Can School Leaders Use an AI Agent?

I am ready to move on to my next level of use of Artificial Intelligence. I’ve been hearing a lot about AI Agents/Bots or AI companions. Dr. Nick Potkalitsky (such an Americanized Polish name 🙂 ) in his newsletter article titled “The Agent Problem: Why AI’s Latest Revolution is K-12’s Worst Nightmare” considers the next stage of artificial intelligence use and how it might impact schools. He refers to Ethan Mollick’s blog post, “A Guide to Which AI to Use in the Agentic Era“. Mollick’s premise is that chatting with an AI Large Language Model as a thought partner currently is the most common use of AI with most people. We are now moving to the Agentic Phase where an AI Agent will do your work instead of just providing advice. A tool like Claude’s CoWork runs on a desktop access your Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, etc., and do the work for you. It is replacing the role of an executive assistant. One challenge I see is a person’s exposure of their personal data handed over to the agent. A consenting adult allowing an agent into his/her digital worklife is one thing, but Potkalitsky wonders about K-12 students (minors) doing so as well. School’s current AI policies do not address AI agents doing the work.

None of them contemplate what happens when a student uses Claude Cowork to autonomously research and draft a history paper by reading their own files, browsing the web, and synthesizing across both, in a process that happens faster than a teacher can observe it and leaves no legible trace of how it happened.

Mollick’s advice for Claude users, “For Claude, you need to pick Opus 4.6 (though the new Sonnet 4.6 is also powerful, it is not quite as good) and turn on the “extended thinking” switch.” I want to start using an agent to do the mundane things of my workflow (set appointments / attach meeting notes to my meeting appointments in Google Calendar, etc.) and do some tedious research.

I listened to Ezra Klein’s interview with Anthropic Co-founder Jack Clark “How Fast Will AI Agents Rip Through the Economy” that gave me a better understanding of Claude’s CoWork. I am going to learn more about CoWork by listening to the podcast again and seek out YouTube videos or take a class about using AI agents.