Soumitra Dutta on how agentic AI will impact education

Soumitra Dutta is an innovation and technology researcher and former dean of the Oxford Said Business School. He co-created the Global Innovation Index and the Network Readiness Index‚ two of the world's most widely cited global indices․ Soumitra Dutta recently co-founded Nexi Media‚ an AI-based research and intelligence company‚ and Caasaa‚ an AI-native software development company․

Soumitra Dutta, Oxford Dean (Former) has suggested in a recent post on social media platform X that education is a potentially powerful use case for agentic AI systems—systems capable of planning‚ reasoning and acting rather than just responding․

The classroom has always been shaped as much by imposition as intention․ The trouble is that every teacher‚ however gifted‚ has to move the whole class forward at roughly the same pace‚ covering the material rather than getting everyone to really grapple with it‚ teaching to the middle rather than to each individual student․ It’s where Soumitra Dutta lands—well clear of the cliché of “will AI take the teacher’s job?”—on a bigger question: what happens when technology takes away the parts of teaching that were never really teaching in the first place?

He points out that agentic AI doesn’t just produce content or answer questions․ It can see where a student is struggling‚ it can adjust the next problem they get accordingly‚ and it can build a customized learning trajectory․

The idea of every student getting one-on-one attention has long been the gold standard of education․ Agentic AI offers a way to accomplish this for the first time at scale and in a continuous manner․ The most immediate effects of this are to reducing time and energy educators spent on grading and evaluation‚ in reporting to various administrative authorities‚ and in teaching the same content to different groups. Agentic systems can take on most of that burden‚ allowing teachers to focus on what only humans can do: mentor‚ encourage‚ and build human relationships with students․

However‚ we may add that, in many places where there is the need for more personalized education the infrastructure is not yet in place to reliably support such systems at scale (such as schools with a large number of students‚ few resources‚ and very sporadic electricity and internet access or none at all)․

There is another‚ more subtle danger: the idea that what purports to make life easier for teachers can be used as a reason for reducing the number of teaching staff․ The point at which computer-assisted learning becomes computer replacement is easily blurred‚ especially when budgets are under pressure․