AI specialist Matthew Winters compares artificial intelligence to laptops and lightbulbs. They’re all foundational technologies that become something much bigger when humans “plug in.”
This concept is key to the professional development he provides to teachers, administrators and other educators as the AI education specialist for the Utah State Board of Education.
“AI is a fundamental piece of our civilization and it’s going to continue to be a fundamental piece,” says Winters, a featured speaker at the 2026 Future of Education Technology Conference.
Winters’ agency received a $500,000 grant from a health management organization to train thousands of Utah teachers to use AI. The goal was to enroll 2,000 teachers; as of late summer, around 5,000 had participated in the PD.
Training often starts with alleviating teachers’ fears, says Winters, who was named a DA 100 top influencer in education.
“They’re afraid of losing their job, because AI is going to take it from them,” he explains. “I don’t think AI will ever be able to replace a human fully, especially in a context of a classroom, because there’s so much happening there from a human standpoint.”
Winters can usually convince teachers that only humans can tend to students’ social-emotional or make connections between content areas that may elude a machine.
Not surprisingly, teachers are also concerned about cheating, which, Winters argues, is more of an administrative issue. “I’ve had a lot of great conversations with students across the country and they admit, yeah, they’re cheating, but they don’t know that they’re cheating, because there’s no policy in place.”
He acknowledges that more research is needed into the efficacy of AI in education. Still, many educators are convinced of its relevance when they compare the rapid speed of adoption of generative AI compared to other now ubiquitous technologies, such as the car, the calculator and the cellphone.
“Then we gently nudge them toward, ‘How can this be used in your classroom to meet things that you’ve never been able to do before?'” he said. “And so we get them to creativity, and then they naturally move to, ‘How can I meet the needs of all of my students, and how can AI help me to do that from a variety of different perspectives?'”
Winters has received some jaw-dropping responses when teachers have been asked to evaluate the impact of the training. “We’ve had several teachers say in that reflection piece, ‘I was going to quit education this year, and this has helped me to see that I don’t have to do it all on my own, that I can do things that are really interesting and engaging, and really build myself up in my classroom again.'”
‘Portrait of an AI-Ready Student’
Winters believes he was the first state AI specialist in the country, though a handful of other states have now followed suit. In the role, he also works with national and state leaders on AI policies and helps districts and charter schools adopt AI.
He believes all districts, schools and even individual teachers need to have polices about how—not whether—students use AI. That opens the door for teachers to start to use AI as a powerful productivity tool.
He and his team are about to release Portrait of a Graduate-style frameworks called “Portrait of an AI-Ready Student” and “Portrait of an AI-Ready Teacher.” Teachers, students, administrators and community members contributed to the project.
Matthew Winters’ FETC sessions
- From Vision to Action: Utah’s AI for K-12 Program
- State of AI: Statewide Blueprints for System-Wide Implementation
- Mapping the Future: A Visual Guide to AI Implementation Across Utah Schools
More from FETC 2026: Change management strategies for IT leaders
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