AI for education is a new but rapidly expanding field. Can it support student outcomes and help teachers avoid burnout?
On Wednesday, AI education company Kira launched a “fully AI-native learning platform” for K-12 education, complete with agents to assist teachers with repetitive tasks. The platform hosts assignments, analyzes progress data, offers administrative assistance, helps build lesson plans and quizzes, and more.
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“Unlike traditional tools that merely layer AI onto existing platforms, Kira integrates artificial intelligence directly into every educational workflow — from lesson planning and instruction to grading, intervention, and reporting,” the release explains. “This enables schools to improve student outcomes, streamline operations, and provide personalized support at scale.”
Freeing up time for teachers
As with most current applications of AI, and specifically agents, Kira’s aim is to free up time for teachers to be present with students, especially those who need personalized support. The company says the new platform allows educators to create lesson plans “instantly” without sacrificing individualized feedback for students, and even grades assignments automatically with features like AI Grader and a plagiarism checker.
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However thorough the platform’s analysis may be, it’s hard not to think that something may be lost in having a teacher review assignments through the eyes of an AI agent.
Helping struggling students
Kira says its AI can also help detect when students are struggling and make recommendations to teachers on how to support them early on. The platform can ingest instructional data like text, audio, video, and images, evaluating projects and classroom discussions to assess a student’s needs.
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Kira AI
“Kira’s agents deliver insights in seconds, empowering teachers to make faster, smarter instructional decisions,” the release says. It also aggregates data on student progress for administrators monitoring performance at a district level.
AI is adept at personalization, a burgeoning field in education technology that can help address students’ specific needs without pulling teachers away from the class at large.
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“Personalized learning doesn’t mean uncontrolled or entirely self-directed pacing; rather, Kira delivers concepts and content in ways that uniquely resonate with each learner while ensuring the overall pacing, benchmarks, and coursework structure remain firmly within the teacher’s control,” Kira CEO Andrea Pasinetti told ZDNET. “This approach allows the entire class to move forward cohesively, even as each student receives personalized guidance tailored to their individual needs.”
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Implemented in Tennessee schools
Kira – which is backed by computer scientist Andrew Ng, who is also the founder and CEO of DeepLearning AI – was originally developed specifically for computer science and AI literacy but has now expanded into all subject areas, including the humanities.
It’s currently being implemented in schools across Tennessee through a partnership with the Tennessee STEM Innovation Network, though that appears to be specific to computer science courses for middle and high school students.
Rather than train its own AI models, the company opted for commercial ones. “We’ve found that using agentic workflows yields much stronger and more consistent results than fine-tuning open-source or smaller models, especially for our educational use cases,” Pasinetti explained. He added that Kira maintains privacy by anonymizing data.
“It’s intuitive, saves me countless hours, and significantly enhances student learning outcomes,” Lance Key, a Future Ready VITAL Support Specialist in Putnam County, Tennessee, said in the release. Educators are notoriously overworked and underpaid, especially amidst rising disagreements with parents over curriculum.
Pasinetti says teachers have even approached Kira with ideas for new features and tools. “We believe this stems from the fundamentally generative nature of AI tools, which empowers teachers as creators,” he says.
