UNESCO Digital Learning Week 2025 brought together global thought leaders to grapple with one of education’s most pressing questions: How do we harness artificial intelligence to enhance human learning while preserving what makes us distinctly human?
This year’s event, which evolved from the former Mobile Learning Week, placed AI squarely at the center of educational discourse. The conversations were both inspiring and sobering, with both opportunities and challenges ahead for every person working to support education.
“There is a new actor that never sleeps, never stops ingesting, digesting, and generating information,” is one of my favorite statements made by Stefania Giannini, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General of Education. With more than one billion people now using AI regularly, it was clear from every speaker that this technology that is already reshaping how we learn, work, and communicate.
Giannini shared this during her opening remarks. “When it comes to education, AI is powerful enough to make us question almost everything. Do we still need classrooms, teachers, administrators, textbooks? What does it mean to be a student today?”
The numbers tell a striking story. According to Isabelle Hau, executive director at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, 86% of educational organizations are already using AI, making education the highest adopter of artificial intelligence across sectors. Yet only 10% of schools and universities have established frameworks for AI use and adoption.
As I listened to that statistic the only thing I could think of is a current client describing their school as “the wild west of AI, with no rules or suggested boundaries.”
Despite widespread adoption, only 35 randomized control trials on generative AI in education have been cataloged in the generative AI research repository by the team at Stanford. These disconnects between implementation and evidence demonstrates a clear need for more rigorous research and thoughtful deployment.
More importantly, the Stanford research shows that the success of AI in education depends less on the technology itself and more on how it’s designed and implemented in authentic educational settings. As Hau stated, “How do we design AI for human flourishing? The answer cannot be found in technology alone — it will come from vision, courage, and the choices we make together.”
A human-centered approach was echoed throughout the week by speaker, panelists, and fireside chat participants.
The goal isn’t to create more intelligent machines, but as one speaker said, “nurture what makes us most human, while using AI as a catalyst for learning instead of being replaced and weakened by it.”
One of the most powerful voices came from Nina da Hora, a Brazilian computer scientist whose work highlights the global disparities in AI implementation. Her experience with facial recognition technology in Brazil — which arrived later than in other countries but with embedded biases — serves as a cautionary tale about the importance of implementation timelines and community engagement.
“I think we all know that designing AI is not neutral,” da Hora said, while emphasizing the need for privacy and bias campaigns that operate beyond policy frameworks to protect communities.
The equity challenges are multifaceted. Two-thirds of the world’s 77 million illiterate adults are women, and new forms of inequality are emerging through biased algorithms in search engines, large language models, and recognition systems.
As panelist Dan Wagner warned, “It’s quite possible that AI will actually expand equity and opportunity gaps in different kinds of ways.”
The week’s discussions crystallized around four essential priorities that are also prevalent in their new paper.
- The new digital divide isn’t just about internet access. Rather, it’s about electricity, affordable devices, reliable connectivity, and culturally relevant AI tools that don’t dismiss the unique needs of diverse communities.
- Student privacy and safety require clear frameworks and global standards. We need AI tools in schools that are transparent, reliable, and free of bias. Things that are not currently the case.
- Investment in teacher competencies and professional development is crucial. Teachers must be equipped to evaluate AI critically and make informed decisions about its use. As speakers emphasized, technology and teachers are “two sides of the same coin.”
- No country can navigate this disruption alone. International cooperation for safety standards, AI curricula development, and sharing of methodologies and pedagogies is more critical than ever.
The data point that is most critical to remember came from the Edelman Trust Barometer data showing that technology is among the least trusted sectors today. This trust crisis, combined with the rapid pace of change, requires unprecedented collaboration.
Stefania Giannini concluded her opening statements by saying, “Not like other challenges, this future will be complex, contradictory, and unfolding all at once. To face these effectively, we need what AI doesn’t have: courage, imagination, and ambition — and most importantly, collective action.”
The speakers at UNESCO Digital Learning Week 2025 made it very clear that “the future of education won’t be determined solely in corporate labs or individual classrooms.” Instead, the future of education will be shaped by our collective choices about how we integrate this technology while preserving the human elements that can make learning transformational for all learners. The themes circled from choice, to responsibility, to student protections (see my review of the Protecting the Rights of Children report for more information).
Remember that you can see the livestream of the main-stage at https://webcast.unesco.org/events/2025-09-DigitalLearningWeek2025/
The question isn’t whether to choose between teachers and technology, or progress and sustainability. The real challenge is making commitments that allow us to create a common thread that merges the tensions that AI is bringing to education. Especially with the most critical priority of ensuring that 44 million new teachers can enter the workforce before 2030 ready to use AI in service of human flourishing.
Jody is a thought leader in education and a champion for women in leadership and designing learning spaces and practices that are inclusive for all. You can follow her work at jodybritten.com. You can subscribe to Jody’s newsletter to get weekly updates delivered right to your in-box at https://jodybritten.medium.com/subscribe.
