Despite record-level education spending across G20 economies, five structural issues continue to limit impact: teacher shortages, skills mismatch, the digital divide, weak outcome measurement, and the growing need for trustworthy AI governance.
What’s changing is not how much we invest in education—but how effectively learning systems convert investment into capability, resilience, and economic value.
Artificial Intelligence is now central to this transformation. Not as a replacement for educators, but as an amplifier—supporting teachers, personalizing learning pathways, enabling multilingual access, and shifting education from static instruction to lifelong skill development.
By 2026, the most competitive education systems will be those that:
- Â Augment teachers with AI, rather than exhaust them
- Â Align learning with real-world skills and labor markets
- Â Deliver quality education beyond geography and language
- Â Measure outcomes, not just attendance
- Â Govern AI with transparency, ethics, and trust
Education policy has become economic policy, and AI has become educational infrastructure.