(ANS – Verona) – In February 2026, fifteen engineers and researchers from Google traveled to Venice Mestre, not to explain Artificial Intelligence (AI) to teachers in Salesian schools, but to learn how educators were already using it in the classroom. At the end of May, Google will return to Italy, this time to Verona.
On the afternoon of May 28, beginning at 3:00 p.m., the event “GO Beyond Traditional Education” will take place at the San Zeno Salesian Institute in Verona. This is not a conference about the promises of AI, but rather a presentation of what has already been achieved in the classroom. The international leadership of Google for Education will come to hear about the experiences of Italian Salesian schools—the first example in Italy of AI being systematically introduced into classrooms across an entire network of schools.
In one year, the number of participating teachers has grown from 700 in the Triveneto region to more than 1,600 throughout Italy. What matters most are not the meetings or guidelines, but the lessons being taught every day by educators in elementary, secondary, and vocational training schools.
The research evaluating this initiative, coordinated by Fr. Michal Vojtáš, SDB, for the Pontifical Salesian University, analyzed 1,375 lessons actually conducted in classrooms and gathered feedback from 29,171 students. The most significant finding is straightforward: after using AI in practice, 86 percent of teachers say they want to incorporate it permanently into their teaching. While some might expect a leveling effect, teachers reported the opposite—a rise in content creativity of up to 40 percent. The benefits doubled when AI was used not as a replacement for instruction, but as a complement to innovative teaching methods.
What distinguishes the Salesian experience is not its scale, but the boundaries it establishes. While public debate is often divided between technophobia and uncritical acceptance, the Salesian experiment introduces the concept of “technology on a schedule.” This is not a ban, but a hierarchy of values: AI can enhance learning, but it stops where the educational relationship begins. It is not the machine that is switched off, but the institution that reaffirms the primacy of the human person over the interface—a boundary that transforms Gemini from a potential distraction into a carefully managed educational resource.
The May 28 event will be attended, on behalf of Google for Education, by Amanda Rosenburg (Staff User Experience Researcher, New York), Marco Berardinelli (Google for Education Italy), and Anna Artemyeva (HE Lead EMEA & APAC / Regional Lead for the United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy, and Central Asia). They will be joined by three regional education councilors from Northern Italy: Valeria Mantovan (Veneto), Alessia Rosolen (Friuli Venezia Giulia), and Simona Tironi (Lombardy). The project is now entering its second year.
A school system that creates thousands of lessons using AI—and deliberately decides where not to use it—is not chasing technology. It is managing it.