as part of our ETIH Innovation Award 2026 In our Category Spotlight series, we take a closer look at the categories that make up this year’s first awards. With over 140 entries submitted, the breadth and quality of innovation across the EdTech space is evident.
This category focuses on AI-powered solutions developed in the United States and Canada, and winners will be announced on May 11th.
Where AI moves from experimentation to application
The Best AI-Powered EdTech Solutions (US and Canada) focuses on platforms that apply artificial intelligence across learning, teaching, and operational environments. This includes tools that support personalization, process automation, insight generation, and more informed decision-making.
The judges are looking for evidence that AI is being applied in real-world educational settings, rather than remaining in the experimental stage. This includes how effectively the platform is integrated into workflows, how measurable outcomes are clearly demonstrated, and how AI is responsibly deployed.
This category reflects a shift from the use of exploratory AI to solutions that deliver consistent and scalable impact across educational institutions, classrooms, and support systems.
finalist
2U (Expert Learning Assistant)
Xpert Learning Assistant (Xpert LA) is an AI-powered academic support tool built directly into online learning that 2U has developed for more than 5,300 courses. It provides real-time course-specific guidance based on modules, assignments, and readings, helping to address student disengagement when timely assistance is not available. Since launching in 2023 and expanding in 2026, Xpert LA has helped connect millions of learners around the world. Providing contextual support while maintaining instructor oversight increases learner engagement, homework completion, and course performance, demonstrating how AI can improve learning experiences and outcomes without replacing instructors.
boodle box
BoodleBox is the first AI platform purpose-built to make higher education AI-native. Launching in August 2024, we will deliver multi-model AI, including GPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, and NVIDIA Nemotron, in a single managed environment across 116+ institutions, from R1 research universities to HBCUs and community colleges. Our unique infrastructure reduces AI token consumption by up to 96%, making unlimited access fair and affordable at scale. 18 months later: $3.4 million in full CARR growth, 594% year over year growth, 175% net revenue retention, and 10,491 monthly active users up 342% year over year. BoodleBox not only brings AI to campuses, but also leverages AI to build measurable and verifiable human capabilities for instruction.
CheckIT LMS (Cleo AI Mentor)
CheckIT LMS is an AI-powered EdTech ecosystem built to address student disengagement, reduce teacher workload, and expand the role of AI beyond simple content automation. By combining neuroscience principles with advanced classroom management features, it provides personalized learning experiences for K-12 students while simplifying lesson planning, scheduling, and grading for educators. CheckIT LMS, along with Cleo, a neuroscience-trained AI mentor, translates decades of neuroscience research into actionable strategies that make learning meaningful, personal, and inspiring. CheckIT LMS is Responsibly Designed AI certified by Digital Promise, committed to ensuring that technology respects children’s individuality and healthy brain development.
dream college.ai
DreamCollege.ai is an AI-powered college admissions counseling co-pilot that provides end-to-end personalized guidance through a human-AI collaboration model. By blending human college admissions expertise with advanced AI agents, the platform integrates each student’s unique academic profile, activities, strengths, interests, and aspirations to generate optimal major and college list recommendations, extracurricular activities and scholarship strategies, and AI-guided essay support. Students gain clear direction, less stress, and better-coordinated results. Counselors can scale personalized guidance across large caseloads while maintaining quality and without burnout. Schools are empowered to provide consistent, unbiased, and high-impact university instruction without replacing human expertise.
Explorance (MLY)
Explorance MLY is an AI-powered qualitative analytics platform developed using a proprietary model and continuously refined to help higher education institutions turn open-ended student, faculty, and staff feedback into actionable insights. MLY is trained on millions of real student and employee comments and leverages proprietary machine learning models to classify reactions, detect sentiment, highlight recommendations, and flag important issues while protecting sensitive information. Contextualized analysis ensures comments are clearly interpreted in the context of measuring the student and employee experience. MLY enables institutions to responsibly and accurately scale qualitative insights, supporting data-driven decision-making that drives engagement, inclusion, and academic excellence.
First student (HALO)
HALO is a first-of-its-kind technology platform built to address fragmented systems in K-12 school transportation and create safer, smarter, and more connected experiences for students, families, drivers, and school districts. HALO combines advanced AI, real-time data, and predictive analytics in one system to drive safety and efficiency while providing school districts, school administration, and families with visibility into student attendance. This K-12 transportation platform brings together every aspect of your operations, from AI-powered cameras, route guidance, payroll, vehicle tracking and navigation, student safety, and driver training, into a single integrated platform.
Melo Speech (CMSP:B-5)
Communication Milestone Screening Protocol: Birth to Five (CMSP:B-5) by Melospeech (hosted at screen2report dot com) is an AI-powered tool that helps early childhood educators quickly identify critical early childhood communication delays. CMSP:B-5 automates milestone analysis and report generation in under two minutes, reducing assessment backlogs, increasing efficiency, and enabling earlier intervention. Validated against the Developmental Assessment of Young Children, Second Edition (DAYC-2), it has an 83.82% agreement rate and an average of 2.4 months earlier detection, allowing professionals to spend more time with children and families. Accessible and affordable, CMSP:B-5 brings innovation, equity, and scalability to early childhood education around the world.
metafoodox
Metafoodx is an AI-powered food intelligence platform that helps foodservice operators reduce overproduction, improve planning accuracy, and advance sustainability goals through automated food measurement and analysis. Metafoodx uses computer vision, temperature sensing, and integrated menu data to replace manual waste tracking with fast, consistent data collection across manufacturing and post-consumer stages. The platform provides actionable insights at the menu item level, allowing teams to plan more accurately, reduce unnecessary production, and document sustainability impacts without increasing operational burden. Metafoodx will be deployed across higher education and hospitality facilities to help reduce visible waste while maintaining food quality, safety and dining experience.
Syllabyte AI
Syllabyte is an AI-powered content intelligence platform that transforms how educational publishers operate at scale. By automating standards alignment, metadata enrichment, and accessibility auditing to ensure that AI-generated content is built on validated, curriculum-aligned sources, Syllabyte provides the responsible AI infrastructure required by modern educational publishing. In partnership with Vista Higher Learning, the platform replaced fragmented manual processes with integrated AI-assisted workflows, resulting in 65% cost savings and 57% faster delivery cycles, while improving consistency across content libraries. Controlled by human experts and providing fully auditable output every step of the way, Syllabyte allows education publishers to confidently leverage and scale AI to transform content operations into a competitive advantage.
TalkingPoints (Message Mentor)
TalkingPoints is a national nonprofit organization that uses artificial intelligence to strengthen partnerships between schools and families to improve student outcomes. The AI-powered platform enables educators and families to communicate in more than 150 languages and provides research-based guidance to help families support learning at home. Platform features like Message Mentor use generative AI to help educators craft positive, effective messages that build trust and engagement. In the 2024-2025 school year alone, TalkingPoints supported 9,288,894 students, families, and educators across the country, helping schools increase attendance, strengthen learning outcomes, and strengthen family-school partnerships, especially in historically under-resourced areas.
Check the entire shortlist
You can explore the entire ETIH Innovation Award 2026 shortlist to see the companies and platforms that are shaping this year’s awards. Winners will be announced on May 11th.
