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One month out from the StartEd CEO Summit, Alan Todd sat down with Mary Michael Sellers, CEO of Scantron, for a conversation about what it actually takes to lead an ed tech company through the AI transition.

It's less about the technology than most people expect, and more about judgment, governance, and how you treat the people around you.

A few things that stood out:

On adoption: "This is not a time to rush." Scantron runs AI through a weekly cross-functional team that pressure-tests its own governance before rolling anything out. Adoption is deliberate, not reactive.

On managing a portfolio: Rather than force a bet, Mary Michael runs three tracks at once — analog, digital, and hybrid — and resists starving any one of attention. Her read on the market: demand for paper-based assessment is climbing again as institutions wrestle with cheating and AI fatigue. The customer, not the trend, sets the pace.

On leadership: A simple operating principle — when people feel good, they do good work — and a habit, carried from her years as a teacher, of treating every employee and customer as an individual to be served rather than a segment to be pushed.

On the next five years: Her hope for the CEO of 2030 is that the role stays fundamentally human — that the productivity AI unlocks buys back time for judgment, connection, and the work only people can do.

These are the same themes we'll be exploring with a small group of CEOs, investors, and operators at the StartEd CEO Summit at EdTech Week 2026.

If this is relevant to what you're building, you can learn more or request an invite here.