AI Tutoring Turns $100 into 3+ Years of Learning for schoolers. And there are lessons for leaders in this
An opportunity for a real crisis
Seventy percent of 10-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries still cannot read a simple story fluently. Yet a new The World Bank field experiment in Benin City, Nigeria shows what’s possible when generative-AI steps in as a virtual tutor. Over just six weeks of after-school sessions, first-year secondary students gained 0.31 standard deviations on a curriculum-aligned assessment—equivalent to 1.5–2 years of “business-as-usual” schooling.
The economics are even better
The research team calculated 3.2 Equivalent Years of Schooling (EYOS) for every $100 invested. In business terms, that is a return on learning that beats nearly every comparable intervention in the global evidence base. The full cost of the pilot was $48 per pupil (fixed and variable), with marginal costs under $10, indicating room for further efficiency at scale.
Bottom line: AI is not a bolt-on gadget; it is a force multiplier that lets scarce human expertise reach more learners without diluting quality.
So what?
Although leadership development has not yet been subjected to the sort of large-scale, randomized evaluations now emerging in K-12 settings, the early signals from our client work at 100Facets.ai all point in the same direction: when managers interact with an AI coach that delivers immediate, context-aware feedback, their engagement, reflection depth, and real-world skill application rise noticeably compared with conventional workshops or static e-learning modules. These observations are qualitative for now, but they align with the core mechanism documented in the World Bank tutoring study—high-frequency, one-to-one dialogue that compounds learning gains session after session—suggesting that a rigorous research agenda in executive education could yield similarly outsized returns.
This is why Rev. Dr. Susan Goldsworthy OLY and I are conducing a new research on state of AI in Coaching. If you are a coach, you can join this confidential research by answering 11 questions (2-4 minutes) here: https://100facets.ai/en/survey/ai4coaching
You’ll receive exclusive early insights, key trends, and our white paper “State of AI in Coaching” when it is released at the end of June.
