What CEOs Are Saying: AI in the Classroom

Three earnings calls from McGraw Hill, Skillsoft, and D2L, all making the same argument about chatbots and learning.

In this edition

• Do chatbots hinder learning, or help it?
• Investors more spooked by AI than customers are
• An “app store for knowledge”
• The largest school-data breach on record
• One one in four employees feel ready to work with AI

Quote of the week

“Students, teachers, parents and institutions don’t want to park a child in front of a generic LLM and hope for a good outcome.”

— Philip Moyer, President and CEO of McGraw Hill, on why he thinks AI won’t fully disrupt the company

Over the past year, the frontier AI labs have moved strongly into education. OpenAI built a tutor mode for ChatGPT, made a free version for teachers through 2027, and released a tool to measure whether student AI use improves or erodes how people actually learn. Google and Anthropic are pushing into the same space.

For the companies that already sell software to schools and employers, that raises a question: Is a chatbot a threat to these businesses or a tailwind? Three of them reported in the past week, and all th…