As we navigate the roadmap drawn by COVID-19, we know there will continue to be accelerated digital transformation and rapid innovation of education intended to positively impact student outcomes in 2022. This will take many forms, from institutions evolving their operations to students optimizing their learning with technology to caregivers connecting directly with their children's education through edtech services. To support both new and existing solutions, while delivering engaging learning experiences, developing forward-thinking data strategies and building new revenue streams, edtechs are using Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. Offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally, AWS helps these organizations lower costs, become more agile and innovate faster technology solutions that support students and educators every day. Early stage edtechs are also participating in the AWS EdStart program, the AWS edtech virtual startup accelerator, designed to help entrepreneurs build the next generation of online learning, analytics and campus management solutions on the AWS Cloud.

The Indian edtech giant Byju's keeps getting bigger, having raised more than $4.5 billion since it was founded 10 years ago. This month the company made clear its ambitious research agenda: to achieve the science-fiction dream of building next-generation teaching aids with artificial intelligence. Specifically, the company announced a new research-and-development hub, with offices in Silicon Valley, London and Bangalore, that will work on applying the latest findings from artificial intelligence and machine learning to new edtech products. The new hub, called Byju's Lab, will also work on "moonshots" of developing new forms of digital tutoring technology, said Dev Roy, chief innovation and learning officer for BYJU's, in a recent interview with EdSurge. "Edtech is one of the slowest adopters of AI so far, compared to some of the other industries out there," Roy said.

In this day and age, almost every aspect of our lives is influenced in some way by artificial intelligence. AI powers everything from which video plays next when you're watching YouTube to whether your job application is accepted or your insurance claim is approved. Whether we like it or not, our fate is often determined by algorithms that see us as a cloud of data points, not as humans. So, when we apply this technology to a space as fundamental to our society as education, we must make sure that our approach is responsible and equitable--treating the people affected by our tools as human beings. One of the primary applications of AI is to massively increase an organization's capacity to do tasks that require some form of reasoning. In education, this increase in capacity is already showing up in numerous forms.

We live in a world fundamentally transformed by our own creations. Once imagined only in science fiction, artificial intelligence now powers much of the technology we interact with every day--from smart home devices to cognitive assistants to media recommenders. While subtle by design, the impact of AI is far-reaching. The field of education is no less affected by these technologies. AI shows up in instructional chatbots, personalized learning systems and administrative tools.

Last March, Zoom, the ubiquitous online conferencing platform, became a staple of daily life for many students and educators as learning shifted online. Millions downloaded it--and first learned of it--back in early 2020, when lockdowns forced billions of students online, and at least 100,000 schools onto Zoom. But as the company itself will tell you, it didn't spring up overnight. Zoom is actually a decade old, and the first conferences launched in 2012, limited to a mere 15 participants. While post-pandemic growth has slowed as schools resume in-person learning, the company is still flush with cash, reporting over $1 billion in revenue in the second quarter of 2021.

In a recent white paper, former Scholastic president of education Margery Mayer dubbed 2021 the "year of speech recognition" in education. And she may be right: A spike in adoption by edtech developers in the first half of this year reflects the recognition that technology holds the potential to not only create more engaging learning experiences for students, but to transform the very practice of early literacy instruction altogether. In prior years, such a vision may have seemed far fetched. But as EdSurge has previously noted, the science behind speech recognition for children has begun to come of age, enabling educational applications that have piqued the interest of edtech developers, educators and researchers alike. Part of what has enabled the growing use of speech recognition in education is the availability today of technology built specifically to cater to kids' voices and behaviors.

Imagine a classroom where student teams are learning with a computer simulation, planning a scientific expedition to Mars. They might be challenged to think about the tools they need or the clothing and food they will bring. As the students make decisions about their voyage to the red planet, the simulation changes until each group is following a storyline all their own. That level of personalized learning is just one vision of researchers who are harnessing artificial intelligence to improve education. They're getting a boost through 11 grants of $20 million each that the National Science Foundation has awarded to establish new AI research programs for education and other fields.

Over the last few years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been delivering competitive advantage to businesses across a wide spectrum of industries. By Deloitte's most recent count, 37 percent of organizations have deployed AI solutions (up 270 percent from 2016) and a majority predict it will "substantially transform" their companies by 2023. The shift may also mean transforming their workforce. "As AI drives these transformations, it is changing how work gets done in organizations by making operations more efficient, supporting better decision-making, and freeing up workers from certain tasks," Deloitte reports. "The nature of job roles and the skills that are most needed are evolving."

Colby College is carving out space in the liberal arts canon for artificial intelligence. Thanks to a $30 million gift from an alumnus, the small, selective college in Maine is establishing the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which aims to integrate machine learning, natural language processing and big data into instruction and research across the college. "We want to be sure we're preparing students well for their futures: lives and careers of meaning and purpose," says Margaret McFadden, provost and dean of faculty at Colby. "Well-educated people have to understand AI, what these tools are and how to use them." Artificial intelligence has homes at other U.S. higher ed institutions, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Georgia, Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, and Stanford University.

Humans tutoring other humans works pretty well. The trouble is, it requires a lot of people. Artificially intelligent tools tutoring humans works pretty well, too--but building those digital systems takes time and expertise. So researchers hoping to engineer better teaching and learning systems are working to unlock a new level of education efficiency by creating AI tools that make it easier for almost anyone to build an AI tutor. "We are trying to leverage the joint power of human tutoring and computer tutoring," says Ken Koedinger, a professor of human-computer interaction and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University.