Within education circles, the conversation on artificial intelligence has been largely dismal. Many educators, parents and academic institutions have been left wondering whether children can still learn critical thinking skills and how to evaluate students when many are turning to generative AI to cheat en masse.

But while those fears have paralyzed some, others in the education space see an opportunity to finally achieve educational equality.

Among these optimists are education platform ClassDojo, online course provider Coursera and software company Salesforce—three of this year’s AI Impact Awards recipients.

Newsweek announced the full list of 38 award recipients on Wednesday, including four winners in the AI Education category, one of the more than a dozen industries represented. The winners were chosen by a panel of AI and subject matter experts.

“It’s such an interesting time for impact,” Sunya Norman, senior vice president of impact, told Newsweek. “Folks understanding not only honing in on potential risks and challenges of AI, but also understanding the opportunities—it really helps to bring more balance to the public discourse.”

Salesforce, which launched its first education-focused accelerator in September 2023, received Newsweek‘s Best Outcomes, General Learning award.

Norman recalled that a couple of years ago, Salesforce held a listening tour to understand what teachers, school administrators and students all thought of AI.

“There was a lot of anxiety and fear at the time,” she said. “Eighty percent of school districts didn’t have AI policies, but kids were already using AI. Parents were confused. ‘Should I let my kids do this? How should I govern this? What are the parental settings that need to come into this?”

“Now, about 50 percent of school districts in the U.S. have AI policies,” she said.

Salesforce’s AI education program seeks to support nonprofits and academic institutions by equipping them with tools to build and deploy AI agents through its digital labor platform Agentforce. Salesforce said it has committed $4 million to help education organizations through its accelerator program.

Different organizations can choose to use Agentforce in various ways. For example, College Possible, a nonprofit providing college preparation and assistance to low-income students, built an AI assistant aimed at answering questions about financial aid and college applications. As a result, College Possible’s student-to-coach reach shot up four times what it was before the assistant, without any increase to its staffing, Salesforce said.

“I love elevating education,” Norman said. “More folks need to consider how deeply integrated education success is with broader societal success.”

“The possibilities [of AI in education] are endless,” she added. “It’ll really be about ensuring we don’t leave behind public education, and students and educators in that space.”

Coursera was also recognized on Wednesday for its AI Impact on education. The course provider took home the Best Outcomes, Commercial Learning award for its launch of Coach, an AI-powered personal tutor designed to make online learning more personalized, interactive and effective. The tool was launched a few months after ChatGPT came onto the scene in November 2022.

Greg Hart, the president and CEO of Coursera, described Coach as being a “natural extension” of the company, which seeks to provide global access to education in the most effective way possible.

“The goal of Coach was to enable students and learners to have the ability to dive deeper on things that they might be struggling with, to gain deeper insight into concepts within the course,” Hart told Newsweek.

Since launching it, Coursera has found that learners who interacted with Coach have a nearly 10 percent higher likelihood of passing a quiz on the first try when compared to those who did not use Coach. Those who have interacted with the AI tutor also complete nearly 12 percent more items per hour, Hart said.

Hart added that Coach furthers Coursera’s mission because it’s been an especially powerful tool for women and learners without degrees.

For example, one main piece of feedback he hears is that Coach has created a safe environment for learners to receive feedback without fear of negative consequences. That suggests major strides for women, who are statistically less likely to ask questions than men in a physical classroom.

“It really helps address global inequity, and it helps bring a more level playing field to our learners around the world,” Hart said.

Coach is also available in 26 languages, meaning the advantage of Coursera’s personal tutor is not limited to those in the Western world.

“AI is a really unique technology, in the sense that it is driving incredibly rapid change around the world, and that change sort of risks widening the opportunity gap into haves and have-nots,” Hart said. “At the same time, gen AI is itself a tool that you can use to help address and narrow that gap.”

Hart also argued that the speed at which the world has adopted AI only emphasizes the importance of learning. He said that through Coach, Coursera leverages AI to “address that challenge, to help people learn more effectively, to help people learn more quickly and to help people be ready for what today’s workforce needs.”

The next step in Hart’s blueprint for Coursera is to expand its offering beyond text so that it can also level the playing field for learners who might learn better through video, audio or another type of modality.

At the same time, Hart is also hopeful that as AI develops, it could become the answer to existing concerns about academic integrity.

The share of teens who report using ChatGPT for schoolwork has doubled in the last two years. A Pew Research study published in January found that 26 percent of teens between the ages of 13 and 17 use the chatbot for school, compared to just 13 percent who said the same in 2023.

Back in July, Coursera began rolling out features to verify authentic learning. Those tools limit access in high-stakes scenarios, prevent low-effort behavior, detect plagiarism and assess understanding by requiring students to show their work instead of just providing an answer.

Also recognized in the education category of Wednesday’s AI Impact Awards is ClassDojo. The communication platform received the Best Outcomes, K-12 Education award for its creation of Sidekick, an AI-powered teaching assistant aimed at cutting out what Sam Chaudhary, the CEO and founder of ClassDojo, referred to as “busywork” for educators.

“I feel very grateful for it to be tied to our work in AI, because I really think this is the next wave for all of us,” Chaudhary told Newsweek. “Dojo has a chance to lead and to take what could be a scary technology and demonstrate how it can be used to help people learn and grow and flourish.”

ClassDojo, which reaches 45 million kids across 90 percent of U.S. elementary schools, provides teachers with a way to easily share classroom updates and track student behavior all on one platform. Chaudhary and his co-founder, Liam Don, founded ClassDojo to remedy the “divorce” between the school communities that use education technology and the school districts that purchase that technology, Chaudhary explained.

“We had this mini epiphany: Everyone here is building for the institutions. What if we built for the people actually doing the work?” Chaudhary said. “I’ve been a teacher, I’ve spent time in the classroom. We were like, ‘Well, why don’t we just go to teachers and kids and families and ask them what their biggest problems are, and build things that help with that.'”

After hearing from hundreds of teachers, it was clear that many expressed discontent with the fact that there was a clear divide between what happens at school and what happens outside of it. And so Chaudhary and Don founded ClassDojo to close that gap and “reconstruct that village around every kid,” Chaudhary said.

And it was in that same vein that ClassDojo’s Sidekick was born.

When the platform’s founder went back to more teachers to hear other concerns, they were met with a consistent message that educators were drowning in busywork. So, ClassDojo began building an assistant that could solve that problem. By generating lesson plans, seating charts and activities to send home for families to complete together, Sidekick would give teachers the chance to devote all their time to teaching.

Just months after its launch, ClassDojo reported that teachers were using ClassDojo in over 28,000 schools across 55 countries. A separate survey conducted by the platform found that one-in-three teachers say they plan to use Sidekick next semester.

Chaudhary said while the large-scale data is still coming in, “We’ve heard teachers say things like, ‘I like that it does so much of the thinking with me, it’s hard to keep up, thinking of 100 different things a week for all my students.’ ‘I love the ease of report card comments and parent-teacher conferences. It takes what I’m thinking and words it eloquently.’ ‘I really love how it rewrites my posts so they’re easier for parents to read, even in different languages. I get so much more parent interaction when I use Sidekick.'”

“Education, as a sector, is slow to change,” he said. “Potentially, rightly so. You’ve got kids. It’s a vulnerable population. But a good way to effect change is just to demonstrate success. And so, I hope more of the industry goes that way.”

Even as AI offers a new opportunity to achieve educational equality, Norman acknowledged its limitations.

For example, while College Possible’s AI Assistant would be extremely helpful in helping a first-generation college student pick the best schools in their state or determine what types of financial aid they might be eligible for, there are other questions that Norman believes are better suited for a real-life adviser.

“We’d love for a human college counselor to be reserved for something like, ‘I’m feeling scared because no one in my family has gone to college before. Can you talk to me about what it was like when you were on a college campus for the first time?'” she said. “That should go to the human.”

A fourth education award was also announced on Wednesday. To read more about MedCerts, which won the Best Outcomes, Higher Education award, check out Health Care Editor Alexis Kayser’s story.

To see the full list of AI Impact winners, visit the official page for Newsweek’s AI Impact Awards.

Newsweek will continue the conversation on meaningful AI innovations at our AI Impact Summit from June 23 to 25 in Sonoma, California. Click here to follow along on the live blog.