Amir Nathoo says AI will save teachers time and disrupt traditional schooling, but parents will keep wanting human interaction. Outschool plans to use AI to help teachers find students and reduce workload, not replace them. He worries AI-enhanced superstar teachers could dominate the market.
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Hey, Dimitri, saw you raise your hand. You wanna help us kick things off here? Thanks, Mike. I have a question about how you're thinking about some of the developments in AI that we're seeing in edtech. And sort of a lot of the promise that I hear from folks building these tools is that the future is basically personalized one-on-one tutoring with unlimited questions. And so like even in my own field economics, there's now something called AllData where you upload your course materials and you have unlimited EA 24 hours a day, and your physical TAs can, like, focus on students that are struggling. Are these tools kind of complementary to your approach? Are they competing with what you're offering? And in particular, in, like, are you worried about, like, a superstar dynamic where there's only, you know, a handful of really awesome math teachers that are all sort of AI augmented that kind of capture a large share of the education market and obviously changes their bargaining power with your platform and kind of how do you think about all this?
Yeah, great question. I think my answer differs in the short term compared to the long term. In the short term, I think we benefit quite significantly from these trends because the initial use cases for AI that have been widely adopted are things like saving teachers time and kids cheating on homework. Well, guess what? If teachers can save time, they can spend more time teaching on Outschool. If kids are cheating on homework, it's disruptive to traditional education and generally anything that disrupts traditional education is gonna benefit our platform. And similarly, I think, you know, the other thing from a societal perspective is that, you know, one of the reasons why anxiety has been increasing with traditional education and people are searching for alternatives like Outschool is because people sense that how the world is changing and what they're experiencing as parents in their everyday lives is diverging from how school is operating. And that sense of, you know, the incongruence between traditional schooling and where the world is going is gonna increase with AI. And so benefits our business. I think the challenge will come with if this idea, this vision of the all-encompassing AI tutor can, A, actually be made real. Because there's a lot more than demos. And B, is actually appealing to kids and parents, which I think is the, is the bigger risk. That's the key question. Our bet is that there is enduring value in humans in education and parents on even if, even if that amazing tutor, automated tutor is possible. And I think there's still big questions about that. Parents are not gonna want their kids to spend all of their time in front of a computer interacting with an AI tutor. They are going to want a human education. Now, what the humans do is an open question. But what if the AI thing is better at teaching math, better at doing the majority of what we consider kind of current core education? It'll have to evolve. But I, as a parent myself, I think I want my kid talking humans as part of their kids' education. So we're going to focus on that part and use AI to make the human interaction better, whether it's everything from discovering the right humans to put together to have a really great learning experience, to reducing teacher workloads, to AI teaching assistants to superpower teachers' personal lives. All of those are within scope. But I think the idea of completely replacing humans in K-12 education is wrong.
