McKinsey estimates that generative AI could raise marketing productivity by 5 to 15 percent of total marketing spend, translating to roughly $463 billion annually.
And once you're staring at that kind of number, the rest of the conversation changes, too: the job forecasts, the re-org rumors, the "doing more with less" logic that's already seeped into white-collar life. The World Economic Forum projected that 23 percent of jobs will change by 2027, with 69 million jobs created and 83 million eliminated.
If we take learning to be a durable change in long-term memory and if we take instruction as the key lever of that and if AI can teach better than humans, not as some distant possibility but as an emerging reality, then we must reckon with what that reveals about teaching itself.
The lesson here is not that AI has discovered a new kind of learning, but that it has finally begun to exploit the one we already understand.
But let’s be clear. Again, the history of Edtech is a story of failure, very expensive failure. This is not merely a chronicle of wasted resources, though the financial cost has been considerable. More troubling is the opportunity cost: the reforms not pursued, the teacher training not funded, the evidence-based interventions not scaled because capital and attention were directed toward shiny technological solutions. As Larry Cuban documented in his work on educational technology, we have repeatedly mistaken the novelty of the medium for the substance of the pedagogy.
The reasons for these failures are instructive. Many EdTech interventions have been solutions in search of problems, designed by technologists with limited understanding of how learning actually occurs. They have prioritised engagement over mastery, confusing students’ enjoyment of a platform with their acquisition of knowledge. They have ignored decades of cognitive science research in favour of intuitive but ineffective approaches. They have failed to account for implementation challenges, teacher training requirements, and the messy realities of classroom practice.
