Publishing giant Pearson has been solely focused on education since a corporate re-brand in 1996 and has, according to CEO Omar Abshar, a simple purpose – “to help people realize the life they imagine through learning” – and one that’s increasingly enabled by AI.

Take the case of 15 year-old ‘Verity’, for example. She’s used Pearson’s AI teaching assistant to help answer questions and influence her career path. She taps into “conversational AI Pearson pedagogy” that “packs both personalized practice and personality”, apparently. The AI helps her determine that a career in medicine is her destiny. Going on to med school, ‘Verity’ trains as a paediatrician with the help of Pearson’s multi-modal AI platform, complete with her personal skills wallet to log every procedure and certification so she and her supervisors can see her emerging capabilities at a glance. Now, ‘Verity’ is living her dream.

Now, dream might be one word that springs to mind when you consider how many years this story covers and how vital still-emerging AI tech appears to be at the heart of it. Fake, might be another word? It’s certainly not vérité – or at least, not yet. It will come as no surprise to learn that the whole ‘how powerful AI is’ narrative has in fact been built by AI tools running on Amazon Bedrock. How ‘Verity’ gets on in the real world will take a few more years to play out…

Nonetheless the simulacrum does reflect a disturbing reality, as Abshar points out:

Not everyone’s life is as beautifully designed as Verity’s. The US today is the world’s largest and most formidable economy, and yet, one in five Americans struggle with basic literacy. More than 30 million Americans don’t have a high school diploma. US math skills have declined meaningfully in the last five years, and we know that 65% of job skills are going to be fundamentally transformed with AI and technology by 2030 has very meaningful consequences for the health and wealth outcomes.

According to Pearson’s own research, in the US alone, people slipping through the cracks between school and work and between jobs, and it costs the American economy about $1.1 trillion every single year – or around five percent of the total GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the country. As Abshar observes:

You could take just a few weeks reduction in that learning-to-earning phase and put that back in the economy and that adds about $40 billion worth of earnings back into the economy every single year.

Skills problem  

The bottom line is that the US – other countries skills crises are available – has a well-established skills gap that is at risk of becoming a skills chasm, he argues, and this calls for action. AI is a tool/weapon that can be used in this cause:

We know from years of experience working with AI that when it’s thoughtfully designed, it can really help student engagement with the learning concepts that build the cognitive skills that we all need in order to succeed in a changing economy, and it helps people develop the skills that are critical preparing a workforce that’s resilient against a future where the technology skills are evolving faster than the human skills.

About two years ago, Pearson started rolling out AI across all of its Higher Education tools. The results found that when AI is applied in the flow of the student study, and students are helped to engage with the tech, it helps them develop new cognitive skills and higher order outcomes. Abshar explains:

In the digital courseware platform, what we find is they get more than just their results; they get actual learning from this. In the last year, we were running giant trials on large numbers of people. With 2 million students in the last year who engaged with the AI tools that we gave them in the courseware platforms, we found that those who are using the courseware AI work 4x better in terms of learning outcomes overall, and about a third of those students were putting input into the AI that demonstrated truly higher cognitive ability and higher order reasoning skills.

On the back of pilots like that, Pearson is now taking its learning materials and its “learning science know how”, and combining it with AWS technology. For example, in the UK, the firm has taken its AI learnings and applied them to an exam practice tool for young learners who need to study and prepare for their high stakes school exams. This delivers guided practice that helps students go deeper into the materials, and it provides instant feedback, as well as helping them to build flash cards for memory development.

That kind of positive reinforcement in the flow of study, with the repetition that learning science determines is needed to build build critical thinking skills, is very powerful, according to Abshar:

The AI tool, importantly, flags the learning gaps to teachers and parents to help students know where they need to intervene and where more practice is required. Learning takes more than technology. It takes a great leader to guide and inspire students. I suspect that [everyone] knows the moment in life where a teacher influenced you and inspired you as well. We know that Edtech alone won’t solve or won’t solve all the problems. It won’t be the full answer for the future, but we know that when you put a human in the loop of learning with great technology, you can achieve wonderful outcomes.

Don’t forget the teacher

The teacher is, of course, the other side of the educational coin, as Abshar notes:

It’s never been more important to support the millions of teachers who are teaching the tens of millions of students around the world and preparing them for the next generation of work.  We know that 43% of teachers spend about three hours every week just in planning lessons. Imagine if you could take that lesson planning time and put it back into coaching kids in the classroom. Our smart lesson generator tool helps global English language teachers assemble quizzes, practice questions, reading comprehension and assignments, and it draws from Pearson’s massive library of English content and generates customized lessons literally in seconds.

In our Connections Academy virtual schools we’ve given teachers AI tools to help them with coaching K-12 student. The assessments here are aligned to the school’s curriculum exactly at the right grade level, the subject, the course unit, and it takes minutes for teachers to build a range of tests from multiple-choice essay questions. Our teachers are telling us that they’re saving literally half the time in the preparation, which is a big deal. And again, you see teachers combining with the technology helping students with personalized learning journeys.

Back to ‘Verity’, whose fiction Abshar pitches as not just a possibility, but the start of a re-invention of learning and education for millions of people:

You can imagine a world with AI agents and tools in the hands of teachers and students, supporting them with Higher Education products that deliver better learning outcomes and workplace tools and resources, including digital wallets and credential management to help people in their professional and personal journeys.

I really believe that if you aren’t working with AI agents today or using AI every day in your life. I think you will be soon. It’s a future that is becoming our reality. Personally, I’m optimistic about how we can apply all these innovations in service of people. The technology is there for us humans. AI, isn’t just the great disruptor for the world, it’s also a solution that makes us smarter, helps us solve the skills gap, and helps us help everyone achieve better prosperity.

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