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The Guardian Archive Long Reed.

I'm Alex Beard.

I'm Alex Beard an educator and author and I wrote the long read Can Computers Ever

Replace the Classroom which came out in 2020. I've been interested in the topic of

education technology for a long time and a few years ago people were starting to say

that AI was going to transform education.

And I had my doubts because lots of promises

had been made about this topic many times over the years

and we hadn't seen big shifts in what happened in schools

and classrooms. And then one day I was

speaking at a conference in the London Docklands, Bet, it's the kind of

world's biggest education technology conference. And as I came off stage having just talked about AI

and why it wasn't going to transform education,

the Chinese came and handed me this solid silver business card and said, would you be interested in coming to speak to the

founder of our new AI education technology company?

He'll take you for lunch tomorrow, you know, come back here and have a chat.

And I came back and met over lunch Derek Lee, who I wrote about in the piece in the end.

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