From hype to habit: How teachers are actually using AI in classrooms today

For much of the past two years, the conversation around artificial intelligence in education has been dominated by speculation. Will AI replace teachers? Will students misuse it? Will classrooms become automated?

These are understandable questions — but they miss a more important one.

Our data shows how teachers actually using AI in real classrooms today?

To move beyond opinion and anecdote, we recently undertook a year-long analysis of anonymised usage data and qualitative feedback from tens of thousands of educators across India and other countries. The result is a research report titled, ‘How Teachers Are Using AI to Redefine Education’, — not as a prediction of the future, but as a snapshot of the present.

What emerges from this data is both reassuring and instructive: teachers are not outsourcing teaching to AI. They are quietly embedding it into their daily work — in ways that strengthen pedagogy, reduce cognitive load, and make deeper learning possible at scale.

The big shift: From hype to habit

One of the clearest signals from the research is that AI adoption in education is already happening — but in very specific, teacher-led ways.

Across more than 115,000 AI-generated teaching resources and over 30,000 active educators, we observed a consistent pattern. Teachers are not using AI as a novelty or an add-on. They are integrating it directly into core instructional workflows such as lesson planning, assessment design, classroom preparation, and revision.

This matters because it reframes the AI debate. The most meaningful impact of AI in education does not come from replacing tasks or automating teaching. It comes from expanding what teachers are able to do within the same limited time they already have.

What teachers are actually using AI for

The research identified ten recurring AI use cases that now define how teachers are applying AI in practice. Five of these clearly dominate adoption:

Lesson planning has become foundational: Over half of active teachers regularly use AI to design lessons, structure learning objectives, and align content with curriculum requirements.

Assessment design is scaling: Nearly one in two teachers rely on AI to generate quizzes, worksheets, and practice material — not to reduce rigour, but to increase consistency and frequency.

Teaching is becoming visual-first: More than a third of teachers use AI-generated presentations to explain concepts visually, particularly in Science and Mathematics.

Academic writing is being streamlined: Teachers increasingly use AI for structured documentation, reports, and institutional communication.

Concepts are being taught through experiences: A growing share of educators use AI to design activities and projects that move learning beyond theory.

What is notable is not just what teachers are doing, but why. In interviews and feedback, teachers consistently emphasised that AI becomes valuable only when it helps them focus more on conceptual clarity, student interaction, and application — not when it merely speeds up paperwork.

Time recovered, not teaching replaced

One of the most important insights from the study is time recovery. Teachers using AI on the platform save an average of 4.7 hours per week. Crucially, this time is not being used to do less teaching. It is being reinvested into mentoring students, addressing learning gaps, refining explanations, and designing better classroom experiences.

This reframes AI’s value proposition in education. AI’s impact is not that it saves time. Its impact is that it expands what teachers can do with that time. This distinction is central to understanding why fears of teacher replacement are misplaced. When used thoughtfully, AI does not hollow out teaching. It strengthens it from the inside.

Alignment with India’s educational priorities

The direction of teacher usage observed in the research aligns closely with the intent of India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 — particularly its emphasis on conceptual understanding, experiential learning, and reducing the burden of rote memorisation.

Teachers are using AI to explain concepts in multiple ways, design formative assessments, and personalise instruction. In effect, AI is becoming an enabler of pedagogical change that the system has aspired to for years, but struggled to implement at scale due to time and resource constraints.

Teachers’ voices from the classroom

What makes these findings credible is that they are echoed in teacher voices across geographies.

A senior Mathematics teacher with over three decades of experience told us that AI helps him generate rigorous practice material faster, allowing him to focus on strengthening fundamentals rather than preparing worksheets. An English teacher in Jaipur described how curriculum-aligned lesson plans and assessments, generated in minutes, reduced daily stress and improved classroom flow. A school administrator in rural Tamil Nadu highlighted how guided AI workflows helped maintain academic consistency without requiring advanced technical skills.

Teachers in Bahrain and Kenya echoed similar sentiments: adoption accelerates when AI is reliable, structured, and embedded into everyday teaching — not when it demands prompt engineering or constant platform switching.

Across contexts, the message is consistent. AI works when it respects classroom realities.

Unlocking the real potential of AI in Education

Despite clear value, the research also surfaces a sobering truth: mass adoption of AI in education remains uneven.

Teachers cited familiar barriers — high costs, fragmented tools, steep learning curves, and poor alignment with real workflows. As a result, many educators remain stuck using AI only at the automation level, rather than as a lever for deeper transformation.

The report frames AI adoption as a progression:

Automation, where AI replaces repetitive tasks

Enhancement, where AI improves how concepts are taught

Transformation, where AI enables teaching that was previously impractical or impossible

The greatest risk is not AI replacing teachers. The real risk is stopping at automation, relying only on generic AI chatbots.

A policy inflection point

Education systems now stand at a critical inflection point. AI in education is no longer experimental. The next phase will be defined by choices: simplicity over sophistication, integration over novelty, teacher-first design over shortcuts, and infrastructure over isolated tools.

Realising this future will require collective effort. Governments must create enabling policy frameworks. Institutions must rethink pedagogy and teacher development. Technology providers must build responsibly — not for demos, but for daily classroom use.

Looking ahead

The evidence from real classrooms is clear: teachers are already using AI—not to automate tasks or replace teaching, but to shift education from rote memorisation toward deeper understanding and real-world application of concepts. When used thoughtfully, AI becomes a lever for teaching transformation, not a shortcut for content generation.

The future of education will therefore not be shaped by AI alone. It will be shaped by teachers empowered to use AI meaningfully, at scale, through teacher-first platforms that are simple, comprehensive, affordable, and designed to work out of the box—without steep learning curves or upskilling barriers.

(Binit Agarwalla, Founder, TeachBetter.ai)

(Sign up for THEdge, The Hindu’s weekly education newsletter.)