AI that listens: Building educator-centered AI tools on AWS

The number of K-12 educators who use artificial intelligence (AI) is growing quickly, with many turning to AI assistants for timely and reliable insights into student performance. By eliminating administrative tasks and simplifying data analysis, these emerging tools enable teachers to focus on what matters most: supporting student growth.

In the 2025-26 school year, Otus, a leading K-12 student data and assessment solution, will empower 1,165 administrators and 8,579 educators to maximize outcomes for over 106,000 students with its assistant. Putting AI into everyday practice helps these districts capitalize on the reliable data foundations they already have in place and integrate the information into effective classroom strategies.

Innovating around the educator experience

Because two of the Otus co-founders are former educators themselves, they know teachers want to allocate as much time and resources as possible toward students rather than technology. With this in mind, they designed their AI assistant to focus on solving the real challenges teachers and school leaders face every day, not to chase trends.

Otus utilizes a robust architecture powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver its suite of AI capabilities. Key components in the development of AI Insights included Amazon Bedrock and Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock in support of large language model (LLM)-powered features such as automated content moderation and real-time Q&A functionality.

Not only do teachers and administrators need to be able to ask questions in real time, they want to phrase them in everyday language, using prompts such as “Are there any early warning signs of students who may need additional intervention?” or “Which students meet the criteria for chronic absenteeism this semester?” Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL enables advanced natural language search capabilities and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) functions through vector storage and semantic query processing for enhanced content discovery.

In education settings, accuracy and privacy safeguards are crucial, and districts are reassured by Otus AI’s capability—backed by Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)—to enable secure, resilient storage of student performance data and learning artifacts.

And because cost is always top of mind for edtech companies that serve schools, Otus uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Auto Scaling Features to provide scalable computing power to handle live classroom environments and data-intensive analytics.

Clean, connected data to tackle collective challenges

Since its launch more than a decade ago, Otus’ platform has supported over 2.5 million students. Its software provides solutions for data-driven decisions around everything from early literacy to college and career readiness at a scale that districts would not be able to achieve using manual analysis. For example, more than 185 million standards have been assessed using Otus, and from the 2022-23 to the 2024-25 school year, the number increased by 135%.

At the classroom level alone, during the 2024-25 school year, teachers administered 12.2 million assessments using Otus—a 10% increase from the 11.1 million given the year before. This growth demonstrates the benefits of a tool that simplifies assessment creation, grading, and feedback while also giving educators in-the-moment insights so they can more efficiently personalize instruction—all of which leads to improved learning outcomes.

Teachers using Otus report saving hours each week by streamlining time-consuming tasks including communication with families and lesson planning. The platform’s clear data summaries facilitate differentiation, allowing teachers to tailor their approach to each student or to groups of students with similar needs. Unsurprisingly, educators with access to these tools to help manage their workload report higher job satisfaction.

For administrators who need to stay on top of complex trends at the individual, classroom, school, and district level, synthesizing a wealth of comprehensive, complete data in seconds using AI Insights is invaluable.

“One of the things that really excites me about AI in schools is the ability to monitor data 24/7 and notice things that we, as humans, might overlook,” said Director of Innovation, Teaching, and Learning Patrick Dawson of Winnetka Public Schools in Illinois, an Otus partner. “With chronic absenteeism, AI can synthesize a lot of data and potentially indicate where we should lean in because of an early indicator we missed.”

Not only can AI Insights help educators and administrators identify areas of concern early, it can generate recommendations for action. Because the Otus platform brings together academic, demographic, behavioral, and assessment data, its AI can deliver insights on everything from equity to teacher effectiveness to resource allocation to financial and ROI analysis.

Otus recognized AI’s potential early on. Starting in 2015, just a year after the company’s founding, its leaders were engaging with experts in the field, and in 2017 it established its partnership with AWS, ensuring a reliable, scalable foundation for its AI efforts. By 2024, Otus had gathered a dedicated team to research and shape Otus AI and an advisory board to guide its strategy.

“Otus is embedding AI into key aspects of the platform to adapt to the needs of all education stakeholders,” said Otus President and Co-Founder Chris Hull. “AI-powered Otus will help schools maximize outcomes for all students more effectively and efficiently.”

The future of AI-powered learning

Following the release of AI Insights, Otus remains attuned to additional real-world applications of AI in public education, powered by secure and scalable AWS infrastructure. For instance, through its partnership with Discovery Education, Otus is collaborating to develop a new, AI-powered tool that will leverage real-time student data to provide personalized learning experiences, dynamically adapting content to meet individual needs.

As more districts put AI into everyday practice, educators will continue to discover new applications for using secure, AWS-powered tools to save time, surface key insights, and support student needs more effectively.

The adoption of Otus’ AI Insights illustrates the speed at which AI is moving from concept to classroom. To discover how AWS helps EdTechs deliver impact where it matters most to ensure all students succeed, contact us today.