Schools have no shortage of AI software. What they lack is teachers trained to use it well. A growing number of education technology companies, including Abu Dhabi's Alef Education, are treating the training, not the tools, as the real product.

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For years, the sales pitch to schools has been about the software: adaptive platforms, automated grading, generative tools that draft a lesson plan in seconds. While classrooms have filled with artificial intelligence faster than almost anyone predicted, in many schools, those tools sit underused. The obstacle has turned out to be less about the technology than about the people expected to wield it. Most teachers were handed powerful systems with little guidance on how to fold them into the daily work of teaching.

The evidence is hard to miss. In a 2026 study by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation, 82 percent of K-12 teachers said they had received no formal guidance on using AI across their work tasks, and just 18 percent reported any formal direction from school administrators. The same study found that where teachers do use AI, they lean on it mostly for lesson preparation, building assignments and assessments, and adapting materials, rather than for direct instruction. In other words, the market is flooded with product, but adoption is following cautious, practical patterns that rarely match the marketing.

The Training Gap EdTech Overlooked

For much of the current AI wave, vendors sold platforms and treated teacher training as a light onboarding step, a webinar, and a login. By 2026, that approach was visibly running out of road, as districts shifted from scattered pilots toward system-wide integration and began asking harder questions about whether any of it was changing what happens in classrooms. The uncomfortable answer, in many cases, is that tools purchased with real budgets are barely touched because the humans meant to use them were never properly supported.

Alef's Change of Direction

That is the gap Alef Education is trying to fill. On August 11, 2026, the company said it would expand its professional learning program to 2,300 teachers ahead of the new academic year, anchored by a new suite called Alef AI for Teachers that bundles tools named Toki Studio, Magic Buttons, and Generative Apps for lesson preparation, adapting materials and building assessments. Rather than a one-time rollout, Alef is pitching a year-round model that runs from lesson planning through classroom delivery, formative assessment, and data-informed decisions delivered through in-person and virtual training, self-paced courses on its Alef Academy, subject-specific support and coaching.

Founded in 2016 and listed on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange, the company operates across roughly 20,000 schools in the UAE and Indonesia, reaches about two million registered students and supports more than 85,000 educators. In 2026 it was ranked first in the Middle East and Africa, and 13th globally, in TIME's list of the world's top education technology companies, drawn from around 6,500 companies. Its argument is that scale is worth little if teachers cannot use what they are given.

“The future of education depends on empowering teachers, not replacing them. By combining sustained professional learning with curriculum-aligned AI, we are enabling educators to spend less time on administrative preparation and more time doing what matters most - engaging students, responding to their learning needs and delivering high-quality instruction,” said Geoffrey Alphonso, Chief Executive Officer of Alef Education.

Alphonso, who joined the company in 2017 after running program management at Pearson, has built Alef around the idea that AI should sit beside teacher judgement, not override it.

Augmentation, Not Replacement

That framing places Alef on one side of the defining fault line in education technology which is whether AI augments teachers or eventually displaces them. In July, Coursera put $100 million into LearnVector, a new company from the AI pioneer Andrew Ng built on the premise that AI will make workers more productive rather than obsolete, and that someone still has to teach them the new skills. Khan Academy, OpenAI, and Google are all pitching AI tutors as support for students and teachers, not substitutes. Alef's insistence that its tools keep educators in full control of instructional decisions is a version of the same wager, and a response to real anxiety about deskilling and academic integrity.

Why Education Decision-Makers Should Watch

Although Alef operates far from American classrooms, the dynamic it is responding to is nearly identical in the United States. The same Gallup and Walton Family Foundation research found that six in ten K-12 teachers now use AI for their work, and three in ten use it at least weekly, yet formal training has not kept pace with that adoption. The recurring pattern across markets is that tools have reached classrooms faster than the guidance and support teachers need to use them well, and the return on those tools suffers for it. Whoever solves teacher enablement, rather than shipping another feature, stands to define the category.

The Harder Part Comes Next

The optimism and training tens of thousands of teachers well is slow and expensive. Coupled with the fact that measuring whether professional development actually changes classroom practice is notoriously difficult. There is a real risk that Alef AI for Teachers becomes one more underused system if the support around it lapses once the launch fades. Some of the company's headline claims, including reported test-score gains in Indonesia, are self-reported and await independent scrutiny. And the governance questions hanging over AI in schools, from data privacy to bias affecting vulnerable students, do not disappear because a vendor promises a human-centred approach.

Still, the underlying insight is sound and increasingly shared. The next phase of AI in education will not be won by whoever builds the cleverest model, it will be won by whoever convinces teachers to trust the tools and gives them the time and training to use them. Alef’s initiative may just prove that the least glamorous part of the work, teaching the teachers, is the part that matters most.

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