Officer in the world. And if I do it right, it means that other organizations will make this type of investment of how do we think about shaping the future that we want. And while my day job tends to focus a lot more on this very future-focused, to me, Team for Tech fills the 'what are we doing right now to make sure that we're not widening the equity gap and that in fact we're making the investments and bringing more people into how we shape a better future.'
And now this is for both of you, and I know Julie, you have some beautiful pictures that describe what you do at Team for Tech. Now, that story clearly illustrates that you've seen these waves of major technological change, societal change, from even during your journey. And now some argue AI may be the biggest of all. But you were there even before large language models were a gleam in anyone's eyes. What can you tell us a bit about what you see as the power of AI for good, for bad, in the context of education? Of course, there's a much larger discussion, but for now, for today, in the context of education, tell us a bit about that, please.
Yeah, I mean, I think AI is an accelerant, and so in our work, we want AI to be an accelerant of evidence-based teaching and learning strategies, specifically to build these durable human skills. So we talk about AI as a topic and AI as a tool. So AI as a topic means making sure that all of our stakeholders are AI-literate, that they understand what the benefits and risks of the technology are. So we want to make sure they have that seat at the table. And then AI as a tool, I mean, it's an incredibly powerful tool for disseminating these evidence-based teaching and learning strategies. So you know, we over these 14 years have developed a platform. It's kind of a three-tier level of support. We have a free, open community of practice where we're sharing training webinars, tools, resources all the time with these 1,500 NGOs, not just AI, but how can you build digital infrastructure, pedagogical expertise, and operational capacity to use AI effectively as a tool. And then we run these peer learning cohorts, typically 10 NGOs from a similar region, and it's focused on a given topic. And so many of these over the past 18 months have been on how to use AI as a tool for evidence-based pedagogy.
And that's what I would love to show. I don't know if we have a quick minute. I mean, these are the heroes of our work. So these NGOs, they come to these cohorts, 10 NGOs, about five staff per each, so about 50 people, and you know, they're each reaching at least a thousand learners per year, typically 3,000 on average. And the whole cohort is designed to help them come up with their own human-centered implementation plan. So it starts with their challenge, not some abstract idea of hammer looking for a nail. And then over the eight weeks, they come up with this implementation plan, and then we have in-region expert coaches who work with them for six months to actually implement the plan, and they're typically given a small stipend so that they can work on that. So, you know, these are just a few that have come out. This is an NGO called YYA Solutions. They're based in Uganda, and they developed something called YYA Voice, which is an AI-powered personalized STEM tutor delivered over flip phone. So you can see that you call in and it is voice-to-text that goes to a RAG model that's mapped to the Ugandan STEM curriculum. And it delivers back personalized answers in the local accent, in the local language. And for the students, it feels like having a personalized STEM tutor, where most of these students are out of school, so they didn't have any teacher, you know, before this was created. And they're seeing amazing completion and return rates.
Can I ask, just so you said they're mostly out of school. So are they doing these in groups or are they doing them individually or what's the setup?
Yeah, it's individual, and they get a certificate. It's been recognized by the Ministry of Education. So they get a certificate for completing.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Over flip phone. Coursera over flip phone. And I just want, they've reached 40,000 students, 80% course completion, and they actually here in London won the BETT Global EdTech Startup Award this year, earlier this year.
So they're super exciting. This is Dignitas in Kenya. They do teacher coaching, and so in the AI cohort, they helped advance their LeadNow AI-powered coaching platform for teachers, but also for mid-tier Ministry of Education coaches. So all of our cohorts are very focused on how can these NGOs develop a solution that they can then scale by partnering with government. So this LeadNow coaching solution, it delivers AI-powered videos to illustrate, you know, teaching techniques and is being scaled with the Ministry of Education. This is Africa ICT Right in Ghana. In our cohort, they worked on a platform called UT STEM. So basically in Ghana, the Ministry of Education had distributed these STEM kits to all secondary schools, but teachers didn't know how to use them. And so they created this AI-powered app that was mapped to the curriculum, and then teachers can go in and get lesson plan suggestions of how to use this equipment to teach, you know, evidence-based STEM lessons.
This is Rising Hope Girls Education Foundation in Nigeria. They in the cohort developed a tool called Read Buddy, which is an AI-powered voice recognition reading tutor for primary school students. So in their classrooms, you know, you have one teacher for 50 students. And so there's no way that teacher can listen to every student read. And so this platform listens to the student, gives feedback, you know, gives practice, tailored practice on phonics that they're struggling with. And they also just won the AI for Good Award at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva for this solution. Educate in Sierra Leone. Again, this is an AI-powered teacher prompt library so that they know how to go in and ask for evidence-based lesson plans. And then again, it delivers video examples. So you're moving from like a chalk-and-talk style of pedagogy to actually like activity-centered student pedagogy.
I think I have maybe one or two more. This is Kenya Connect. Lila just got back from there. I think this is a great example of our long-term partnership. We've been partnering with Kenya Connect for five years now. They're an NGO and they work with 70 government schools, mostly primary but a few secondary. And when we started, they didn't have computers. So through our grants, through teacher capacity building, we trained all of their teachers to actually teach coding because coding is required by the Kenya competency-based curriculum, but none of the teachers had training in how to teach it, let alone the equipment. And so we provided both. And so all of these students were then receiving Scratch-based coding instruction. Two out of the last three years, students from these schools in rural Makueni County, Kenya, won the Kenya Robotics Olympiad. And so they were competing against the top schools in Kenya, and they won two out of the last three years.
And then one of them went international.
Yeah, they both went on to the global competition. And Turkey and Singapore was the first time, obviously, these kids had been on a plane to go to these competitions. And then it was building on that, I think, you know, to your question, it's a long tail, right? Like we had been building this capacity for Kenya Connect, then they just participated in our AI cohort. And again, it was how do they use AI prompts so that their teachers can get lesson plans that are mapped to the curriculum.
Can I ask just, oh, maybe I'll let you finish.
This is the last one, I promise. Yeah, I just, these are the heroes of our story. So I want you to see what it looks like. This is Educate Rwanda, and in the cohort, they came up with an AI analytics tool that maps to the Ministry of Education management information system, basically LMIS system, because that system, all the teachers upload their results, but then it takes weeks to basically just see, you know, what the data is. And so they've created this AI analytics and feedback layer. So instead of weeks, in 48 hours, the mid-tier Ministry of Education officials can actually get diagnostics on like which classrooms are struggling, which teachers are struggling, and then they can target their support resources. So this is just their kind of MVP that they showed in the cohort.
Implicitly, you've answered the question I was going to ask you, which is if I were a... so you have in a sense a Team for Tech to the NGO to their beneficiaries. If I'm a member of, if I'm a part of the cohort of NGOs, implicitly I heard you say, well, I might get some sort of technology support, some skills. You mentioned a grant, so maybe some financing. The connections you mentioned, the peers and perhaps mentors. Any, what else? What's part of the package? Is it highly personalized? Is it a standard set? Just you can...
Yeah, and that's what we found the most valuable is actually the long tail of coaching because, you know, it's one thing to come up with a plan on paper, but then when you actually implement it, it's a very iterative process. So that's why we have in-region expert coaches who are meeting with them at least once a month, helping to pivot, to tweak the solution, to prepare them for kind of that Ministry of Education scaling goal.
I think one of, you know, a lot of this is, as I said earlier, it's not just about the technological shift, it's about the cultural shift that needs to happen. And I think Julie and I both experienced this when we did our computer labs and our origin stories of it took us coming back regularly to check in on the progress because what we found was people on the ground really understand the significance of this investment as seeing potential in them that even sometimes they might not see in themselves. And being able to commit three to five years of sustained investment to support, I think, has been really helpful. And having the variety of options of the mentorship, the different types of trainings, connecting to other NGOs and like-minded people. So it doesn't, I mean, change and leadership in these environments is hard, while leadership in...
General is really, really hard and very lonely, and so being able to find those fellow travelers, I think, has been quite empowering for many of them. I was—Julie mentioned—I was in Kenya this summer. I went for a week to go visit Kenya Connect and kind of get an update of what was happening on the ground, and she mentioned the students who went to the national competition. Those students had never been on a paved road before they went to Nairobi for the competition. I mean, they were learning in the local community center at Kenya Connect, and that's where they picked up the skills and the confidence to do this. And for me to be able to see that their expertise is really understanding the local community—the mothers and the women's culture, the students, knowing the school administration, the curriculum, the cultural challenges post-COVID that they were dealing with. What they didn't have was that technology know-how, and that's really where we were able to lean in with our partnership. And it just reminded me of—like, we may have—we, you know, we can sit here with all of our knowledge, but unless we are finding the right partners on the ground who provide that last mile plus—I mean, they're supporting 70 to 90 schools on any given time in rural Kenya, and that's something that no global organization can do.
So, just building on that point, before we go to Q&A, as you know more than most in this world, there's been some controversy around AI in the context of education as well. You know, are we going to lose certain skills? What is the future for kids and so on? Can you help us make sense of those potential risks that people have talked about in the context you were talking about here, which is, as the title said, low-income communities, and we saw some of the challenges they face. Can you help us understand both the potential risks or problems you've encountered, for example, as well as how that fits into what you're doing in these communities?
Yeah, I think technology has always been both a risk and an opportunity. I mean, when we were first dealing with computers, even, you know, it wasn't that the computer was going to solve the problem in the classroom. You know, the computers had to work, the teacher had to know how to use them, it had to be the local curriculum, etc. So I think that we both grew up in this culture where technology is an enabler. It's kind of back to your—it's a tool, but we have to focus on what's the right adoption. For me, I do think, you know, so much of how we think about AI, you have to think about the—like, what keeps me up at night. It's like, are we managing the risks as well as we could, and are we also managing the opportunities as much as we can? And it has to be a hand-in-hand conversation. You know, one of the things that I think about risk a lot, and that's actually—I took the job because I was worried about the risks, and I wanted to be—if I could bring my experience from the tech industry into this moment in AI, then that would be a good thing. And there's so many aspects of responsibility. There's the here and now. There's where are we layering and how are we putting AI on top of the current education system? And then where is the education system just not working that regardless of what technology you put in? It's just, you know, do you have the right incentive models? Are they training for the right skills for the employability? So I think all of this is kind of coming to a head. The one thing that I feel really pleased about is that we're having the conversations about the risks, and we're having them upfront. When I was in venture capital, I can't tell you how many conversations around the investment table we had, or in social media times, where we were not talking about the risks.
The benefit we have right now of Hollywood and our science fiction is that we have a shared image of what could go wrong, and we openly talk about it. Now, I don't think completely abandoning AI is the right solution because it's already helping us advance, you know, drug discovery, helping students with neurodiversity who learn a different way be able to actually engage in the content in ways they weren't able to before. It's helping teachers save time. In Northern Ireland, I was up at a school there. Teachers on average—they did a—the government did a pilot because they were dealing with 40—sorry, they were dealing with—the teachers had too many students per class, too long hours, and in the pilot that they ran, the teachers reported that they saved 10 hours per week per teacher, and it wasn't necessarily to fill the time doing other work. Sometimes it was actually just being able to take a step back or providing some extra help to the students. In Sierra Leone, we've worked with a school there. Cognitive offloading is a big topic right now. So we said, how can you introduce AI into a classroom, keeping the teacher in the lead, much like in Northern Ireland where the teachers were empowered with how they wanted to use AI. In Sierra Leone, they used a special project that we have called Guided Learning, which is based off of years of pedagogical research that we eventually built into Gemini. So the teacher facilitated the classroom, middle school students, in eight weeks in math and science—one of the most challenging subjects where sometimes teachers aren't necessarily equipped to have the kind of teaching so many different students at so many different levels. In just eight weeks with the AI support, the students advanced the equivalent of a year and a half in their science and math scores, which is significant. Now—
