A Conversation on AI in Education: Aaron Cuny and Erica Murphy on the AI for Equity and Hendy Avenue Partnership

The partnership between AI for Equity and Hendy Avenue Consulting has been instrumental in helping school leaders navigate AI adoption. We sat down with Aaron Cuny, Founder of AI for Equity, and Erica Murphy, Hendy Consultant, to discuss their collaboration, what they’ve learned, and what’s ahead.

You two have spent over 2 years working closely with one another on AI initiatives. What is your counterpart’s superpower, and how have they amplified the work of AI implementation and adoption for AI for Equity partners?

Erica: Aaron is uniquely able to think both at the balcony level and the weeds level, basically simultaneously. He knows everything about the sector—stays up to date by reading everything—and then really works to identify next steps that would benefit our partners in the near term. It’s fun watching him think broadly about policy, funders, and scope, and then narrowly draft implementation plans that could be used the next day.

Aaron: Erica brings a rare combination of deep content knowledge and an intuitive understanding of the change management dynamics that sit at the heart of implementing anything in a school system. AI adoption isn’t just a technology challenge—it’s a people challenge, and Erica gets that. She understands how school systems actually operate, where the friction points are, and how to move leaders from awareness to action in ways that stick. That expertise has been especially valuable as our work has evolved from building general AI awareness among leaders to tackling the harder, more nuanced questions around instructional integration and AI literacy. On top of all that, she’s just easy to work with—which matters more than people realize in partnership work like this.

AI implementation can feel overwhelming for school leaders. What’s one piece of advice you’d give to someone just starting this journey?

Erica: Identify a problem you are already facing and then seek to find ways that AI can help. That way, it isn’t a new thing; it’s a tool to address something you are already grappling with. Getting started is the hardest part, so just try it!

Aaron: I’m going to make an opposite recommendation, here – start with governance, not tools. Before you dive into which AI products to pilot or what policies to write, clarify roles, responsibilities, and decision-rights. Who owns the AI strategy for your organization? Who’s making decisions about what gets adopted and how? Once that’s clear, validate for your team that this work is deeply connected to your mission of serving kids—because it is. And then be honest with your team about prioritization. Everyone is juggling competing demands, so leaders need to name that this matters and create real space for people to engage with it meaningfully.

I love how two differing approaches to AI implementation surfaced in your last responses. Both make a lot of sense! I’m curious, how has this partnership changed your own thinking about AI in education?

Erica: Outside of my work with AI for Equity, if I were still a CAO, I would likely think AI was just “another thing,” and I doubt I would prioritize it. Aaron has shown me the full spectrum potential—both positive and negative—of AI and really made me think critically about the changing world our students will enter. If we don’t change with them, our K-12 system isn’t preparing them with what they’ll need to thrive in the workforce.

Aaron: Erica has been a real value-add in evolving our thinking about the implementation challenges on the instructional side of the work. Early on, a lot of our focus was on helping leaders understand AI and build organizational readiness—things like strategy, governance, talent implications. That work remains critical. But as we’ve gone deeper, Erica has helped sharpen our thinking about what it actually takes to move AI from the leadership level into curriculum and instruction—into the classroom, where it ultimately has to reach students. That’s a fundamentally different implementation challenge, and her perspective on the pedagogy, the change management, and the practical realities of instructional communities has made our approach stronger.

What are you most excited about for the next phase of this work?

Aaron: I’m really excited about the AI Literacy Collective. We’ve brought together an incredible group of ecosystem partners—TNTP, Leading Educators, Student Achievement Partners, Teaching Lab, Bellwether, Hendy, and others—to tackle a challenge that no single organization can solve alone. Right now, most school systems are finding that AI student usage policy isn’t enough. Policies don’t give teachers sufficient task-level clarity, so students are having wildly inconsistent experiences depending on which classroom they’re in. What the sector needs is AI usage expectations embedded directly into curriculum itself. That’s what the Collective is building—open-source instructional frameworks across core content areas that we believe will inform the next generation of curricula and digital learning. We’re defining how students should interact with AI in ways that uphold rather than collapse academic rigor, and mapping that to specific content-area skills. I think this work has the potential to shape how curriculum developers and publishers think about AI integration for years to come.

Erica:  Well said, Aaron – and ditto! Our AI literacy instructional frameworks and potentially partnering with ELA curricular providers to integrate literacy at the materials level have me really energized as we round the corner on the next phase of our collaborative efforts.
You can find out more about AI for Equity by visiting their website: https://ai-for-equity.org.