The AI Trust Chasm: What Can We Do To Bridge The Gap?
With guest Erin Mote
Do you trust AI? And if you don’t, what should you do? That’s the heart of this wide-ranging conversation between leading education policy advocate, Erin Mote, and Future Fluent’s Jeremy Roschelle and Betsy Corcoran. Interacting with AI, Erin says, is "like conversing with a brilliant person you cannot trust." But Erin doesn’t stop there. She’s got a treasure trove of ideas of how to build bridges over this gap, from more robust government policy, to checklists for school leaders before they adopt AI and, crucially, for parents who want to prepare their kids to live in this complex new world. Advocate, educator, Mom: Erin brings a rich perspective to the question of how are we going to learn to live with AI. Join us.
Erin Mote
Erin Mote is the CEO and Founder of InnovateEDU, a non-profit dedicated to radically accelerating innovation in education through "uncommon alliances." A researcher and enterprise architect, Erin leads the organization’s work on systemic change in special education, talent development, and data modernization. She and her team developed two of InnovateEDU’s signature technology products: Cortex, a personalized learning platform, and Landing Zone, a cutting-edge data infrastructure service.
Through her work at InnovateEDU, Erin helped establish the EDSAFE AI Alliance, a global coalition promoting the Safe, Accountable, Fair, and Efficacious (SAFE) use of AI in education. Under her leadership, EDSAFE provides policy advocacy at federal and state levels, a national network of district-level policy labs, and a groundbreaking fellowship program to build leadership capacity in the AI era.
A global leader in technology access, Erin co-founded Brooklyn Laboratory Charter School and served as the founding Chief of Party for the USAID Global Broadband and Innovations Alliance. She has served as a senior advisor to the White House/OSTP, the State Department, and the Obama Administration on global development and technology policy.
Erin serves on advisory boards for SXSW EDU, XPRIZE, Digital Promise, and the Barbara Bush Foundation. She is an Aspen Institute Socrates scholar and a proud alumna of the University of Michigan.
LEARN MORE!
Erin Mote shares loads of resources on LinkedIn. In addition, here are some of the resources that we talked about during this episode of Future Fluent.
Author and commentator April Rinne writes about how to navigate change. Check out her book, Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change (as well as some astonishing pictures of the scores of places she has done handstands!)
The Last Invention podcast goes through the 70-year history of artificial intelligence, including competing visions of utopia and apocalypse.
Get all the details about EdSafe AI, including its latest white paper, S.A.F.E. by Design: Policy, Research, and Practice Recommendations for AI Companions in Education
Super handy for school leaders: This checklist (created by EdSafe) of considerations around data governance and the ethical implementation of AI. It’s called: AI in Education: Negotiating for our Future - A Checklist for K12 Districts, Dec. 2025.
The AI Civil Rights Act of 2025 was introduced in the US Congress in December 2025 and is still in committee. A bill in the Florida state Senate mirrors the approach of the congressional bill and is moving faster. It aims to create strict, state-level guardrails for AI, directly challenging federal efforts to standardize regulations and positioning Florida as a leading, skeptical regulator of the technology.
