AI is making it easier to bring new ideas to the education market, but turning those ideas into solutions that schools can actually implement remains a complex challenge. In this 5 Questions interview, Rayna Glumac, Founder and CEO of RYE Consulting, discusses what innovators need to understand about education procurement, market strategy, and the realities of bringing products from ideation to adoption.
What do you do?
I’m the Founder and CEO of RYE, a boutique consulting firm focused on helping organizations “Raise Your Expertise” in the education market. I bring together my experience as a classroom teacher, policy and procurement leader in big publishing, and legal background to help innovators move from ideation to global, Fortune 500-level growth.
Empowered by classroom teachers, instructional coaches, and leaders, RYE focuses on the business side of education: procurement, market strategy, curriculum, professional learning, and ongoing advisory work. Since 2013, we’ve partnered with organizations across the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Europe to navigate a go-to-market strategy from PreK through workforce.
The “what” of my work is helping innovators find the open window in a complicated, fractured market and then build the strategy to walk through it. We answer the big go-to-market questions: Who is the actual buyer? What problem are they funded to solve? When can they buy? What procurement pathway exists? Does the pricing make sense? And does the product fit the conditions under which educators actually work?
It’s about understanding where the market is moving and, more importantly, where it is actually buying, looking at the intersection of data, policy, funding, procurement, implementation, and the needs of educators and leaders in practice.
Why is this work important?
AI has made it easier than ever to create and bring an idea to market. That is incredibly exciting for education. The next great education entrepreneur could come from anywhere, and more people can build solutions to problems they see firsthand.
But easier to build does not mean easier to scale.
Education is a collection of markets layered on top of one another: federal and state policy, funding streams, district budgets, procurement rules, academic priorities, strategic plans, political realities, school calendars, implementation capacity, and increasingly, workforce needs. A change in any one can completely change how you approach going to market.
There’s a difference between a product being wanted and being buyable. We need to make sure innovation is research-based, thoughtfully piloted, and designed for implementation with fidelity. What professional learning will a teacher need, and does it fit their schedule? What is the implementation lift required to see positive outcomes? What feedback should we gather before scaling? What can the market actually bear to pay? How do districts expect products to be packaged and purchased?
The faster we create new educational products, the more intentional we need to be about testing, learning, and implementing to ultimately build something that can make a difference for all learners.
What’s been the biggest surprise so far?
I’ve been working in education for two decades, and I’m still surprised by how much people hold onto a headline. It’s why every one of our live learning sessions opens with the news dominating the cycle and what it actually means for go-to-market strategy.
Education is especially vulnerable to headline-driven strategy. We saw it when the current presidential administration made AI in K-12 education a priority, with its executive order on Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth and guidance around leveraging federal grant funds to improve education outcomes with AI. New AI-driven companies came to us ready to build on a political promise, only to run into the real story: funding restrictions, timelines, and procurement realities. In a nationalized procurement cycle, a headline can take two years to become an actual purchasing trend.
That’s taught me to treat the news cycle as one input into a broader strategy, not the strategy itself. Education is deeply connected to government systems, and fragmentation in adoption, policy, and funding is only growing. The work isn’t waiting for the system to change. It’s understanding the system as it exists, finding the openings within it, and moving our clients forward before everyone else catches up.
Where do you see your work in five years?
Reflecting on the past five years, I’m confident that I can’t predict the education market five years out. We’ve gone from COVID-era funding influxes to widespread cuts. Nearly one in four of America’s 500 largest school districts replaced its superintendent in the past year, creating the biggest transition to date.
What I do know is that RYE will continue to evolve with the market. We’ve expanded from traditional education consulting into building curriculum with museums, developing family engagement apps with international organizations, and delivering AI-focused professional development globally. That range is intentional; as a team of educators, we embody the idea that if you believe in good pedagogy, we can be your people.
Today, companies and investors often bring us in after they have a product and need a go-to-market strategy. We’re positioned to come in during diligence, before a check is written, and in R&D, before a product is built, to bring pedagogy, purchasing reality, and market strategy into the design conversation.
I want us close enough to the market to see what’s coming and positioned to help shape it.
What else should people know?
One of the things I’m most excited about is our work through RYE Collective, our learning arm. It’s allowing RYE to expand beyond individual consulting engagements and build infrastructure around scale in a more collaborative format.
Through this pathway, we run the Scaling Hub for the Learning Engineering Virtual Institute (LEVI), supporting organizations with the practical market questions, moving innovation from research-based development into real-world adoption. LEVI’s model is explicitly focused on developing, scaling, and implementing ambitious learning innovations, so helping teams think about the market alongside the product is a natural extension of our work.
We’re also kicking off our sixth year with the Canadian Trade Commission, supporting a yearly cohort of companies to build the foundation for entering the U.S. market. We’re asking the questions that too often come after a company has already invested heavily in the market: Who can buy it? Who will champion it? What will implementation require? What evidence will matter? What does it cost? What funding can support it? What happens when the pilot ends?
Both experiences reinforce something I’ve believed for a long time: scaling is not a sales problem you solve at the end. You have to think about the market while you’re building.
