Two Chinese entrepreneurs, Derek Li and Rick Chang, separately jumped into the country's tech boom nearly a decade ago, in the early days of Xi Jinping's rule. China's mobile-technology market was exploding, fueled by generous government subsidies and a light touch from regulators. Their respective businesses benefited greatly from the dynamism in China's tech sector, underpinned by Mr. Xi's push for innovation and entrepreneurship. That atmosphere has now soured, with the Chinese leader targeting what he calls the ills of unchecked capitalism. While he still lavishes support on strategic tech sectors, Mr. Xi has aimed a regulatory fusillade at "monopolistic" practices of internet giants and their handling of troves of citizen data.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a discipline of computer science that deals with machine intelligence. It is essential to bring AI into the context of learning because it helps in analysing the enormous amounts of data that is collected from individual students, teachers and academic staff. The major priorities of implementing AI in education are making innovative use of existing digital technologies for learning, and teaching practices that significantly improve traditional educational methods. The main problem with traditional learning is that it cannot be suited to every student in class. Some students may grasp the concepts well, while some may have difficulties in understanding them and some may be more auditory or visual learners. The World Bank report on education has indicated that the learning gap created by this problem causes many students to drop out (World Development Report, 2018). Personalised learning has been able to solve this grave problem.

For a child prodigy, learning didn't always come easily to Derek Haoyang Li. When he was three, his father – a famous educator and author – became so frustrated with his progress in Chinese that he vowed never to teach him again. "He kicked me from here to here," Li told me, moving his arms wide. Yet when Li began school, aged five, things began to click. Five years later, he was selected as one of only 10 students in his home province of Henan to learn to code. At 16, Li beat 15 million kids to first prize in the Chinese Mathematical Olympiad. Among the offers that came in from the country's elite institutions, he decided on an experimental fast-track degree at Jiao Tong University in Shanghai. It would enable him to study maths, while also covering computer science, physics and psychology. In his first year at university, Li was extremely shy.

AI in education is more than science fiction. One study found that 34 hours on Duolingo's app are equivalent to a full university semester of language education. But educational AI and the broader category of educational technology (EdTech) go well beyond language learning. Companies like Carnegie Learning and Fuel Education apply artificial intelligence to K-12 learning. One of the most popular EdTech platforms, McGraw Hill's ALEKS, is a web-based, AI-powered assessment and learning system that covers K-12, homeschool and even college content.

As the chief technology officer and assistant dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Education, Paul Kim spends more time than most pondering how artificial intelligence (AI) can impact education. He believes most educators don't think about it enough, and those who do worry too much about it. "We're at a very early stage of understanding what AI can possibly do for us, especially in the education teaching system," he says. "I think the possibilities are huge." One thing he doesn't see as a possibility?

Zhou Yi was terrible at math. He risked never getting into college. Then a company called Squirrel AI came to his middle school in Hangzhou, China, promising personalized tutoring. He had tried tutoring services before, but this one was different: instead of a human teacher, an AI algorithm would curate his lessons. The 13-year-old decided to give it a try. By the end of the semester, his test scores had risen from 50% to 62.5%. Two years later, he scored an 85% on his final middle school exam. "I used to think math was terrifying," he says. "But through tutoring, I realized it really isn't that hard. It helped me take the first step down a different path."

We can build robot teachers, or even robot teaching assistants. And if the answer is yes, what's the right mix of human and machine in the classroom? To get a fresh perspective on that question, this episode we take you to China, where a couple of us from EdSurge recently traveled for a reporting trip. One of the events we attended was a two-day conference about artificial intelligence in education organized by a company called Squirrel AI. It's vision felt unusually utopian.

The educational system is broken, and unfair. For decades, if not centuries, learning was limited by geography and having the means to continue with higher education. Online learning and massive open online courses (MOOCs) promised to address the inequities in education while extending its reach across all geographies. However, the online model simply paved over the older methods with technology, and perhaps even making things worse -- pushing course material to students, with no effective way to track how much they're learning, or even if they're paying attention. Now, artificial intelligence (AI) may have an answer for that, bringing learning and feedback in a very personal way to students.