Kids are outsourcing their minds We’re building the layer that makes them think anyway
Before the research catches up.
Before the regulation lands.
Before a generation loses the habit of thinking for itself.
Students’ access to unlimited AI isn’t a tools problem.
It’s a thinking problem.
California has mandated AI literacy in every K–12 classroom.
30+ states are moving on similar bills.
AI literacy should teach students to think alongside AI, not outsource their thinking to it.
67% of students are already using AI daily with zero guardrails. BestColleges, 2024
The evidence is already in. The intervention is what’s missing.
We read it. We operationalize it.
In the classroom. In the policy conversation.
Co-build the tools and curriculum that teach AI literacy.
We design alongside the teachers and students who will use this work. Not for them, with them. The tools, prompts, and curriculum we build are tested and refined in the classrooms they are meant to serve.
See Our Programs →Make sure AI policy reflects what works in real classrooms.
We give public testimony, publish in education and policy outlets, and work alongside researchers and policymakers to make sure decisions about student AI use are grounded in evidence from real schools.
Read our latest →Recent testimony and writing.
How to prevent AI from teaching students not to think
“You cannot reskill a workforce if the underlying capacity for critical thought has already been eroded.”
The Cognitive Gap: Why NYC’s AI Policy Needs a Pedagogical Core
“Parents worry that untethered AI will cause students to lose the practice of thinking for themselves. They are not wrong.”
What cognition-first AI actually looks like.
When a student opens any AI tool, the Platform pauses before the answer loads and prompts them to form a position first. Then AI answers. The exchange is scored and logged.
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Teachers build it. Students think with it.
A hands-on teacher fellowship. A student curriculum that builds AI literacy from the inside out. A research pilot that turns every classroom session into evidence.
See Our Programs →A letter from the founder Why I left Google to build this
To ensure every student learns how to use AI as a thinking partner, not a thinking replacement.
One learning: the system only moves when every seat works toward the same thing. I know how to convene these players, and I know how to move the system.
Protecting students’ ability to think is too dangerous to get wrong. We need every player at the table: it’s time we get to work.
I grew up in Brooklyn, between Flatbush and Marine Park, with my mom working in Midwood and my schools spread across all three neighborhoods. A city that can feel like everything is possible and nothing is simple, often in the same hour.
My parents had learned to navigate the behemoth of NYC public schools. In true Pakistani immigrant tiger parent fashion, they pulled me out of one middle school after two months because they didn’t like how math was being taught, and moved me into a “math lab” at Andries Hudde Junior High School in Midwood.
It was there, in sixth grade, that I learned my brain was both a tool I could trust and a muscle I could strengthen. We worked through thick textbooks on our own, taking unit tests at our own pace and needing at least an 80 to advance. If we got stuck, we had to interrogate the exact point we got lost before asking for help. Our two teachers served as guardrails, keeping us on track but never doing the thinking for us. That pedagogy has a name: mastery learning. It built the foundation for how I think today, a foundation now at risk with widespread student use of AI.
I spent the first decade of my career in the weeds of NYC classrooms, advising elected officials on school integration and zoning issues, watching how students get sorted early, who gets the advocates, and who gets written off. Then I watched that same dynamic collide with technology.
Inside Google, I worked on AI policy, specifically the socio-emotional dependencies kids were forming with chatbots. I saw a surreal disconnect. Google had spent years pushing devices into American schools; the executives driving that push sent their own kids to low-tech schools that kept screens out of the classroom. As AI has arrived, I see the pattern repeating. Publicly, panacea. Privately, use carefully.
The people shipping these tools to other people’s children were shielding their own.
Well-resourced students are now treating AI the way their parents treat an early draft: something to push against, not something to accept. Not because their schools are teaching it. Because their parents model it. They push back on outputs, ask themselves what they think before accepting what ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini returns, and continue to refine the thinking until they arrive at their own point of view. That scaffolding is domestic, not institutional. For a student whose parents don’t have that fluency, the classroom is the only potential equalizer. But teachers are waiting on guidance. So students ask AI. AI answers. And the answer becomes the thought.
This isn’t a technology problem. It’s an equity problem wearing technology’s clothes.
The mission I’ve spent my career on, the battle to ensure every kid builds the capacity to think is now inside every backpack in America. And the kids with the fewest advocates are the most exposed. The teachers I’ve worked with aren’t the problem; they are the last line of defense. What they lack is a way to turn their pedagogical instincts into data that districts and policymakers can act on.
We are watching this movie in real-time with social media: harm first, research a decade later, regulation a generation too late.
But this trajectory is not inevitable. AI systems can be built to prompt students to form hypotheses, make their reasoning visible, and engage before handing them answers. That friction is not inefficiency. It is the defining product decision of this generation.
So that’s what I built. A layer that sits on top of every AI tool a student already uses, slows them down just enough to think, and gives teachers the visibility to guide them. When a student asks ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini to write their thesis, the layer will ask them first to think through what they think the argument should be. It tracks habits over time and tells teachers which students are learning to think alongside AI and which are outsourcing it. It doesn’t replace the teacher. It gives the teacher something to work with.
I built the first version myself, then found the people who shared the conviction. That’s what we’re building at Augmented Intelligence Advisory: the cognitive guardrails so the next generation can still think for themselves.
We will come to see this as the student equity issue of the 21st century.
Work with us to get it right.
Makes student thinking visible. Every time they use AI.
Five stages, captured in real time.
THINK teaches students to recognize when AI is augmenting their thinking and when it is replacing it. Built on decision science learning standards, the Platform scores every prompt and surfaces how thinking matures over weeks and months.
Prompt Complexity Score
Every student prompt is scored in real time across four dimensions: Goal Clarity, Context Scaffolding, Reasoning Demand, and Epistemic Posture. The score is visible to the student.
Prompt Complexity Curve
A longitudinal view of how a student’s prompts mature across weeks, units, and subjects, ultimately measuring students’ metacognitive development under AI.
The framework in action, at the point of use.
When a student opens any AI tool, the Platform pauses before the answer loads and prompts them to form a position first. Then AI answers. The exchange is scored and logged.
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Ready to make thinking visible in your district?
We work with district leaders, policymakers, and school systems to stand up the platform, train teachers, and turn the evidence into action.
See Our Programs →Protecting students’ ability to think will require engaging with the whole ecosystem
Every day, leaders are setting policies, teachers are designing assignments, and students are outsourcing their thinking. These three decisions don’t happen in isolation. We work with schools across the full ecosystem: diagnose, onboard, equip, co-design, implement.
The School-Based AI Audit
Most school leaders are making AI policy decisions without data on what’s actually happening in their classrooms. We start by giving them that data.
We start with anonymous student and teacher surveys mapping current AI use and concerns about cognitive impact, alongside interviews with school leadership. We learn more about how students and teachers are actually using AI, and where the cognitive risk is concentrated. From there, we work with leadership to align on what the school needs and how the fellowship and curriculum can meet it.
The THINK Fellowship for Educators
A partnership where teachers become designers of AI literacy, testing what works in their classrooms and building evidence of real behavior change.
Hands-On Intensive Launch
Teachers build their own AI fluency grounded in cognitive science, then move into a co-design sprint: drafting classroom interventions, testing them with real students, and iterating based on what actually moves behavior change.
Ongoing Community of Practice
Office hours, peer-to-peer problem solving, surveys that measure what’s actually changing in classrooms, and a culminating gathering where teachers present classroom data, co-design the next version, and earn their Certified THINK Facilitator credential.
The THINK Curriculum for Students
Students design their own AI practice and measure whether it’s making them think more.
Students start with the research showing AI is making them think less, then learn the THINK Framework: think, hypothesize, interrogate, navigate, know. They practice with real AI, test their knowledge, remove the scaffolds, and build the practice of using AI as a thinking tool, not a replacement tool. Our program runs alongside their AI use, surfacing the evidence: are they asking better questions, fact-checking more, thinking more?
By the end
You have evidence of what changed across leaders, teachers, and students: and a school positioned to keep building.
Interested in partnering?
We work with districts, school networks, and education organizations to bring these programs to classrooms.
Get in Touch →Schools at the center. Everything else follows.
AIA partners with K–12 schools to protect students’ ability to think alongside AI. Our work happens at three layers: a school-based audit, a teacher fellowship, and a student curriculum.
We also show up in the public conversation through testimony, op-eds, and partnerships with researchers and policymakers working on student AI use.
The people behind the work
This is an ecosystem problem. It requires ecosystem people.
Ayisha Irfan is the founder of Augmented Intelligence Advisory. She brings 15+ years of experience across every layer of the education ecosystem, and in tech.
Most recently, she spent the last several years inside Google advising product and engineering teams on Search’s data governance and generative AI features. This is where her education policy brain collided with the realities of how AI was being shipped to students, and this work led directly to the formation of AIA.
Prior to Google, at Airbnb, Ayisha led North America local policy and partnerships. Her work included Airbnb’s public commitment to provide accommodations for 20,000 Afghan newcomers and the national public-private partnerships that housed first responders and survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking during COVID-19. This work shaped her understanding of how tech can be used as a tool for public good.
Prior to that, Ayisha spent a decade in NYC government and policy spaces, focused on: leading grassroots organizing with students, leading leadership development work with current and former teachers, and advising elected officials on educational equity issues.
She holds a master’s in Policy and Applied Statistics from NYU and a bachelor’s in Biology from Brooklyn College.
Sahil Shah is a software engineer, and the Technologist in Residence at Augmented Intelligence Advisory. His work spans more than a decade of building and scaling systems across industries, including fraud detection, payments, search, and business analytics. He focuses on solving ambiguous problems, working across stakeholders, and delivering solutions that balance short-term iteration with long-term sustainability.
Sahil has held engineering roles at Meta Platforms, Workday, and Airbnb. At Airbnb.org, he was a technical lead on the org’s commitment to provide emergency housing to 100,000+ people displaced by disasters and conflict. This work reinforced his interest in applying technology to real-world needs.
He currently works as a software engineer at The New York Times, focusing on AI, data engineering, and digital archiving.
Sahil holds a degree in Computer Engineering from University of California San Diego.
Yissely Ortiz is Chief Programs Officer at Augmented Intelligence Advisory, where she leads program strategy, and designs educator and student-facing learning experiences at the intersection of AI, critical thinking, and educational equity.
She brings more than 15 years of cross-sector experience in leadership development, inclusive program design, and systems change. Yissely’s career spans private sector, nonprofit, and community-based work. Her work across the public and private sectors has enabled her to move fluidly between strategy and implementation, ensuring that programs are designed with the same care they are delivered.
At AIA, Yissely leads instructional design and facilitation across pilot sites, partnering with teachers, students, and community organizations to ensure that AI literacy work is grounded in everyday classrooms and real needs. She is driven by a conviction that the communities too often left out of new technology should be the first to shape how it is used.
Let’s talk about what comes next.
AI companies building for classrooms. Ed-tech platforms designing their next product. State agencies implementing new mandates. Foundations backing what comes after the hype. Districts and educators ready to stop watching and start building.
If that’s you, let’s talk.
Get in Touch →Audits · Advisory · Platform · Programs · Research