AI Impact Awards 2025: These education companies see a bright point among the concerns

In education circles, the conversation on artificial intelligence has been largely lamentable. Many educators, parents and university establishments have wondered if children can always acquire critical thinking skills and how to assess students when many turn to a generative AI to cheat en masse.

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

Among these optimists are the Classdojo education platform, the online course provider Racerara and the Salesforce software company – three of this year's IA impact awards.

Nowsweek announced on Wednesday the full list of 38 recipients, 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 IA and matters experts.

“It's such an interesting moment for the impact,” said Sunya Norman, main vice-president of the impact Nowsweek. “People understand not only compliance with the risks and potential challenges of AI, but also of understanding opportunities – it really helps to cause more balance to public discourse.”

Salesforce, who launched his first accelerator focused on education in September 2025, received NowsweekThe best results, General Learning Award.

Norman recalled that a few years ago, Salesforce had organized a listening visit 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 did not have IA policies, but children were already using AI. Parents were confused.” Should I let my children do this? How should I govern this? What are the parental parameters that should enter this area? “”

“Now, around 50% of school districts in the United States have AI policies,” she said.

The AI ​​education program of the AI ​​of Salesforce seeks to support non-profit organizations and university establishments by equipping them with tools to create and deploy AI agents via its digital work platform agent. Salesforce said that he had hired $ 4 million to help educational organizations thanks to its accelerator program.

Different organizations can choose to use Agentforce in various ways. For example, Possible College, a non -profit organization providing college preparation and assistance to low -income students, has built an AI assistant to answer questions on financial assistance and college requests. Consequently, the student's student training in the possible college has won four times what she was before the assistant, without any increase in her staff, said Salesforce.

“I love raising education,” said Norman. “More people must consider the depth of integrated education with broader societal success.”

“The possibilities (from AI to education) are endless,” she added. “It will really be a question of ensuring that we do not leave public studies and students and educators in this space.”

Racera was also recognized on Wednesday for its impact on AI on education. The course provider has won the best results, Award for commercial learning for its launch of coach, a personal tutor powered by AI designed to make learning online more personalized, interactive and efficient. The tool was launched a few months after Chatgpt entered the stage in November 2022.

Greg Hart, president and chief executive officer, 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 objective of the coach was to allow students and learners to have the capacity to dive more deeply on the things with which they could have trouble, to better understand the concepts of the course,” said Hart Nowsweek.

Since its launch, Racera has noted that learners who interact with Coach have a probability of almost 10% higher to spend a quiz in the first try compared to those who did not use the coach. Those who interacted with the AI ​​tutor also carried out almost 12% of more items per hour, said Hart.

Hart added that the coach promotes the Racera mission because it is a particularly powerful tool for women and learners without diplomas.

For example, a main comment he hears is that Coach has created a safe environment for learners to receive comments without fear of negative consequences. This suggests major progress for women, who are statistically less likely to ask questions than men in a physical class.

“It really helps to solve global inequalities, and it helps bring a more level playground to our learners from around the world,” said Hart.

Coach is also available in 26 languages, which means that the advantage of the personal racera tutor is not limited to those of the Western world.

“AI is a really unique technology, in the sense that it leads to an incredibly rapid change in the world, and this change of risk expanding the opportunity gap in wealthy and helpless,” said Hart. “At the same time, Gen Ai is itself a tool that you can use to help fill and reduce this gap.”

Hart also argued that the speed at which the world has adopted AI only underlines the importance of learning. He said that through the coach, Racera operates AI to “take up this challenge, helping people learn more effectively, helping people learn more quickly and helping people be ready for what the workforce needs”.

The next step in Hartra's plan is to extend its offer beyond the text so that it can also level the playing field for learners who could learn better by video, audio or another type of modality.

At the same time, Hart also hopes that, as AI develops, this could become the response to existing concerns concerning academic integrity.

The share of adolescents who report the use of chatgpt for school work has doubled in the past two years. A PEW research study published in January noted that 26% of adolescents aged 13 to 17 use the chatbot for the school, against only 13% who said the same thing in 2025.

In July, Racera began to deploy features to check authentic learning. These tools limit access in high issues scenarios, prevent low -effort behavior, detect plagiarism and assess understanding by forcing students to show their work instead of simply providing a response.

Classdojo, Classdojo, is also recognized in the Education Prix Education category on Wednesday AI. The communication platform has received the Best Results Prize, K-12 Education Award for its creation of Sidekick, an AI teaching assistant aimed at removing what Sam Chaudhary, the CEO and founder of Classdojo, called “occupied work” for educators.

“I feel very grateful to be linked to our work in AI, because I really think it's the next wave for all of us,” said Chaudhary Nowsweek. “Dojo has a chance to direct and take what could be frightening technology and demonstrate how it can be used to help people learn and grow and flourish.”

Classdojo, which reaches 45 million children in 90% of American elementary schools, offers teachers a way to easily share class updates and follow the behavior of students on a single platform. Chaudhary and his co-founder, Liam Don, founded Classdojo to remedy the “divorce” between school communities that use educational technology and school districts that buy this technology, said Chaudhary.

“We had this mini-epiphany: everyone here built for institutions. What if we build for people who really do work?” Said Chaudhary. “I was a teacher, I spent time in class. We said to ourselves:” Well, why are we not going to teachers, children and families and asking them what their biggest problems are, and build things that help it. “”

After hearing hundreds of teachers, it was clear that many expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that there was a clear gap between what is happening in school and what happens outside of him. And so Chaudhary and Don founded Classdojo to fill this gap and “rebuild this village around each child,” said Chaudhary.

And it is in the same vein that the classdojo companion was born.

When the founder of the platform returned to more teachers to hear other concerns, they encountered a coherent message that the educators drowned in occupied work. Thus, Classdojo began to build an assistant who could solve this problem. By generating course plans, seats and activities to send the house so that families end together, the companion would give teachers the possibility of devoting all their time to teaching.

Only a few months after its launch, Classdojo said that teachers used Classdojo in more than 28,000 schools in 55 countries. A separate survey by the platform revealed that a teacher in three say they plan to use the next semester sidekick.

CHAPHARY said that while large -scale data always arrives: “We have heard teachers say things like:” I like it so much thought with me, it is difficult to follow, to think of 100 different things per week for all my students. “” I love the ease of the comments of the report card and the conferences of parents-teacher. “I really like the way it rewrites my messages so that they are easier to read, even in different languages.

“Education, as a sector, is slow to change,” he said. “Potentially, rightly. You have children. It is a vulnerable population. But a good way to make a change is simply to demonstrate success. And therefore, I hope that more industry goes in this direction.”

Even if AI offers a new opportunity to reach educational equality, Norman has recognized its limits.

For example, while the AI ​​assistant from the possible university would be extremely useful to help a first generation student to choose the best schools in their state or to determine the types of financial aid to which they could be eligible, there are other questions which, according to Norman, are better suited to a real advisor.

“We would like a human university advisor to be reserved for something like:” I'm afraid because no one in my family has already gone to college. Can you tell me about what it was when you were on a university campus for the first time? “” She said. “It should go to humans.”

A fourth education prize was also announced on Wednesday. To find out more about Medcerts, which has won the best results, the higher education price, consult the editor -in -chief of health care The story of Alexis Kayser.

To see the full list of IA impact winners, visit the official page For the IA impact prices of Newsweek.

Nowsweek Continue the conversation on significant AI innovations at our IA impact summit from June 23 to 25 in Sonoma, California. Click here To follow the blog live.