Content production is the clearest win
Turning existing material into different formats — slides into a workbook, a recording into notes, a long course into a summary — is mechanical transformation, which is exactly where AI is strong.
The subject expertise still has to come from you. What is removed is the reformatting, which for a training business is a substantial recurring cost.
Formative feedback, yes
Practice questions, draft feedback on exercises and explanations of why an answer was wrong, available at 10pm when the learner is actually studying. This is genuinely valuable and low risk because nothing is being certified.
The distinction that matters: formative feedback helps someone learn; summative assessment decides whether they passed. Automate the first and be very careful about the second.
Summative assessment, carefully or not at all
The marks that appear on a certificate carry fairness obligations, appeal rights and the credibility of your qualification. Automated marking of anything subjective creates exposure disproportionate to the time saved.
Where automated marking is used for objective questions, that is ordinary software. For extended written work, human marking with AI assistance for consistency checking is the defensible arrangement.
Learner support from your own material
- Answering course questions from your own materials, with citations
- Available outside tutor hours, which is when most study happens
- Escalating to a tutor when it does not know
- Surfacing the questions nobody could answer, which is your content backlog
The academic integrity question
Learners have access to the same tools. Assessment design has to account for that: more oral assessment, more work produced in supervised conditions, more emphasis on process and application rather than on producing text.
Detection tools are unreliable and produce false accusations, which is a serious matter for a learner. Design assessment that is robust rather than relying on detection.
Accessibility as a genuine benefit
Automatic captions, transcripts, translations and alternative formats make courses substantially more accessible for a modest cost. This is one of the clearest social benefits of the technology in this sector.