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🔹 TL;DR – My ISTE 2025 Trip

• I went to ISTE 2025 to see where educators really are with AI.
• NZ’s AI conversation felt too small for the pace of global change.
• My book became a bridge into international discussions.
• Travel created enough perspective to reset assumptions.
• This post begins a three-part retrospective on ISTE 2025 AI in Education.

Why I Went to San Antonio – ISTE 2025 AI in Education

Earlier this year, I flew from Taupō to San Antonio for ISTE 2025 — one of the largest education technology gatherings in the world. It was my first international trip in years, and the first time I’d arrived at a global event carrying a book I’d written about AI and the future of learning.

I landed in the Texas heat, checked into a hotel overlooking the San Antonio skyline, and collected a parcel waiting for me at reception — a box of advance copies of Education Is Over. Adapt or Die. The symbolism wasn’t subtle: the work had reached the world before I had.

At the time, I knew this trip mattered.

What I didn’t yet realise was how much it would shape the rest of my year — and my trajectory in AI in education.

People often ask why I went.

The short answer is: visibility.

The longer answer is more interesting — and, frankly, more honest.

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1. New Zealand feels small when you work in AI

I love Aotearoa, but anyone working in technology or education knows the feeling: our systems are good at stability, but not at speed. AI doesn’t care about national borders, policy cycles, or sector committees. It moves quickly, breaks patterns, and rewires expectations before the ink is dry on the latest “draft strategy.”

By early 2025, it was clear that my work in AI for education had outgrown the domestic conversations. I’d been writing, building, and advising for years, but I hadn’t yet stepped into a space where the global conversation was happening in real time.

ISTE was that space.

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2. I needed to understand where educators actually are with AI

There’s a big gap between what people say about AI and what they’re actually doing. Some teachers are experimenting. Some are nervous. Some are already using AI in ways their institutions haven’t even begun to consider.

I wanted to see the real landscape — not policy statements, not media angles, but educators on the ground figuring things out. Walking into ISTE meant walking into thousands of micro-conversations about what’s working, what’s not, and what’s emerging.

For someone who builds tools, writes frameworks, and works with organisations trying to move at the speed of technology, this was essential. You can’t meaningfully contribute to the future of AI in education without standing in the room where those future-shaping pressures are actually being felt.

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3. The book needed to leave the country before I did

A few months before the trip, I’d finished Education Is Over. Adapt or Die — a short, sharp field guide for educators who can feel the ground shifting beneath them.

I wrote it because the conversations I was having across New Zealand were starting to loop: people worrying about change, unsure what to do next, waiting for permission, hoping for clarity.

The book wasn’t meant to be academic or diplomatic. It was meant to be useful.

Bringing it to ISTE was the real test. Would the ideas resonate internationally? Would they push back? Would the tone translate? As it turned out, the book became a conversation starter — a calling card — and a surprisingly efficient way to signal what kind of work I wanted to do next: direct, practical, slightly provocative, but always grounded in helping educators adapt.

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4. Stepping out of routine resets your perspective

Travel has a funny way of forcing reflection. It empties your days of familiarity and replaces them with small frictions: navigating airports, adjusting to 40-degree heat, getting lost, turning up in rooms where you know no one.

In those spaces of mild disorientation, you see your own work more clearly.

San Antonio created just enough distance from the New Zealand education ecosystem to expose assumptions I’d been carrying, patterns I’d been reinforcing, and ideas that were ready to be retired. It also surfaced something else: a sense that the next decade of my work was going to be fundamentally different.

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5. I needed to test myself in a bigger arena

There’s a moment in any career where you have to stop wondering whether you can contribute at an international level and actually show up to find out.

San Antonio was that moment for me.

Not because I expected a breakthrough, but because I needed the calibration. How did my ideas sound in a global conversation? How did they sit alongside others? Was I too early, too late, or simply seeing something different?

Those questions aren’t answered in your own office.

They’re answered when you stand in a conference room in Texas with a badge around your neck and realise nobody knows who you are — and it’s up to you to change that.

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6. The real reason: the work was changing, and I was changing with it

Sometimes a trip isn’t just travel.

Sometimes it’s a line in the sand between who you were and who you’re becoming.

San Antonio was that line.

It reset my perspective, shifted my work onto a global footing, and sparked a sequence of opportunities and projects — in New Zealand and internationally — that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.

In the next part of this retrospective, I’ll look at what was actually happening inside ISTE 2025: the tools, the conversations, the unexpected gaps, and the very real signals about where AI in education is heading.

And after that, I’ll turn to the human side of the conference — the encounters, the moments between sessions, and the quiet reflections that only happen when you’re thousands of kilometres from home.

This is Part I.

Part II comes next.

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