During our AI Strategy Lab project, School IRL, I was the team member responsible for 4 main parts of our project: the problem our idea would help solve, the opportunity behind it, the business model development, and the clickable mock-up creation. In practice, this meant that my contribution was to take our original idea, an app where students point their phone at everyday objects and get lessons linked to their curriculum, and turn it into a feasible project that can be argued with numbers and evidence, explained with the course frameworks.
I started by showing that the problem was real. To be able to prove that school budget cuts resulting in fewer school trips were a current and real problem, I opted for the most recent data I could find. That resulted in some research interactions. I had first found information that half of US schools eliminated field trips in 2010 and 2011 (Greene et al., 2014). It supported our story and app idea, however, it was fifteen years old. After looking for other sources, I decided to replace it with Sutton Trust and NFER Surveys from 2023, 2025, and 2026, which were much more recent and showed that around half of the school leaders in England were cutting trips, increasing to 68% in the most disadvantaged schools. Besides updating a date, those figures showed that real-world learning is rationed by money, and that became one of the core pillars of our argument: AI can make experiential learning scalable rather than rationed. The lesson for me was that an evidence or number can be accurate and still not support the claim you are making.
When it comes to the business model strategy, I realized at the beginning that I was mainly writing a description of the app rather than a business model. So then, I turned to the Session 2 material of the course, which guided me better and made me realize that I was not using some of the course’s concepts, such as AI position and defensibility. Rewriting the slide around this material changed how I understood our own idea. For example, choosing an AI position was less obvious than I thought it would be. We placed School IRL as a Modular Creator because each object scan assembles a lesson from that object, topic, and grade level, and the AI assists rather than replaces the teacher. With that, I learned that the frameworks do not hand you obvious answers, they force you to reflect on your idea, take a position, and defend it. Still, I would say defensibility was the hardest question, since it was tempting to say the AI was our advantage, but AI image recognition technology is available to anyone. After carefully thinking about it, our answer was that the advantage sits in a curriculum-tagged object library that improves with every scan and teacher rating, and in the teacher workflow that makes switching costly.
The prototype is where our plan changed the most. Our first plan was a small experiment with real image recognition, a fixed curriculum table, and teachers rating AI-generated lessons. Given the deadline, we scaled it down to a clickable mock-up with pre-loaded photos and simulated AR. In our first mock-up version, the teachers’ dashboard and tools, and the students’ tools and functionalities were in the same app interface, however, for the teachers’ tools, a password was required, so that students wouldn’t have access to it. After receiving feedback, we realised students found it confusing that they couldn’t access some tools and were unsure about which password the app was requiring. As a result, I decided to change the mock-up and have two separate interfaces, one for students and one for teachers and their respective tools. The way this worked was by adding one starting page that would require an email and password, and would have two buttons saying “Log in as Student’’ and “Log in as a Teacher”. Depending on the login details and button clicked, the user would access their corresponding interface. That made the app feel more intuitive and less puzzling for students.
What surprised me most was that, while building the mock-up, I realized how much the concept of the app depended on small interaction details. The first version of the AR page/screen looked more like an annotated picture rather than actual augmented reality. Then I realized that a picture capture button contradicted our own AR idea. If students have to take a picture, it is just a camera app, not an AR technology app, where students just keep pointing their phone at any object and angle, and the lesson will appear as an overlay. So, pointing at an object without taking a picture is much closer to what we promised. Design choices I had seen as superficial turned out to carry strategy.
Working in a team showed me the limits of my own strategy understanding, for example, at first I thought that the cost of one extra lesson was close to zero and didn’t take into consideration any other factor that could influence this. However, my teammate writing about the economics of our app showed that this only holds if they behave as expected, if they spam-scan random objects, API costs can rise quickly. This sharing of ideas and perspectives within the team made the project much more enriching for me.
To conclude, before this project, I would have assumed that the technology is both the product and the sustainable competitive advantage. After this project, I see it the other way round. The AI capability can quickly become a commodity, and strategy is about what you build around it and how you create value: data that improves over time, a workflow people come to rely on and trust between people who use it. AI is only the starting point, and that’s how this project changed my understanding of AI and business strategy.
References:
Trust, S. (2024b, February 8). School funding and pupil premium 2023 – The Sutton Trust. The Sutton Trust. https://www.suttontrust.com/our-research/school-funding-and-pupil-premium-2023/
Lewis.Tibbs, & Lewis.Tibbs. (2026b, April 22). New poll reveals schools facing further painful spending cuts. The Sutton Trust. https://www.suttontrust.com/news-opinion/all-news-opinion/new-poll-reveals-schools-facing-further-painful-spending-cuts/
Gcarter, & Gcarter. (2025b, April 9). New poll reveals major increase in cash-strapped schools cutting staff. The Sutton Trust. https://www.suttontrust.com/news-opinion/all-news-opinion/new-poll-reveals-major-increase-in-cash-strapped-schools-cutting-staff/
Greene, J.P., Kisida,B.,&Bowen, D.H. (2024). The educational value of field trips. Education Next, 14 (1),78-86. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289374487_The_Educational_Value_of_Field_Trips
