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Nathan Schultz, the newly appointed CEO of global education technology company Chegg, shares insights with Gulf Business about the company’s major shift into artificial intelligence and discusses the important role the UAE plays in the company’s vision for growth and innovation in higher education.
The CEO of the California-based education technology company explains how their new AI-powered personalized learning assistant can create customized learning journeys that empower students, regardless of their goals, level, or learning style.
Tell us how excited you are about the opportunity in your new role as CEO of Chegg.
We're very excited. Over the past 16 years, Chegg has become one of the largest, most accessible, and most impactful online education services for students around the world.
I've been proud to be part of the leadership team that drove many of these changes, starting with our transition to an all-digital learning platform and then, as COO, helping to embed AI into nearly every aspect of the business. So it's a tremendous honor to take the helm, especially following in the footsteps of a CEO like Dan Rosensweig, who I've been fortunate to work with for so many years.
We've built an amazing team and are excited about the opportunity to use our proprietary AI tools to revolutionize how we serve students, improve student outcomes, and increase Chegg's value to investors.
What do you think the future holds for AI when it comes to learning?
There is great potential, and we can already see what is coming in the near future. The development of AI is a big step towards making personalized learning a reality. Personalized learning is a much-discussed concept in edtech circles, yet it never seemed entirely feasible before the advent of AI.
Students can have a learning assistant in their pocket that predicts their needs and adapts to their strengths and weaknesses. GenAI tools for learning can instantly respond with a more natural conversational interface with students when rigorously tailored and assessed for educational outcomes.
Conversational AI designed for learning can recognize what types of questions students struggle with and provide the most appropriate and effective responses, for example determining when a procedural question needs to be broken down into steps or when a conceptual question can be explained with a real-world example.
Conversational AI can encourage greater engagement by suggesting prompts that students might ask to deepen their learning. It can also teach students how to interact with the GenAI system by guiding them in creating helpful follow-up prompts.
This is more important than ever, because many students today combine their studies with work and family responsibilities. Students need learning support that can adapt to their needs, whatever their goals, level and style.
The higher education market is growing rapidly in the UAE. At the same time, the UAE's AI market is expected to reach nearly $2 billion by 2026. Why do you think the UAE is best positioned to benefit from the opportunities that AI brings to learning?
The UAE has been at the forefront of AI for many years, long before the advent of generative AI, and is now considered one of the three most important countries in the world in this field. Not only is it home to the world's first AI-focused university (Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence), it was also one of the first countries in the world to develop a strategic national approach to AI policy and education.
In 2024, chatbots began to be rolled out in schools, meaning that the UAE government and its people are well aware of the potential of this technology and how important a role it can play in the future.
By building platforms that harness the educational potential of AI, particularly in developing personalized learning, companies such as Chegg can help the UAE pursue its AI leadership goals in 2031 and beyond.
Tell us about the new AI-powered learning assistant Chegg is developing and how it can change the way students in the UAE and GCC countries learn.
Chegg's platform believes that through guided, two-way conversations, students learn, deepen their understanding, and adapt as their knowledge and skills evolve. Following up on answers with suggested prompts for questions students might ask next fosters deeper, more active engagement in their learning and shows students how to interact with AI systems.
We hope the platform will let students know if they are studying at the optimal times of the day, suggest that they engage in more practice instead of relying solely on review, and encourage students to work through difficult concepts to increase their learning resilience. We support this by automatically generating high-quality study aids, including practice tests, study guides, and multi-modal instructional content customized to specific student needs.
How does Chegg use AI to deliver its products and services?
Our unique assets, including over 100 million pieces of learning content, connections to learners around the world, and access to a large number of subject matter experts, come together to deliver the most effective learning experience possible. In developing an education-specific AI platform, we believe it is essential to own a large-scale language model and quality assurance layer. This allows Chegg to verticalize education-specific AI and is essential to our goal of controlling quality and accuracy at a lower cost than leveraging a general AI platform.
Over the next few quarters, we will be focusing on rolling out enhancements and features that will provide an even richer and more personalized learning experience, whether that means real-time conversation support with our AI learning tools, generating flashcards, generating exercises or creating focused study guides.
Our platform is designed to predict, generate and deliver personalized solutions that we expect will increase value for students and expand the audience we can serve in a cost-effective manner.
To give you an idea of how quickly this effort is expanding, we received over 9 million questions in the first quarter of this year, compared to 3.9 million new questions in the same period last year. And as more questions are asked, we believe we will generate more content, drive more traffic, and translate into new customers in the coming quarters.
When it comes to learning, there are a number of general-purpose AI tools out there, such as ChatGPT, but how is Chegg different from them?
GenAI has captured the imagination of students around the world, with a recent global survey showing that 40% of college students are using general-purpose AI tools in their studies. However, despite the growing interest of students in general-purpose GenAI tools, concerns about using them in their studies remain.
According to the same survey, of the 40% of undergraduate students worldwide who used GenAI for their studies, 47% were concerned about receiving inaccurate information, calling for a more focused approach to AI in educational environments.
Our first priority is to create new subject-specific LLMs that are trained on large datasets of educational content and real student interactions, then fine-tuned by human subject experts and evaluated by the students themselves to ensure the quality of the answers provided is accurate, customized, empathetic, and contextually relevant.
That's why Chegg is launching a proprietary AI platform that includes 26 subject-specific LLMs, all built by Chegg's 150,000+ subject experts, designed with learning and accuracy in mind, and trained on Chegg's 100 million+ learning pieces of content, rooted in learning science.
This correlates with student demand, with 55 percent of students globally saying they want GenAI tools to leverage human expertise in generating answers.
How can Chegg's new AI-powered learning assistant complement existing efforts to integrate AI into learning in the UAE?
The UAE plans to introduce AI-powered chatbots in schools, providing an ideal opportunity to take student learning to the next level. In higher education, student adoption of GenAI is growing rapidly: Anthology research found that nearly a third (32%) of UAE students use GenAI tools frequently (at least once a week), and 56% of students surveyed believe GenAI will revolutionize the way they teach and learn.
Rapid advancements are underway and as large-scale language models are verticalized for education, the next wave of AI-powered learning tools, if used correctly, can serve as a valuable supplement to teachers' classroom activities and improve how students learn. These and other innovations can support students on their personalized learning journey.
As the application of artificial intelligence in education advances, the role of teachers remains critical: students' unique development paths cannot be fostered solely by algorithms and large-scale language models.
But if deployed thoughtfully and strategically, AI tools can provide a customized learning experience to each student’s pace and needs, delivering supplemental support when and where it’s needed most.
I know Chegg runs the Global Student Prize and it's great to see UAE students have been finalists for many years. Why did Chegg launch the Global Student Prize?
In 2021, Chegg.org partnered with the Varkey Foundation to create the Global Student Prize, which highlights students who are impacting learning, improving the lives of their peers, and contributing to society. Each year, one outstanding student is selected from thousands of applicants around the world to receive a $100,000 prize.
But the awards also highlight the efforts of incredible students around the world who are working together to reshape the world for the better and act as agents of change.
The UAE has always put forward incredible students who inspire young people around the world. For example, in the award's inaugural year, UAE student Lamya Butt was named among the top 10 finalists for her contribution in providing ICT devices to thousands of students in Dubai.
We have had some fantastic students from the UAE named as finalists in the Global Student Prize in 2022 and 2023. 2024 will be the fourth year of the Global Student Prize and we can’t wait to see who our fantastic finalists will be this year!
Is Chegg starting to work directly with schools?
Yes, we're excited to launch testing partnerships with US universities and reach even more students. The vast majority of US users (89%) say Chegg helps them better understand the concepts they're studying, which is why we're excited to allow educational institutions to offer their students free access to our platform.
We hope to further pilot partnerships with universities in the UAE and the wider GCC region and work together to deliver even better learning outcomes.
What is the value of partnering with a university?
The UAE government announced plans for a university rating system in 2017, signaling a clear determination to reduce university dropouts and ensure that higher education institutions provide students with the support they need, resulting in the recently launched National Higher Education Institutions Classification Framework.
We know that universities can sometimes struggle with student retention and retention, and we believe that by establishing partnerships between institutions, we can solve these issues and become valued partners within the education ecosystem.
