Ukrainian EdTech company Headway Inc, which has attracted new investments for AI transformation, is not creating a separate position of «Chief AI Officer» and is betting on all teams working with new tools, not one responsible manager.
This was stated by the company’s founder Anton Pavlovsky in an interview with Forbes Ukraine. He noted that the company deliberately built a large number of tests into the process and did not consider unsuccessful attempts as a problem.
This also explains how Headway is building its transformation. The company did not immediately try to rigidly standardize all processes or choose one model as the «heart» of the business. Instead, they tested different tools and, according to Pavlovsky, most of these AI experiments were unsuccessful. At Headway, this is called a normal part of the culture of experimentation: unsuccessful attempts should lead to individual solutions that can then be scaled.
The company’s active restructuring for AI, according to the founder, began in the spring of 2023 after his trip to Silicon Valley. After that, Headway made artificial intelligence a key focus of internal planning, and teams were mandated to conduct numerous tests in products, content, translations, user interaction scenarios, and development.
One of the company’s internal tools is called Huge. Pavlovsky describes it as a constructor with a large number of elements from which you can assemble different user journey scenarios. In essence, the system allows you to combine different options for onboarding, training, and interaction with the product for a specific user in real time. The Headway system itself began to be developed even before the current boom in generative AI, but with the advent of new models, the algorithms, according to Pavlovsky, simply intensified these processes. In some areas, the founder claims, efficiency has increased many times, and he outlined the overall assessment at approximately 40%.
AI at Headway is used not only in experiments with content or personalization. Pavlovsky says that in the company’s new products, algorithms generate up to 90% of the server part and up to 70% of the user interface. At the same time, the company is not trying to calculate too meticulously at an early stage how much it spends on AI tools. The founder openly admits that he does not know the exact amount of expenses for 2025 and even believes that the company has probably not invested enough in this area. His logic is as follows: first you need to see the effect, and only then build the economy in detail.
The effectiveness of implementation at Headway is assessed primarily through revenue and marketing metrics. The company believes that the advertising effectiveness or productivity of individual scenarios can be calculated quite clearly, but measuring the impact of AI on the work of developers is still more difficult. Therefore, teams are given more freedom in choosing tools, and a centralized vertical of control is not being built.
Separately, Headway is already testing the use of AI to assess employee performance. According to Pavlovsky, the Impulse team is implementing this approach in its department, and in the future they want to scale it to the entire company. That is, it is no longer just about generating code or content, but also about embedding algorithms into the people management system.
In early April 2026, Headway Inc also attracted investments from Horizon Capital. The funds are planned to be used for the development of AI-first and AI-native products, as well as further integration of AI into all key business processes. The company has over 170 million users and is among the largest EdTech players with Ukrainian roots.
Previously, dev.ua wrote about how Headway Inc became the first company with Ukrainian roots to attract investment from the Endeavor Catalyst fund.
