Edtech is a Code Word for Bad Tech (and AI won't fix that alone)

Written from ASU-GSV, April, 2026

It was 2008. I had just taken my first job in higher ed — rebuild the entire online student experience from the ground up. I’d come from financial services, where my team had launched and scaled a full e-commerce platform, digitized core banking, credit cards, and lending, and shipped new features every week. I figured: how hard could this be?

I went to the registrar to understand how courses were set up, how students enrolled, how faculty were attached. We had a clean interface designed and ready to build. I just needed to know how to connect the systems.

“Does the LMS have an API?” I asked.

“Yes!” my colleague, our university registrar, said. Enthusiastically.

She walked me to her desk. I watched her download a file from the SIS, SSH into the vendor’s server, and manually copy it over.

She was the API. My brilliant, deeply experienced, mission-critical colleague, manually moving data between systems, was the API.

That was the day I coined the phrase: Edtech is a code word for Bad Tech.

A lot has changed. And a lot hasn't.

That was 17 years ago. I’ve spent 7 years directly building these experiences inside institutions, and another 10+ years consulting across higher ed and other industries. Millions have been poured into edtech. The tools have actually gotten better.

But I’m watching AI create the same hysteria the web did in the early 2000s.

Schools are buying piecemeal. There’s no orchestration. And while our industry loves to discuss the future, there is still very little consistent, disciplined execution. And very little honest evaluation of what to build and why, of what success looks like, and how to measure it - before the next silver bullet arrives. Of course, that thing is AI today.

The vendors aren’t entirely to blame. Higher ed can be hard to work with. And when you’re a vendor chasing a budget holder, you build what solves their problem, not the student’s. If it’s novel enough, maybe you can sole-source it and skip the procurement process entirely. And so the fragmentation compounds, year after year.

So two years ago, I placed a bet on ServiceNow.

I started a consulting business, Forever Human.ai, and established a partnership with ServiceNow.

People were shocked. “You mean… the help desk software?”

Yes. And no.

ServiceNow started in IT support, but it’s expanded across the entire enterprise - CRM, HR, procurement, and more. More importantly, it’s built for workflows that cross organizational boundaries. One system. One underlying data store. One identity. Deep integrations into everything else you already run. Governance, monitoring, and reporting come baked in.

And most schools already have it, even if it’s been sitting in a corner doing IT tickets.

But here's what made the bet feel right for right now.

For as long as I’ve worked in higher ed, there has been one white whale: a single, unified view of the student. Not just for the students themselves, but for the people trying to serve them.

Financial aid didn’t know what academic advising knew. Career services was operating in a completely separate system. Faculty had no visibility into what support a struggling student was already receiving. Every department was doing their best with a slice of the picture.

We tried to build that unified view over and over again. It was always too complex, too expensive, or too politically complicated to pull off.

ServiceNow’s AI investment is the most compelling answer I’ve seen to that problem, and not just because the core platform is AI-ready. It’s because of how they’re building. Their agentic AI capabilities allow institutions to deploy intelligent agents that work across departments instead of being siloed to one workflow. The acquisition of Moveworks accelerates exactly that: an AI layer that can sit across financial aid, academic advising, career services, HR, and IT, giving staff and faculty a single intelligent surface to interact with.

That’s not a feature. That’s the thing we’ve been trying to build for 20 years.

And critically, leveraging ServiceNow’s AI Control Tower, you can test a promising new edtech AI startup inside this environment in a governed, visible way. Not spin up another silo. Not another standalone tool with its own login and its own data model. The platform becomes the place where you evaluate, integrate, and scale without adding to the sprawl that’s been choking institutions for decades.

Was I right to bet on it?

Mostly, yes. The tool is powerful, AI-ready, and we’ve put new capabilities live for clients in weeks, repeatedly.

But the tool was not the whole answer. It never is.

What I’ve learned from managing digital experiences for 160,000 students, 35,000 of them fully online, is that execution takes two things: creativity and discipline. Higher ed has creativity in abundance. It comes from everywhere: faculty, students, employers, regulators, advisors, leadership. The ideas are not the problem.

The problem is bringing those ideas into reality. Structuring the work. Shipping it. And then shipping again.

That’s why I’m here. Not as an outsider looking in, and not as someone who’s only ever lived inside the institution. Someone who’s been in the trenches, executed at scale, and still believes this industry deserves better tools and better partners.

Someone has to do it.

Tracey is the founder and CEO of Forever Human.AI. She’s at ASU-GSV this week. If you’re here or just ready to stop buying piecemeal and start executing, DM me on LinkedIn.