From Guru-Shishya to AI Agents: Will AI Replace Teachers?

Dear Friends,

I am a 5th-generation teacher in my family. My great-great-grandfather, great-grandfather, and grandfather followed the Guru-Shishya Parampara way of teaching. It was an oral tradition, and the teacher was the sole authority. The thought was that books would destroy memory. However, both my parents were school teachers. By then, books had become the authority. The teacher’s role was to transmit knowledge from books.

When I joined teaching in 2010, MOOCs were starting to pick up. The role of teachers had shifted toward mentoring and inspiring students in the classroom. During the pandemic, I recorded my Design Thinking classes at home for the first time and shared them with students. In 2022, one of my friends started a startup to develop an AI Avatar (skill2030.com) to replace an English teacher. Last year, I taught AI for Business and helped all our MBA students develop one or another AI Agent. In spite of this, as of 2024, 269 million students are enrolled worldwide. Universities survived in 2026 as well.

You might be wondering why I am talking about this journey. Today, I have to deliver a webinar on how careers are going to change, especially for MBA students, in the context of AI disruption. The moot question I need to answer is whether university enrolment will decline, increase, or remain stagnant. This is a hard question. However, teaching patterns and methodologies will change drastically.

1000 AD–1450: Gurus and Monasteries focus

1450–1900: Printing Press focus

1900–1980: Radio, Film, and Television focus

1980–2000: Computer, CD, and Multimedia era

2000–2010: Internet era

2010–2020: MOOCs era

2020–2023: Remote classes during COVID

2023–2026: GenAI era

2026 onwards: Personal AI Tutor / Agentic Era

Every time, the same question popped up: "Is the teacher still relevant?"

In the last 1,000 years, teachers survived every disruption. However, there is a catch. The teachers who changed and transformed during each of these phases survived.

What is the one skill required for a teacher across all these phases?

The mindset to adapt.

I recently read a small case. Two neighbours were fighting over apples supposedly damaging tulips. Law students produced pages of legal arguments. The professor ended the discussion with one observation:

"Apples fall in autumn. Tulips bloom in spring."

The case itself did not make sense.

In the age of AI, judgment matters more than information.

Hence, in my view, we as teachers need to bring that judgment into the classroom. We need to teach human-centeredness, empathy, design thinking, and commensurability rather than merely bringing theories and research into the classroom.

More than producing research papers, teachers have to spend time building simple, inspiring stories and short cases and bringing them to the table for discussion. Today, a good AI agent like Jenni.ai can produce a better research paper than a human teacher spending hours and hours writing one. The teacher's role now is to read such AI-produced information and turn it into meaningful capsules for classroom consumption.

I am seriously considering changing my teaching methodology in this direction rather than spending most of my time on in-depth research and other activities. This, in my view, will be the biggest help to students in the age of AI.

The Mindset That Kept Teachers Relevant for 1,000 Years

Ravi Saripalle