Your tutoring slots are emptying and schools are trialling AI tutors. An honest look at what is changing for teachers and what is still yours.
This in-depth guide covers everything you need to know about will ai replace teachers? what the evidence shows. Based on verified income data and real-world case studies from our database of 138 side hustle tactics.
AI will replace parts of teaching before it replaces teachers, and that process has already started. AI tutors now deliver lessons in thousands of classrooms, a handful of private schools run their academic day on software with adults acting as coaches, and the tutoring and homework-help business has been hit hard. Classroom teaching jobs are holding steady for now, but the work inside them is changing fast, and the side income many teachers rely on is the first thing at risk.
A Sunday night you might recognise
It is Sunday night and you are still at the kitchen table with a stack of essays. You became a teacher because you liked the moment a kid finally gets it. You did not picture the second job you took to cover rent, or the evening tutoring sessions that paid for your own child's swimming lessons. Lately those tutoring requests have dried up. A parent you used to see every Thursday told you, kindly, that her son "just asks the AI now."
Then you see a headline about a school where children learn for two hours a day from software and the adults are called "guides." You wonder whether the degree you are still paying off is going to look, in ten years, like a qualification for a job that got quietly redesigned around you.
That worry is reasonable. Here is what the evidence says.
What AI can already do in a classroom
The pitch from the people building these tools is large. Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, said in his 2023 TED talk: "We're at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen." His company built Khanmigo, an AI tutor and teaching assistant, and with Microsoft's backing it now offers Khanmigo for Teachers free in more than 180 countries and territories (updated December 2025). Its own pitch to teachers is that preparation tasks "can consume more than 50% of their workload" and the software can take a share of that.
Bill Gates went further. On The Tonight Show in February 2025 he said a great teacher is rare today, and that "with AI, over the next decade, that will become free, commonplace", naming "great medical advice, great tutoring." Asked whether humans would still be needed, he answered "for most things," then added: "There will be some things we reserve for ourselves."
The deployments are no longer pilots in one classroom:
- Miami-Dade County Public Schools uses Gemini for Education for 100,000 high-school students and teachers, and Google's own case study describes it as functioning "like a personal tutor."
- Estonia launched a national programme, AI Leap, that gave 20,000 students in grades 10 and 11 and their 3,000 teachers access to AI tools from 1 September 2025, with another 38,000 students and 2,000 teachers planned for September 2026.
- The American Federation of Teachers launched a $23 million National Academy for AI Instruction with Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic in July 2025, aiming to train 400,000 educators over five years.
The schools that already run on software
The scene from your Sunday night is real. Alpha School, a private network founded by MacKenzie Price, runs what it calls two-hour learning. Students spend about two hours each morning on maths, science and reading with AI-driven software at their own pace, then spend the afternoon on projects and life skills. CBS News reported in October 2025 that the network had 16 campuses, tuition starting at $40,000 a year in Austin, and staff called "guides" earning six-figure salaries. Price told CBS: "So our guides are not teaching academic content, but they are connecting."
The school's own site says "Adults, whether teachers or parents, become 'guides'" and claims its classes "learn twice as fast as their peers and rank in the top 1% nationwide." That claim comes from the school. CBS noted that the school reports top 1% results on standardised tests and cited no independent study of outcomes. Arizona's Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Horne, said of the Scottsdale campus in August 2025: "The idea of two hours a day, I'm very critical of" and "It's definitely inadequate."
So the AI-led school exists, it is expensive, it is small, and its results are self-reported. What it shows is a business model where an adult's job moves from delivering content to motivating children, and where one adult can cover more children for the academic part of the day.
Question to sit with: if a school could cover maths and reading with software, which part of your day would you defend as the part a parent pays for?
What the studies on AI tutoring found
This is where the worry gets harder to wave away. The best recent studies show AI tutors can teach well when they are designed carefully.
At Harvard, a randomised trial in an introductory physics course compared a purpose-built AI tutor with an active-learning class taught by experienced instructors. Published in Scientific Reports in June 2025, it concluded: "We find that students learn significantly more in less time when using the AI tutor." Students in the AI group spent a median of 49 minutes on the material, against a class session of 75 minutes.
In Nigeria, a World Bank team ran a six-week after-school English programme in Benin City in mid-2024 using a GPT-4-based assistant with teachers in the room. The World Bank reported gains of "about 0.3 standard deviations", which it described as "nearly two years of typical learning in just six weeks."
There is a warning in the research too. A field experiment with nearly 1,000 high school maths students in Turkey, later published in PNAS in 2025, gave some students plain ChatGPT-style access during practice. They did 48% better during practice but 17% worse on the exam once the AI was taken away, compared with students who never had it. A version with teacher-written guardrails erased most of that harm. Co-author Hamsa Bastani said: "We're really worried that if humans don't learn, if they start using these tools as a crutch"
Read together, these studies say the same thing from two sides. A well-designed AI tutor can deliver a lesson, and a careless one can quietly stop children learning. Both cases make the human who designs, supervises and checks the learning more important. Both also suggest that the person who delivers a standard explanation of a standard topic, over and over, is the most exposed.
What is happening to tutors and tutoring companies
If you want to see what AI does to paid help with schoolwork, look at Chegg. The homework-help company's quarterly filing for the period ended 30 September 2025 reported:
- subscription revenue down 42% year on year
- paying subscribers down 43% in that quarter, after falls of 38% and 30% in the two quarters before
- total quarterly revenue of $77.7 million, against $136.6 million a year earlier
- a restructuring "expected to impact approximately 388 employees, or about 45% of our current workforce"
The filing names the cause directly: "Recent technological shifts, notably Google's AI Overviews search experience" and students' growing use of generative AI for academic help.
When students stop paying for answers, the paid work behind those answers shrinks with them, well before anyone announces it as a job loss.
Language learning shows the same pattern. Duolingo's chief executive, Luis von Ahn, wrote in an April 2025 memo that the company would "gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle." After a backlash he wrote "I do not see AI as replacing what our employees do". His clarification covered employees. The contractor line stood.
For a teacher, this is the part that lands closest to home. Plenty of teachers top up their pay with tutoring, exam marking, test prep or writing lesson resources for sale. RAND's 2026 survey found that nearly one-third of teachers hold a job outside their school system, spending an average of 13 hours a week on it. Homework help, essay feedback and worksheet creation are exactly the tasks the software does well and cheaply.
Question to sit with: how much of your household budget depends on income from tutoring or side work that a cheap chatbot subscription now does well enough for many parents?
What teachers themselves are reporting
Teachers are adopting AI quickly, mostly to claw back time. A Gallup and Walton Family Foundation survey released in June 2025 found 32% of US public school teachers used AI at least weekly, 28% used it infrequently and 40% did not use it at all. Weekly users saved 5.9 hours a week, about six weeks over a school year. Only 19% said their school had an AI policy.
RAND's spring 2025 survey found 53% of English, maths and science teachers used AI for school, a rise of more than 15 points in one to two years. It also found that 61% of parents agreed greater use of AI would harm students' critical thinking.
In England, a randomised trial of 259 science teachers found that using ChatGPT with a guide cut lesson planning time by 31%, about 25 minutes a week, with no noticeable difference in lesson quality (December 2024).
None of this is surprising if you know the workload. RAND's State of the American Teacher survey found teachers worked an average of 49 hours a week in 2025, ten hours more than they were contracted for, on an average base salary of about $73,000. Given that, saving six hours a week sounds like relief.
Here is the uncomfortable part. The hours AI saves are the same hours an administrator can count. If marking, planning and feedback take less time, a district under budget pressure can ask whether it needs the same number of teachers per hundred students, or whether larger classes and more software can fill the gap. Nobody has to fire anyone for that to happen. They simply decide not to fill the next vacancy.
| Figure | Number | Source |
|---|
| US high school teacher jobs, 2025 | 1,087,500 | BLS |
| Projected change, high school teachers, 2025 to 2035 | 0% (about 2,500 fewer jobs) | BLS |
| Projected change, kindergarten and elementary teachers, 2025 to 2035 | 0% (about 6,100 fewer jobs) | BLS |
| Teachers using AI at least weekly, 2025 | 32% | Gallup and Walton Family Foundation |
| Hours saved per week by weekly AI users | 5.9 | Gallup and Walton Family Foundation |
| Average hours worked per week by US teachers, 2025 | 49 | RAND |
| Cut in lesson planning time with ChatGPT, England trial | 31% | Tes, on the EEF trial |
| Chegg paying subscribers, Q3 2025, year on year | down 43% | Chegg 10-Q |
| Chegg workforce cut, October 2025 | about 45% (388 roles) | Chegg 10-Q |
| Alpha School tuition, Austin | from $40,000 a year | CBS News |
| US teaching positions unfilled or filled by not fully certified teachers | 411,549 (about 1 in 8) | Learning Policy Institute |
What the official forecasts say, and where they disagree
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects little or no change in high school teacher employment between 2025 and 2035, with median pay of $72,040 and about 63,500 openings a year, mostly to replace people who retire or leave. For kindergarten and elementary teachers it also projects 0% change, with about 99,400 openings a year. The reasons BLS gives are falling enrolment, the shift to charter, private and home schooling, and state budgets. AI is absent from the list.
That flat line hides a squeeze. Fewer children, tighter budgets and software that can carry part of the teaching load all push in the same direction: fewer hires per retirement.
Globally, the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 points the other way. It says "Education-related roles such as University and Higher Education Teachers and Secondary Education Teachers are also predicted to be among the biggest job creators in absolute terms over the next five years globally", driven by growing working-age populations in parts of Africa and Asia. That growth is real, but it sits mostly in countries with young populations, far from a shrinking suburban district in Ohio or a private tutoring market in London.
There is honest counter-evidence for the US too. The Learning Policy Institute counted 411,549 positions either unfilled or filled by teachers not fully certified, about 1 in 8 teaching positions nationally (July 2025). Shortages in special education, maths and science mean a certified teacher in those subjects is still in demand. And the AFT's president, Randi Weingarten, put the union's view plainly when launching its AI academy: "The direct connection between a teacher and their kids can never be replaced by new technologies".
The forecasts disagree because they measure different things. BLS counts jobs, and classroom jobs are protected by law, by childcare needs and by the fact that someone has to be responsible for thirty children in a room. Gates and Khan are talking about the tutoring function, the explanation of a concept to one learner. That function is the part being automated, and it is also the part many teachers sell on the side.
Question to sit with: if the classroom job survives but the tutoring, marking and resource-writing income goes, what does your monthly budget look like?
Where this leaves the profession
Put the pieces together and a picture forms. The classroom teacher who manages a room, cares for children and is legally responsible for them is the hardest role to automate, and official projections show it holding steady. The roles under the most pressure are the ones built around delivering standard content to one learner at a time: private tutors, homework-help experts, test-prep instructors, online language teachers and freelance curriculum writers. In schools, the pressure shows up as larger loads per teacher, fewer replacement hires and a shift from teaching content to supervising software, the model Alpha School is selling.
That is a slow change, and slow changes are easy to miss until they show up in your pay slip or your empty Thursday evening slot.
Question to sit with: five years from now, would you rather be the person who sets up and checks the AI tutor for a whole year group, or the person competing with it on price?
What this means for you this month
You can protect yourself without leaving teaching. Start by finding out which part of your income is exposed, then move it.
First, list every source of money you earned last year: salary, tutoring, marking, resource sales. Mark each one by how easily a parent or a school could replace it with a chatbot. Homework help and standard essay feedback score high. Exam strategy for a specific board, special educational needs support and small-group work with children who need a human score lower.
Second, if tutoring is part of your income, reposition it toward what software does badly: accountability, motivation, parents who want a person they can talk to. Our guide to online tutoring covers pricing and niches that still hold up. If you know a subject well, packaging it as a course you own can last longer than selling hours one at a time.
Third, if you are already thinking about leaving the classroom, read changing careers at 40 before you decide, and look at the AI training jobs that pay subject experts to check and correct AI answers. For the wider picture, our pieces on jobs AI will replace and will AI replace doctors show the same pattern in other professions.
Start with the list. It takes an evening, and it tells you where to put the next one.