In 2024, 44% of unicorns in United States are AI startups. So, nearly 1 in 2 new unicorns is an AI company. What is even more interesting is these AI players are reaching unicorn status far faster (median of 2 years) than non-AI companies (median of 9 years). The launch of its latest AI models by Deepseek which it says are on par or better than industry-leading models in the United States at a fraction of the cost and is threatening to disrupt the technology world order. While India is now getting into the AI race and is making some exciting moves we are yet to see an Indic LLM.
Though many of you might be aspiring to build foundational Indic LLMs while being hopeful and optimistic about it. In this post we will cover more about certain trends and ideas on how AI is fundamentally set to disrupt and transform the education sector, which is another area AI holds a promsing potential. We have covered some of the insights for founders who are looking to build AI solutions in India for the education space. And there is no surprise if we see AI unicorns in India in this space in near term.
Education as an industry been considered a laggard for technology adoption. However covid changed all of it. It brought massive adaption of tech in the education space. However post covid as people started getting back to brick and mortar mode again, the curve kind of took a downward turn.
Another thing to note is all of these technology innovation in education space has been mostly concentrated on distribution part of it. That is the pedagogy ie the art of teaching still remained in the human realm, while technology addressing mostly the distribution part of it ie the content part through platforms. It may be in the form of Text, Audio, Visual. While this need not be true anymore, as AI is set to fundamentally change this. This is because AI is in itself at the core a technology about learning. So, GenAI is set to disrupt the education sector. One of important outcomes of this is, it is going to make learning outcomes based. As all the information is available now on internet to anyone and everyone. In the age of AI learning is not going to be about rote learning and memorisation. The focus is going to be on curiosity, thinking and asking the right questions to hone one’s thinking and problem solving skills, with less and less of rote learning and memorisation.
So, AI is expected to bring this fundamental shift by making it pedagogy based thereby making it easier to design outcomes based systems in teaching and education.
Also, in today’s world many of teacher’s time gets used up in administrative tasks. With AI holding the potential to automate 40%-50% of administrative tasks there by freeing up most of the time of a teacher, which can be used in where it is actually meant to be used, which is teaching. Another interesting area is, with so much availability of data about a student it not only about what to teach but also on what not to teach for instructors/teachers. Reinforcement learning makes it possible for an AI system to personalise based on student level, grade and preferences. Multimodal systems will further enhance it.
