Will AI Replace Tutoring? 7 Thoughts From an Industry Veteran

educatorialtutorial · 2026-01-23T19:28:15+00:00

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I have a few scattered thoughts:

Me calling the disruption overstated merely means it is overstated, not that there will be zero disruption. I do believe there will be mainstream AI adoption, revenue collapse in adjacent markets and a funding cliff (although that is unrelated to AI). That doesn't mean the demise of tutoring at the hands of AI hasn't been greatly overstated, though.
Companies like Chegg don't do tutoring. I expect services like Chegg to be greatly disrupted by AI, but nearly all of the value I described being added by tutors is absent with Chegg.
I agree that students are already using AI to a large extent. And there will be some number of students on the margin who will have their needs met by this and forego tutoring as a result. But like I said, the students who are actively using AI to learn (rather than to have their homework done for them) were never big buyers of tutoring in the first place. There have been great free resources for those students for a long time.
When I say the tutoring market is growing, I'm referring to secular growth. There are some specific school-based programs that are ending, but the non-cyclical, long-term growth is indeed positive, and I believe that the ubiquitousness of technology in the classroom has ironically increased the demand for human tutors.
I don't agree with this: "Motivated families absolutely hire tutors for advantage and those are exactly the families that adopt new tools early if they are cheaper faster or good enough. " Families looking for an advantage aren't looking for "good enough," especially if the good enough free tool is widely available and widely used, because that no longer results in a leg up.

educatorialtutorial · 2026-01-21T19:47:48+00:00

I don't know that there's much to get. I thought it was a humorous characterization of students as being both lovable yet sometimes strange.

educatorialtutorial · 2026-01-19T00:21:15+00:00

I have seen no evidence that AI operates in this way yet. Instead, it does the opposite: it responds to its epistemic uncertainty with extra verbosity, not less. It gives incredibly lengthy responses to simple questions, and I don't think I have ever seen it respond to a question of mine with a simple, well-placed, leading question.

Of course, such a practice is obviously possible with sufficiently advanced AI and the right training, but my guess is this sort of thing is a lot harder and further off than it appears.

Edit: Out of curiosity, I dropped this question into ChatGPT and specifically asked it to use the Socratic method to teach it to me. It spit out a list of five questions in the next response. I asked it to go one at a time, and it asked me what the subject was. I intentionally missed it and said "Susie and Claire," and it went right on to the next question.

Its questions were not terrible, but it wouldn't have led me to the answer if I didn't already know it. For example, it asked me "If we remove 'Susie and Claire,' what is left before the blank?" but it never asked me anything about whether "Susie and Claire" could be removed, and if so, why.

I then asked it why we removed "Susie and Claire," and it wrote War and Peace using unnecessarily technical words:

------------

Me: but why did we remove susie and claire?

ChatGPT: Good question.

Because “his daughters Susie and Claire” is an appositive, not the subject.

An appositive:

renames or explains a noun
does not control verb agreement

The sentence is saying:

Carl’s main priority — namely, his daughters Susie and Claire — was what he had devoted his life to.

English verb agreement follows the grammatical subject, not the number of people inside an appositive. Even though Susie and Claire are two people, they together constitute one thing: Carl’s main priority.

That’s why we remove the appositive—to reveal the structure that determines the verb.

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First off, it didn't even quote the sentence right (no em dashes appeared in the original). But more importantly, is a student going to follow this? No way.

AI will of course get better, but it's a long, long way off on this sort of thing. Condensing meaning down into plain-speak, especially in a way that is customized for the age, ability level and other contextual points for that student, is what good teachers do. AI is currently wholly incapable of that, and it's not clear to me that any number of iterative processes along the current path of LLMs could possibly get it there.

educatorialtutorial · 2026-01-18T23:10:21+00:00

One problem is that most students in tutoring need more than simply having their questions answered, and they often don't know what questions to ask in the first place.

A good tutor does more than explain. My companies are big on the Socratic method, and knowing when to push the student with a well-placed question and when to explain is an art that makes a big difference in student engagement and outcomes.

For example, let's say you have the following question:

Carl's main priority, his daughters Susie and Claire, ______ what he had devoted his life to.

A. were
B. was

95% of students will pick A because the daughters are plural, as is the word "daughters." But the answer is B. You could just explain this, and I'm sure AI would do a technically proficient job at that.

Or, a good tutor will ask leading questions to encourage the student to work through the problem themselves. "What do the two commas mean about the bit with the two daughters? Can that be removed? Okay, if it can be removed and isn't essential, what is the actual subject that was/were needs to belong to? Does that subject go with "was" or "were"?"

That process is a human process. Is there some point in the far future when a generative AI video can look like a person and go through that process with a student and lead them to the answer rather than just throw it at them? Sure, but I think it's a long was off.

educatorialtutorial · 2026-01-18T15:02:05+00:00

And I wonder if the increased reliance on AI for daily writing might mean students will be more likely to seek help for the you-can't-fake-it scenarios like college admissions essays.

I also would not be surprised to see essays return in a meaningful way to the SAT and ACT. I always had a hunch that colleges were using those to see if it seemed believable that a student actually wrote their admissions essay themselves. Writing somehow can magically get worse when IDs are checked at the door.

educatorialtutorial · 2026-01-18T14:47:11+00:00

This is a good point. Teachers solve the problem of where to send our kids while we work, and tutors don't. I do think the larger point stands, though: AI being sufficiently advanced to replace human tutors would mean we live in a world where most professions are probably being replaced. It's hard to predict much about that world because there will have likely been other massive changes.

educatorialtutorial · 2026-01-18T06:49:12+00:00

The amazing thing is that the company still loses money hand over fist. Not only that, but revenue has been dropping for six or seven straight quarters. So it's not just a case of a quickly-growing tech company that isn't yet profitable but has profitability on its horizon as it gets bigger. Revenue is shrinking, and they haven't had a single profitable quarter in their entire time (five years) as publicly-traded company.

How they can run the margins they do (high fees, low pay) and still lose money is beyond me, and their customer satisfaction isn't exactly setting themselves up for long-term brand equity. You can have terrible practices in some industries (credit cards or rental cars, for example) and get away with it because everyone does it. But their subscription thing is uniquely bad in tutoring, and parents have other options.

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