The coming years offer an opportunity to transform education. AI can provide precise insights about student needs and deliver lessons in a way that resonates with students’ interests and learning style. However, the technology also raises questions about academic integrity and the future nature of learning and teaching, questions that emerging tools are taking thoughtful approaches to addressing.
Amira Learning
For accelerating literacy with AI and neuroscience
The Amira Reading Suite is designed to capture virtually every aspect of a student’s reading performance, using AI and neuroscience to prioritize instruction needs. Thanks to a partnership with Anthropic, the platform now provides instruction via voice-based conversations. Working in collaboration with educators, the company says its tool has been shown to accelerate reading growth by up to 70% faster than traditional methods, which translates into an average of seven additional weeks of reading growth in a single school year.
eSelf
For personalizing AI tutor avatars
Many students who could benefit from a tutor don’t have that opportunity because of cost or location. eSelf is developing lifelike avatars that help students understand academic material, practice independently, and prepare for exams in more than 30 languages, with culturally relevant touches such as posing a question about baseball to a student in the U.S. versus one about soccer to a student in Brazil. In March 2025, the company teamed with Harvard and Israel’s largest textbook publisher to deploy its tutors to every school in Israel.
Grammarly
For tackling AI cheating at the source
Long before ChatGPT started composing essays, Grammarly was helping millions of users polish their prose. Now the company is focusing on helping students prove that their work is authentic. Taking advantage of the 500,000 apps and websites on which it’s used, its opt-in Authorship tool can identify which content has been generated by AI, modified by AI, pasted from another source, or edited by Grammarly or a native spell-checker. Launched in October 2024, the tool was used to generate more than 4 million reports in its first eight months.
The companies and individuals behind these technologies are among the honorees in Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech awards for 2025. Read more about the winners across all categories and the methodology behind the selection process.
