The AI-Tutor Revolution That Wasn’t

In a 2023 TED Talk watched by millions of people, the American educator and entrepreneur Sal Khan declared that AI was about to deliver “probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen.” The founder and CEO of Khan Academy was touting the company’s new educational chatbot, Khanmigo, claiming it promised to be an “amazing personal tutor” to “every student on the planet.” By 2024, Open AI CEO Sam Altman was chiming in that AI was on the verge of delivering, for students, “virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need.”But by this spring, Khan had admitted that the release of Khanmigo was “a non-event” for many kids. Although access exploded, from reaching 40,000 students in 2023 to nearly 1 million this year, actual uptake—whether students use it—has stagnated.A tool designed to respond to questions and ask follow-ups can’t help a student who doesn’t engage or know what to ask. Khanmigo, like so many other ed-tech tools, has floundered because it hasn’t solved the challenge at the center of education: How do you motivate students to experience the discomfort of learning something new? An AI tutor may be able to deliver math problems that are perfectly calibrated to a student’s level. But it can’t make the student actually do the problems. “Learning is hard work,” Kristen DiCerbo, Khan Academy’s chief learning officer, told us. “It’s cognitively effortful and not experienced as fun. How do we get kids to want to do that?” AI is a powerful tool, she added, but it can’t be expected “to bridge that motivation gap.” Although AI tutors have sometimes proven valuable in low-resource schools in developing countries, a recent Stanford review of all of the available research into the use of AI in K–12 schools found that educational benefits for students generally were limited.[Read: Is schoolwork optional now?]Only about one in three students is highly engaged in school, according