Learning About Learning: 

Learning Predictions For 2026 And Beyond

Personalised Learning Meets Infinite Curiosity. 

Every student deserves an educator who knows exactly how they learn best, who can engage their curiosity, honour their individuality, and nurture their creativity. For most of human history, only the wealthy could afford a personal tutor. That’s about to change.

I think back to my own education. The moments that mattered most weren’t lectures in crowded classrooms. They were conversations with teachers who took time to understand how I thought, what confused me, and how to explain something in a way that made sense specifically to me. Those teachers were rare.

For most students around the world, personalised attention remains a luxury. School was built for efficiency, not diversity. We organised education around conformity.

Standardising what students learn, when they learn it, and how we measure success. Education researcher Sir Ken Robinson spent decades documenting how traditional systems organise around conformity rather than diversity, compliance rather than curiosity. He observed that in some parts of America, 60% of students drop out of high school. But the dropout crisis is just the tip of the iceberg. What it doesn’t count are all the kids who are in school but disengaged from it, who don’t enjoy it, who don’t get any real benefit from it.

AI has the power to fundamentally change the way that we approach education. Children are natural learners. They will pepper you with questions until you cry uncle. The only limit to their curiosity is access to people and tools that can answer their questions. So, instead of forcing every student through the same system and learning sequence, AI will adapt to how each child thinks. Answering “why?” as many times as a student asks, exploring tangents that spark interest, adjusting explanations until something clicks. It creates safe spaces where students can fail, try again, and ask questions without judgment. And it’s not just STEM, AI enables students to explore the arts, languages, music, and humanities. Most importantly, it does what great teachers have always done: it engages each student’s natural love of learning rather than suppressing it.

A student can now access tutoring from an AI system for $4 per month. Khan Academy’s Khanmigo exceeded all projections by 1,400%, reaching 1.4 million students in its first year. Anthropic launched the world’s first nationwide AI education pilots in Iceland.

According to a UK UCAS survey, the proportion of students reporting using any AI tool has jumped from 66% last year to 92% this year. These aren’t experiments—they’re production systems at scale. And this transformation is happening in India, Brazil, and across Africa. 

Physics Wallah serves 46 million students and has achieved 250% revenue growth. UNESCO’s CogLabs operates across 35 countries using smartphones that students already own. 

Amazon launched a $100 million Education Equity Initiative to help underserved students gain skills in AI.

Generation Alpha is already thinking about AI differently than we do. During a recent TEDx talk, cultural anthropologist Rob Scotland tells the story of a few sixteen-year-olds who, during math class, engineered their own curriculum with ChatGPT and TikTok. When asked why, they said: “We wanted to try something else.”

For adults, AI is a tool. For Generation Alpha, it’s an extension of thinking. They’ve deleted “impossible” from their operating system and replaced it with “not yet.” AI tutoring works because it nurtures that curiosity. Students demonstrate a 65% increase in their willingness to attempt challenging tasks using AI tools. Duke University found that AI-assisted intervention increased IQ scores in children with autism by up to 17 points. These aren’t just better test scores. They’re students who approach difficulty itself differently because they learned in environments where “I don’t know yet” is a starting point, not a failure.

To be clear, teachers are NOT going away. What’s changing is what teachers do. We are in the midst of a global teacher shortage, and teachers should not have to spend the majority of their time on tasks that scale poorly (and can be automated)—grading, administration, answering routine questions over and over. AI is freeing them from that heavy lifting while enabling them to be more creative, provide more individualised education, and keep students engaged—and research backs this up. Teachers who use AI tools save an average of 5.9 hours per week, which equates to about six weeks per school year. It’s also allowing educators to reach more students, even with tight financial constraints. For example, Now Go Build CTO Fellow from NextGenU created culturally adapted textbooks at 1/100th traditional cost, scaling from 12 lessons to 605 lessons in 18 months, work that would traditionally require teams of educators working for years. This wasn’t possible five years ago.

In 2026 and beyond, personalised AI tutoring will be as ubiquitous as smartphones. Every student will have access to instructions adapted to their learning style, pace, language, and needs. Education is a human system. There are conditions under which people thrive, and conditions under which they don’t. Robinson used Death Valley as a metaphor—the hottest, driest place in America, where nothing grows. Until 2004, when it rained. In spring 2005, the entire valley floor was carpeted in flowers. Death Valley wasn’t dead. It was dormant, waiting for the right conditions.

When you use tools to engage curiosity instead of enforcing compliance, when you honour diversity instead of demanding conformity, schools spring to life. And that changes everything.