He is making a bet on how AI can be used to improve teaching and learning.
Today marks a milestone for Grady. Anant Agarwal, the founder of edX, is joining as Chief Executive Officer.
Anant has spent his career at the frontier of technology and education. He is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and a former director of CSAIL, the university's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In 2012 he founded edX, the online learning platform launched by MIT and Harvard, and taught its first course, on circuits and electronics, which drew 155,000 students from 162 countries. Under his leadership edX went on to reach more than 100 million learners worldwide. His work has been recognized with the McGraw Prize for Higher Education, India's Padma Shri, and the Yidan Prize for Education Development.
And now he is making a bet on how AI can be used to improve teaching and learning.
Grady begins from a simple conviction: the quality of a student's education should not be limited by the size of their class, the resources of their school, or where they attend. Feedback and grading are two of the most powerful forces in learning. It is how a student knows whether they understand something, where they went wrong, and how to get better.
Used well, AI can amplify and strengthen learning. Not by replacing the instructor, but by extending what a good instructor already does. The careful attention once reserved for a small seminar can reach far more students. Grady was founded by 2 professors and technical researchers, who know the realities of higher ed and who envision this upleveling of teaching and learning.
That is the vision Anant is joining to build. With edX, he showed that technology could widen access to a great education without lowering its quality. His decision to lead Grady is a statement about where he believes the next chapter of that work lives: not only in who can reach an education, but in the quality of what every student receives once they are in it and how to support current educational systems to achieve this.
It is also why this moment feels significant. A leader who democratized access to education, now joining two faculty founders who know firsthand what is at stake in the classroom. We believe that is a powerful combination for students and faculty everywhere, and a sign of the kind of AI higher education actually deserves: built with educators, in service of learning, with the teacher at the center.
There is a great deal of work ahead, and we are energized for it. Welcome, Anant!