As AI accelerates through every industry, education leaders are facing a pivotal decision moment.

The best advice is to stop thinking it’s going to be a choice in schools of using AI by teachers or students -- or not at all. It’s going to be used in teaching and learning and already is at scale. It’s also not so simple as buying AI as licenses to frameworks around a large language model (LLM) only.

The real choice is between AI as a tool or AI as an infrastructure. A fork, but then a forked fork. Forking to the infrastructure choice, routines and norms can fork again and again to change how schooling is managed with a multiplicity of systems and the very nature of schools becoming something never seen before.

Districts nationwide report heavy experimentation with AI add-ons inside LMS platforms, productivity widgets, and teacher-facing content helpers. Yet Learning Counsel research shows that 82% of districts are unsure whether these tools meaningfully shift the underlying structure of schooling—or simply place new technology atop a century-old operating model.

Beneath the noise, two distinct paths are emerging. They share the word “AI,” but the long-term consequences couldn’t be more different.

Path 1: Teacher-Only AI Tools--Convenient Start, But Confining Long-Term

In a 2025–2026 national survey of curriculum and technology leaders, the majority (67%) said their first AI investments went directly to teacher-facing assistants. These tools are attractive because they promise time savings: faster lesson generation, rubric automation, translation support, student-help chat, and more.

But as Learning Counsel research has repeatedly documented, tools inside LMS or LMS-lite platforms tend to reinforce the factory model:

• Teachers remain the point-of-distribution.
• Whole-group pacing dominates.
• Master schedules remain fixed.
• Class rosters remain rigid.
• “Personalization” remains a thin layer of branching logic.

Education leaders report a paradox: AI makes teachers faster, but it does not make schools adaptive. Convenience increases, but logistics remain unchanged. Students move only as fast as the structure lets them.

Path 2: The Institutional Orchestrator--AI as the Mind of the Enterprise

The second path is emerging in only a small fraction of U.S. districts—but its trajectory mirrors transformations seen in healthcare, manufacturing, and fintech. Instead of just a tool or only embedding AI inside applications, AI becomes the coordinating intelligence above and between all systems.

This ideology, is already being done in places like Llano Independent School District, has a name: Omni-AI. It’s the focus of the Omni-AI Alliance.

In an Omni-AI model, the institution does not buy just tools but parts to an entire engine. The institution becomes AI-driven, perhaps starting with a teaching and learning tool that has a growth path -- like Brainfreeze.ai.

Above a tool, is something known as the orchestrator layer—referred to by Learning Counsel analysts as the “mind of the enterprise.” Ideally, this is the thing-of-things education leaders have always dreamed of machines could do for schooling, perhaps something they haven’t had the capacity to dream about because they never thought those things would always be a human burden.

An Omni-AI can perform functions teacher tools cannot:

• Schools gain control panels with toggleable restrictions, explicit keyword filters, and safety parameters -- real governance controls for safe, compliant AI use
• Workflow routing across SIS, LMS, HR, Finance, and content repositories
• Recommending the right courseware into a lesson, courseware already owned and running a separate system entirely
• Institutional-level analytics that are impossible inside siloed systems
• Real-time staffing allocation
• Dynamic student cohorting based on real-time progress
• Automated path/pace/place orchestration
• Fractionalized teacher time allocation
• Live schedule recomposition around late buses, other factors
• Alerts from one major system about another, and cross-hatching information to make recommendations to educators

Instead of platforms generating the workflow, AI generates the workflow and platforms plug into it.

This is the architecture that allows districts to escape the legacy school schedule and support 100% personalized paths without overwhelming staff.

It’s real possibility is helping schools to stop closing under-enrolled schools and instead fall back to less rooms used until, or if, they are ever needed again. Meanwhile, renting them out or selling space could save the thing families want to save, their neighborhood school and community.

Most importantly, it provides what CTOs and CIOs have been begging for: visibility, traceability, and control instead of “black box.”

Enter BrainFreeze and Its Parent, Airia

This company, Brainfreeze and its parent, Airia, comes from working with big banks, big healthcare, and then a big heart. The CEO, John Marshall, has children. He opened a school, Basecamp 305 in Miami. He built an AI platform for teachers, and he trained them all well. It’s a great school -- but the untapped power above that is the orchestration that Marshall’s company Airia can do that districts need immediately behind their use of Brainfreeze to get to enterprise-level management.

At first glance, BrainFreeze, a teacher-facing AI platform appears to be simply a more advanced alternative to consumer-grade AI tools. Districts testing it in 2026 report that it far exceeds standard chatbots because it ingests IEPs, student profiles, rubrics, and teacher preferences—producing contextualized outputs unlike anything on the open market.

But here is where it gets interesting: Brainfreeze is built for an AI orchestrator layer, meaning:

• It sits above and coordinates all institutional pathways, not just instruction.
• It can draw from multiple LLMs, not a single opaque model.
• Districts can decide:
  – Which model responds to which type of request
  – How much student data an LLM can see
  – What phrases or content types are blocked
  – What auditing and logs are required

In short, Airia takes the “black box” out of AI governance.

This matters because in Learning Counsel’s November 2025 survey of 2,300 administrators, 91% said that “lack of transparency and control” was their top concern with AI tools. Teachers want power; institutions want boundaries. Airia’s architecture is one of the first to offer both.

BrainFreeze, then, is simply the teacher-facing surface. Airia is the enterprise brain beneath it.

Districts evaluating orchestrator strategies report three reasons Airia stands out:

1. Multi-LLM Choice
   No single model meets every instructional or legal requirement. Airia’s ability to route requests to different models based on sensitivity, use case, or content type is a major shift.
2. Governability and Safety
   Keyword controls, customizable restrictions, compliance reporting, and audit trails address core district fears about liability.
3. Enterprise Orchestration, Not Just Instructional AI
   Because Airia’s architecture is built for logistics—cohorting, scheduling, pathway routing—it aligns with the future of Time AI and the collapse of factory-model structures.

A Fork, Not a Feature

As AI accelerates, leaders face a decision that will define the next decade of schooling:

• Use AI as a teacher tool?
  You accelerate the factory model, but with no path to upgrade and change structures.
• Adopt AI as the enterprise orchestrator?
  You can exit the factory model, create an AI enterprise.

BrainFreeze and Airia enter the landscape at exactly the moment districts are waking up to the limits of bolt-on teacher tools. A whole lot of AI literacy work is being done, most of it to teach what not to do. With Omni-AI, the conversation becomes AI fluency, a level of human-centered learning with far less guardrails.

The Brainfreeze and Airia combined architecture represents what analysts believe will become standard in the next generation of schooling: AI that is governable, explainable, multi-model, and institution-wide.

More importantly, we report that the saving of schools and districts may already depend on this construct of how AI needs to enter schools.

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Learning Counsel on location in Miami for a demo, August 2026