When the Los Angeles Unified School District rolled out an AI chatbot nicknamed “Ed” district-wide in March, district officials touted it as a revolutionary new tool made possible only by generative AI: a personal assistant that can suggest tailored resources and challenges for each student, and playfully nudge and encourage them to keep learning.
But last month, a few months after its much-anticipated public launch event, the district abruptly shut down the Ed Chatbot after AllHere Education, the contractor that built the system, abruptly laid off most of its staff, citing financial difficulties. The company had raised more than $12 million in venture capital and its five-year contract with the district was for about $6 million over five years, about half of which had already been paid to the company.
It’s not yet clear what happened. LAUSD officials declined EdSurge’s request for an interview, and AllHere officials did not respond to a request for comment about the company’s future. A statement from the district said “several education technology companies have expressed interest in acquiring” AllHere to keep it afloat, but no specifics have been announced.
Technology leader for the second largest school district in the nation He told the Los Angeles Times Some information from the education system remains available to students and families, albeit not in chatbot form. But it was the chatbot that was touted as the main innovation, and it relied on AllHere’s human moderators to monitor some of the chatbot’s output, but those moderators are no longer actively working on the project.
Some edtech experts contacted by EdSurge say the collapse of cutting-edge AI tools offers lessons for other schools and universities working to harness generative AI. Most of those lessons, they say, center on a more difficult element than many realize: the challenge of collecting and protecting data.
An ambitious attempt to link systems
When AllHere leaders demoed the Ed Chatbot to EdSurge in March, the company was doing well and had been featured in Time magazine’s “Top Edtech Companies in the World in 2024Company leaders were most proud of the way the chatbot works across dozens of technology tools the school system uses.
“Ed’s first order of business was how to create a unified learning space that would bring together all of our digital tools and reduce the number of clicks students had to navigate through all of them,” Joanna Smith-Griffin, who was the company’s CEO at the time (she is no longer with the company, according to a statement from the Los Angeles Unified School District).
But this kind of data integration hasn’t been the company’s focus until now: its main expertise has been building chatbots “designed to mimic real-life conversations and respond with empathy and humor based on each student’s needs at the time,” according to its website.
Michael Feldstein, a longtime education technology consultant, said that from the moment he first heard about Ed Chatbot, he felt the project was too ambitious for a small startup to take on.
“To do the work they promised, they needed to pull together information about students from a number of IT systems,” he said. “This is the proverbial hard part of edtech.”
Feldstein estimates it could cost 10 times what AllHere was paid to build a chatbot that could seamlessly pull data from nearly all of a school’s key learning resources, as unveiled at a splashy press conference in March.
“There’s no evidence that they had experience as a systems integrator,” he said of AllHere. “It’s not clear that they had the expertise.”
In fact, a former AllHere engineer reportedly sent emails to school district leaders warning them that the company wasn’t handling student data in accordance with privacy best practices. Article from The 74was the publication that first reported AllHere’s collapse. According to the report, Chris Whiteley told state and school district officials that the way the Ed chatbot handled student records put the data at risk of being hacked. (A statement from the school district defended its privacy practices, saying, “Throughout the development of the Ed platform, the Los Angeles Unified School District closely vetted the platform to ensure it complies with applicable privacy laws and regulations, as well as the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Data Security and Privacy Policy, and AllHere is contractually obligated to do the same.”)
LAUSD’s data systems have faced recent intrusions that appear to be unrelated to the Ed chatbot project. Last month, hackers Selling millions of records It was stolen from LAUSD on the dark web for $1,000, and there was also a data breach from Snowflake, the data warehouse provider used by LAUSD. Allegedly stealing millions of student recordsIncluding participants from the local area. Recent Snowflake Breach It may have also had an impact on LAUSD and other technology companies that partner with the school.
“LAUSD manages a tremendous amount of sensitive data, and if LAUSD’s integrated data system were to be compromised, it could potentially impact a huge number of individuals,” Doug Levin, co-founder and national director of the K12 Security Information Exchange, said in an email interview. He said he’s waiting for the district to share more information about what’s happening. “What I’m most interested in is understanding whether any of LAUSD’s edtech vendors have been compromised, and if so, whether other customers of those vendors are at risk,” he said. “If that happens, this will become a national issue.”
Meanwhile, what happens to all the student data in the Ed chatbot?
According to a statement released by LAUSD, “All student data belonging to the district and stored on the Ed Platform will continue to be subject to the same privacy and data security protections regardless of what happens to the AllHere company.”
A copy of the contract between AllHere and LAUSD, obtained by EdSurge under a public records request, states that all data from the project “shall remain the exclusive property of LAUSD.” The contract also includes a clause that states AllHere “will remove any targeted student information upon the request of the School District.”
Rob Nelson, executive director of academic technology and planning at the University of Pennsylvania, said the situation creates new risks.
“Do they have the appropriate technical measures in place to ensure that data is secure and that it’s not leaked or something done intentionally by an employee?” Nelson asked.
Lessons learned
James Wylie, vice president of education market research firm List EdTech, said he would have advised AllHere to seek out a partner with experience handling and managing data.
His reaction when he saw a copy of the contract between the school district and AllHere was, “Why would I sign up for this?”, adding that “some of the data we need to run this chatbot isn’t even in the contract.”
Wiley said school officials may not have realized how difficult the kind of data integration they were looking for would be. “I think schools and universities often don’t realize how complex their data structures are,” he added. “And they assume the vendor is going to come in and say, ‘It’s here and here.'” But it’s never that simple, he said.
“Building the holy grail of data-driven, personalized achievement tools is hard work,” he added. “It’s a noble goal, but we need to understand what we have to do to get there.”
For him, the biggest lesson for other schools and universities is to thoroughly consider their data systems before embarking on a large-scale AI project.
“It’s a cautionary tale,” he concluded. “AI is not a silver bullet here. You have to get your environment in order before you bring in AI.”
For Penn’s Nelson, the big lesson from this unfolding saga is that when it comes to developing generative AI tools, it’s too early to scale a single idea across an entire school district or college campus.
Rather than betting millions of dollars, he said, “Let’s invest $10,000 in five teacher-based projects, listen to teachers, and learn how these tools work.”
