Despite AI, teachers remain the most important variable in building at scale

Sal Khan made the case at TED a few years ago that AI could be every student's personal tutor: a one-on-one experience, available to anyone, that research suggests could dramatically lift learning outcomes.

- Vivek Prakash

Spending time at tech events across Silicon Valley and San Diego this year, I found that idea had become close to consensus. Founders, educators, and investors broadly agree: AI will raise the floor of teaching quality in ways we have not seen before.

I find myself increasingly aligned with that view. The evidence behind it is not nothing. Recent AI tutoring trials have shown meaningful effect sizes. The optimism is grounded in something real, and I think the educators and technologists making this case are pointing in the right direction.

Where I want to add some texture is on the question of where exactly the leverage sits.

Having built a live coding instruction platform at scale, I have been on the inside of this deployment: AI tutors, lesson plan generators, disengagement signals, automated progress reports, adaptive content. I have watched what these features do and, more importantly, what they do not do. That experience has shaped a view: AI's biggest opportunity in education is not in what it does for students directly, but in what it makes possible for the teachers who reach them.

What the AI does

The AI being deployed across edtech does a few things well. It generates content. It automates reports that used to take teachers hours. It surfaces completion metrics for parents. It routes students toward practice problems based on past performance.

I am not writing from outside this pattern. We have built all of these.

These are real efficiencies. But having watched their effect on actual learning, here is what we found: they improve the infrastructure around teaching. They do not improve the teaching itself.

They make existing systems run faster. They do not change what is fundamentally happening between a learner and a teacher in a live session.