The strategist who now measures when to trust AI

Sophia Romee calls herself an NYU lifer. An undergraduate social-entrepreneurship class introduced her to the idea of repairing the world, and she spent her early career at NYU Stern as chief of staff to the dean, then at the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, before co-founding the rest-and-reflection company Radical Reset. She returned to Wagner as an adjunct professor teaching data visualisation and storytelling.

At the College Board, she started a strategy project in 2023, when ChatGPT was entering public consciousness, with one rule: lead with people and their needs, not the technology. It grew into the GenAI Studio, a start-up inside a 125-year-old organisation, scaling from nothing to 25 staff in under two years. One strand brought AI to the organisation’s 2,000 employees. Another built AI-enabled ways for students to show skills such as collaboration and oral communication that traditional tests struggle to capture.

I never made a roadmap longer than six months

Sophia Romee, NYU Wagner alumni spotlight

Her view of assessment is that students are often better at using AI than the adults around them, so the real question is whether they know when not to. In AP courses, educators broke the writing process into steps: AI could help explore a topic, but drafting should stay human, because learning to write in your own voice is the point.

Her new company, DiscernIt, measures exactly that judgement. She moved from India to Miami at nine and grew up in Little Havana, where she saw how much a zip code can decide, and she says that childhood is the throughline from classrooms to public interest technology.