← ASU+GSV Summit
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. We are here at the ASU GSB Summit 2026 with a legendary edtech entrepreneur, Armand Jaffer, CEO and founder of Brisk Teaching. Welcome to the podcast.
- [00:17]
B
I'm so excited to be here.
- [00:18]
A
Yes. So, first off, you were the winner last year of the GSB Cup. Fan favorite. You're on the big, big shell. That was last year, right? Yeah.
- [00:26]
B
It feels like an eternity ago. I am not ready. Yeah.
- [00:30]
A
Tell us about what that meant to you. You've had a lot of wins in your entrepreneurial career, but what did that particular one mean to you?
- [00:37]
B
I think it was just a culmination of a lot of amazing moments over the course of that year. I think we really were seeing a lot of traction with teachers and students, and I feel like sometimes these awards are not necessarily. They don't feel like a whole separation from all the things that we're doing, but just a recognition of all the great work that the BRISK team has been doing. So it was a lot of fun. I got to meet Sal Khan, and I got to meet John McEnroe, the tennis player. So it's just such a wild. Such a wild event. You're like, was that even real? But okay, yeah, it was fun. That's good.
- [01:10]
A
I feel like that way sometimes about the ASU Summit. It goes so fast.
- [01:14]
B
So, like, I was in an elevator with Reed. You know, I was at a lunch yesterday with Reed Hastings, and I'm like, you're the founder of Netflix. Like, what are you doing here? It's like, such an interesting space.
- [01:24]
A
You never know who you're going to meet in the elevator. Exactly. Fever dream. Exactly. Right. So for those who do not know about BRISK Teaching, you're one of the fastest growth AI native edtech companies in. In the world. Tell us about what BRISK is and what you attribute some of that traction and growth to.
- [01:39]
B
Yeah. So BRISK is an AI tool for schools and districts. We've grown really quickly. We're used by over 2 million educators, 1 in 4 in the U.S. so we've really grown quickly, and I think that's thanks to a core mission that we have, which is to build instructional coherence directly into the tools that teachers and students use, rather than outside of it. And so we. We started with the browser extension because I had seen during the pandemic, working with educators, that they were bouncing between hundreds of different tools. And in some ways, the thing that an educator and a student need more than anything else is coherence across their curriculum, their data, the lms, and everything in between. And so we've been really able to focus on that mission of being able to drive in coherence across things. And that seems to have resonated with educators. Yeah.
- [02:22]
A
And you've also been quite relentless in a positive way at continuing to evolve the product, to launch new features, to expand the capabilities. Recently you've been announced Brisk Next, and you've had a lot of big product launches recently.
- [02:36]
B
Yeah, sure.
- [02:36]
A
Tell us about what the product looks like now and what you're most excited about.
- [02:39]
B
Yeah. So we think about BRISK as kind of this across the instructional cycle, whether there's an instructional maneuver, the distribution to students who need it, the assessment of impact and iteration. And so over the course of building brisk, we've kind of built these really powerful automations across the teacher and student workflows to really drive productive struggle with students. BRISK Next was our opportunity to say, we're already doing the creation of content, the differentiation, the assignment, the engagement with students, the assessment. What about taking all that really powerful data and really think about the thing that often is the hardest part is adaptation. What are the things that we've learned about the classroom and how can we Adapt there? So BriskNext, which we launched almost nine months ago, was our stab at building a web platform, which we had previously been an extension to build a web platform to really be able to capture that moment in the teacher's instructional journey, which is like, I've done a lot now. How do I learn from what I've done to take that next instructional maneuver? Since then, we've also really established this concept of classroom intelligence, which is this idea that BRISK is going to work where you work. And so beyond Google and Microsoft, which we have traditionally supported, and lmss, we've started to extend our tentacles into kahoot, and it's a nearpod. And so we're really thinking about how we can be in some ways the brain of a classroom, understanding the curriculum, understanding the assessment data, and being able to use those as almost forces of gravity to be able to drive instructional coherence no matter what tool you're using.
- [04:12]
A
Yes, that concept of coherence, both instructional coherency of the underlying curriculum coherence, but also coherence between all the tools. Yeah, and, you know, teachers know the number of tools, the number of platforms being used, has proliferated in the classroom. And having too many tabs open and too many tools and too many passwords is a real problem for a lot of educators.
- [04:30]
B
And it just takes. It's a. It's a cognitive task, attacks on what actually needs to happen in the classroom.
- [04:35]
A
Exactly. You have done some interesting marketing techniques. And recently, right before the summit this year, I saw a lot of Brisk street band stuff happening. I think this is a part of how you're announcing new things. What is the Brisk Street Band?
- [04:48]
B
I honestly, our marketing team is amazing. I'm so glad that I'm not a marketer. We have some really, really thoughtful people. And so for. For April Fruit Fools this year, we announced this, like, brisk street band, which we are not. We don't have a band, but we do have a bunch of. You know, the thing about starting a company that people don't tell you is like, you get to work with some of the people that you love the most and you get to do creative things and you get to try things, and some of them are funny and some of them you cringe after. So this was just like one of those moments where we were having a lot of fun with an April Fool's joke.
- [05:20]
A
Exactly.
- [05:20]
B
Yeah.
- [05:21]
A
So. So part of the. I think your vision of coherence is being able to touch more surface areas and bring them into the BR ecosystem. You've launched some really interesting things. You mentioned the nearpod integration, which is recent. You've also, you know, can read student handwriting, you can generate podcasts. You've sort of integrated a lot of the cutting edge AI functionality in the service of instruction. Sure. How do you see, as you see the AI world evolving so quickly, which aspects do you say, oh, we want that should be part of Brisk and which are you like that that's happening? We'll keep an eye on it. Someday we might come back to it?
- [05:55]
B
Well, I think, yeah, that's a great question. The way we think about it is. So our vision ultimately is to build an AI native edtech stack. I fundamentally think we have an incredibly fragmented system that EdTech has kind of implemented that takes students away from high quality instructional moments and productive struggle. And so in order to do that, we've decided to look at all of the different ways workflows of educators and the entire edtech stack. And we really think curriculum needs to be reimagined in the world of AI. We think that high quality instructional material is so, so important and we want to build a layer of AI on top of an HQIM to be able to drive instructional coherence. We're hearing a lot of teachers are using AI and sometimes it's without really consulting the curriculum that their districts have purchased. And it's really important to be able to use rigorous vetted content. And we say see AI as opportunity to build on top of some really high quality content, to be able to drive things like differentiation, to be able to think about making things culturally relevant. And we're already seeing a huge impact for districts that have implemented curriculum intelligence.
- [06:59]
A
Yeah. Final question for you. I think one of the other sort of maybe hidden victories of the BRISK story is that I think you brought a huge number of educators into the AI world in a way that feels instructionally sound, meaningful, effective, safe. People who may not otherwise be using AI on a daily basis are because of risk. And I'm curious what that looks like on the ground. I mean, when you hear from educators who have seen sort of, you know, been AI pilled through brisk, what does that look like? And what would you think for other founders who want to make sure that people aren't so afraid of AI that they never use their tool?
- [07:36]
B
I think what we've seen is teachers are able to be more strategic. Like, I think often there's a cognitive tax on things like grading, on creating variations of content to engage students. And what I see, especially in this world of agents, which I believe we're shifting towards, is really the educator as the orchestrator, as the strategist rather than the executor. And I think the reason why that's so important is often what I hear from educators is there was the tote bag of good intentions. All the things I know I should do that are important but not critical, not urgent. And those often don't get focused on enough. And so my hope with agents and what we're building on, our agentic architecture is being able to build out a framework to allow teachers to orchestrate agents, to be able to take away the routine work, to be able to introduce productive struggle back into the student workflow. One of the things I worry about with AI is agents are really good at flattening struggle and they're all about efficiency. And so I think student facing agents actually need to be purpose built to actually reintroduce productive struggle into the student work process. So we're really excited to be able to do that.
- [08:46]
A
Agents that challenge the student, that make it harder for them to do their work.
- [08:49]
B
Yeah, but they can't be, you know, the chat GPTs and stuff of the world, because that's just doing the absolute opposite of what they do for a student.
- [08:57]
A
Exactly. Yeah. Fascinating. Arman Jaffer, CEO and founder of BRISK Teaching thank you so much for being here with us at the summit.
- [09:05]
B
So much fun.