In the latest episode of CTO2CTO, Forte Group’s CTO Lucas Hendrich sat down with John Higginson, CTO at Curriculum Associates, to talk about what it means to lead engineering teams in an era where AI is no longer optional—it’s expected.
Their conversation covered everything from speech recognition in classrooms to why curiosity may be the most underrated skill in tech today. Below are five key lessons from their discussion.
Curriculum Associates has been integrating AI into its products long before it became trendy. But for John, the goal has never been to “do AI”—it’s to help teachers teach and help students learn.
“We always ask: is this good for the teacher, good for the student, and does it protect privacy? If not, we don’t build it.”
That approach led to the acquisition of SoapBox Labs, a company specializing in speech AI that analyzes how students read aloud. It gives teachers insights they’d never get from manual assessment—without compromising data privacy.
We’re past the point where using AI is a novelty. For engineering teams, it’s becoming a baseline expectation.
“An engineer who says, ‘I don’t need AI,’ is like one ten years ago saying, ‘I don’t use Google.’”
According to John, the engineers who get the most out of tools like Copilot or Claude are the ones with experience. They know when to trust the machine—and when not to.
Mandating new tech from the top rarely works. Instead, John focuses on enabling teams to try things in a low-risk environment.
“We run internal hackathons. We carve out space to experiment. It’s safer to explore when it’s not tied to a deliverable.”
That experimentation feeds back into the org’s velocity—and curiosity. It’s part of a broader shift toward AI as a way of working, not just a set of tools.
Tech leaders love to talk about modernization, but John urges caution: not everything old needs replacing.
“There’s good tech debt—the kind that’s still working fine. And there’s bad tech debt. The trick is knowing the difference.”
He learned this early in his career working in the insurance industry, where COBOL systems still power major functions. Sometimes the most strategic move is leaving things alone.
John didn’t follow a traditional path to CTO. He studied literature and law, and believes those disciplines taught him something that’s often missing in tech leadership: communication.
“This job is about getting people aligned—400 engineers, cross-functional teams, the board. That takes storytelling.”
The ability to connect strategy with outcomes, to explain the “why,” is what separates great tech leaders from the rest.
Whether it’s AI, product design, or legacy architecture, one theme kept coming up in this episode: curiosity.
“Tech changes. What stays the same is your ability to learn, collaborate, and figure out what matters.”
To hear the full conversation, including thoughts on AI in education, the future of agile, and what’s coming next for engineering orgs, listen to the full episode of CTO2CTO with John Higginson.