2025 Year in Review: How LearnWise AI Evolved Into the All-in-One AI Platform for Higher Education

2025 Was the Year Education Reimagined AI

Across higher and further education, 2025 became the year institutions shifted from asking “Should we explore AI?” to “How do we meaningfully integrate AI across teaching, learning, and student support?”

In 2025, AI (Artificial Intelligence) rapidly transitioned from a fringe topic to a strategic imperative within higher education. AI adoption among educators nearly doubled within a year, according to a Cengage Group report; with 86% of higher education students using AI in their studies. Increasing demand for personalized learning experiences and an economic motivation for greater operational efficiency have driven institutions towards considering diverse AI solutions, moving from fragmented edtech stacks to more cohesive, all-in-one platforms built for education. This shift marks a new era in higher education: moving from fears and reservations around AI adoption to an active, ethics-first approach to adopting the right AI tools to enhance learning and support institutions with a human-centered approach.

In this landscape, the higher education sector is facing a shift towards AI as an institutional priority. EDUCAUSE reports up to 57% of institutions are now considering AI a strategic priority, with many prioritizing faculty and staff training to keep up with AI’s expanding role in education. Over half of institutions already use AI to support curriculum design (54%) and automate administrative workflows (52%). 2026 promises to continue rapid AI adoption, bringing about larger questions regarding developing AI policy and robust ethical frameworks and guardrails to maintain privacy, safety, and academic integrity.

In 2025, the institutions we worked with echoed the same message: AI must be integrated across systems and roles not added as another standalone tool. For LearnWise, this was the moment where our vision further crystallized. What began as an AI campus support solution matured into a multi-layered AI platform used across the student lifecycle and institutional workflows. This year was defined by global growth, deeper partnerships, institution-led co-design, and a new wave of product innovation that strengthened our positioning as the all-in-one AI agent platform for higher education.

And as we reflect on everything we achieved alongside our partners, one theme stands out: 2025 wasn’t just a year to scale, but to expand and transform.

Becoming More Than AI Support: The Platform Evolution

One of the most important milestones of 2025 was the launch of the AI Feedback & Grader, which now sits alongside our AI Student Tutor and AI Campus Support as part of a unified platform for teaching, learning, and student success.

• AI Assessment & Grader launched in Canvas, Brightspace, Blackboard and Moodle, helping instructors deliver faster, more consistent, more personalized feedback.
• We launched major improvements to AI Student Tutor, including H5P interactives, topic detection, and multilingual learning experiences.
• Cross-course learning became a reality across Canvas, Brightspace, and Moodle, supporting more integrated study and revision experiences.
• We expanded our knowledge ecosystem with integrations across Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, Campus Group, Kaltura, SolarWinds, and more.
• We delivered deeper control with Flows + Custom Instructions, smarter mode detection, improved LMS access controls, and new security enhancements.

This platform evolution is driven by real institutional needs. Through our various community sessions, we learned educators needed support for feedback workflows. Students needed trusted, instant academic guidance. Support teams needed to free capacity for the human moments that matter most.

Our growing impact was demonstrated in the Jisc AI Pilot Program, where 12 institutions across the UK’s HE and FE sectors adopted LearnWise for a wide variety of teaching, learning, and support use cases. The results, presented in the summer of 2025, reinforced a core insight: institutions want consolidation, consistency, and holistic support, not disconnected AI tools.

This is the foundation on which LearnWise has firmly positioned itself as the category-defining, all-in-one AI platform for education.

Global Community & Partnerships: Scaling Across 4 Continents

2025 was a breakthrough year for global adoption.

We added 70+ new partnerships, closing the year with 90+ institutions across four continents actively using LearnWise AI. Our growth spanned the UK, Ireland, the United States, EMEA, and APAC, demonstrating a worldwide shift toward unified, ethical, institution-ready AI.

Co-building with institutions

Two partnerships shaped our thinking on responsible and institution-led AI adoption:

• UMass Global – where we co-built AI feedback and learning solutions tailored for adult learners and non-traditional study pathways.
• Coleg y Cymoedd – where we collaborated on ethical AI adoption frameworks for teaching and learning with a bilingual, multi-channel deployment to reflect authentic student needs.

Each collaboration reinforced a shared belief: the future of AI in education must be co-designed with educators, not retrofitted into their workflows.

New at LearnWise AI in 2025: Partnerships & QS Reimagine Education Awards

Our platform’s maturity was recognized by peers and industry leaders worldwide.

• QS Reimagine Education Awards 2025 – LearnWise won the Bronze Award in the AI in Education category, placing us among the most innovative global edtech solutions.

• D2L Emerging Partner Award – acknowledging our strategic alignment and impact across institutions using Brightspace.

• Our first EDUCAUSE – marking our entry into one of the most important stages for digital transformation in higher education.

Together, these achievements validated not only our product roadmap, but also our focus on ethical, scalable, institution-centered AI.

Building Communities of Practice in Education

2025 marked the year LearnWise moved from vendor to thought leader, hosting important community-driven conversations on responsible AI adoption.

This year, we convened senior leaders across the UK in small, high-impact sessions focused on policy, pedagogy, student experience, and sector-wide AI strategy.

With our AI in UK Higher Education: Leadership Insights on Strategic Adoption session, we discussed the nitty gritty of AI adoption, including concerns around AI literacy gaps across teams and students, why responsible AI must be treated as a holistic, institutional change rather than a technical implementation, and finding ways to balance innovation with governance and trust.

In our leadership session focused on co-designing responsible AI for education, we gathered with leaders across UK institutions to explore how they’re implementing AI - from student support to academic workflows, and how they are already piloting AI tutoring solutions for students. Other topics included AI accessibility concerns, such as using AI to reformat, translate or personalize content, and the challenge of finding ethical ways to use AI for student output in the arts.

In 2025, a shared conclusion emerged: responsible AI in higher education is an institutional transformation project, requiring time, governance, and evidence, not just products and pilots. In 2026, we hope to continue hosting sessions that delve deeper into case studies and best practices for institutions to chart their paths towards ethical, safe, and scalable AI adoption.

Our growing community came together across several more LearnWise-led sessions, including:

• Our first community-centered webinar in May, exploring AI readiness and student experience transformation across the UK and Ireland
• Two sessions from our emerging Community of Practice
• A fall product webinar series for Brightspace, Canvas, and Moodle, showcasing our new AI Feedback & Grader and how to implement AI feedback workflows without disruption.

The common thread: institutions want spaces to learn from each other, compare approaches, and build ethical, sustainable AI strategies.

Showing Up for Global Educators: Events, Conferences & Offsites

External presence

In 2025, LearnWise attended 19 global events across 3 continents, making some of our biggest appearances yet:

• First OEB Berlin
• First EDUCAUSE
• QS Reimagine Education Awards (where we won Bronze in the AI in Education category!)

Each event reinforced our mission: listening deeply, learning across contexts, and collaborating with partners shaping the future of education.

Internal culture

We’ve grown to a formidable team of 35+ people worldwide, and got together at our annual offset this year in beautiful Sitges, Spain. Our theme for the year ahead was reflected over 3 days of workshops, key presentations and collaboration: “Growing Up” into processes and systems, continuing to scale. 

The week focused on:

• Aligning goals across product, CX, marketing, and sales to our 2026 targets
• Strengthening our culture as a hybrid, global team
• Connecting as humans behind the technology

These moments helped set our direction for 2026 and reinforced the values that underpin our work. Curious about joining our growing team? Check out our open roles here.

What This Year Taught Us: Insights from 2025

This year LearnWise reached a significant milestone: Our AI assistant answered over 1M+ questions worldwide, supporting students through visa processes, exam preparation, wellbeing support, course navigation, and more. This was not only a technical achievement; it reflected the real stories of people navigating their unique learning journeys. 

Across hundreds of conversations with educators, leaders, and students, four consistent themes emerged:

1. Institutions want consolidation, not more tools.
   Fragmentation is the enemy of scale. Institutions want unified, institution-ready AI they can trust.
2. AI feedback is quickly becoming essential.
   Scaling meaningful assessment feedback is one of the sector’s biggest pressure points.
   Multi-channel support is the new baseline.
   Students expect support embedded in the places they already learn: LMS, intranet, websites.
3. Skills and assessment innovation is accelerating.
   AI is reshaping academic practices, from formative feedback to creative output and faculty productivity.

These themes now guide our roadmap and reinforce the strategic direction of the platform.

Looking Ahead to 2026: The Next Chapter of the All-in-One AI Platform

Through our many conversations with partners and the larger educational community, we validated what we already knew: AI solutions can work for education best when they become unified, holistic platforms at every touchpoint of the student life cycle. Our solutions across tutoring, grading & feedback and support aim to cover these three key facets of student life and institutional layers; 2026 will deepen our role as an all-in-one AI platform powering ethical, institution-first AI.

Our vision is to become the fully agentic AI platform for every institution need - including faculty, students and staff - helping them navigate the edtech stack easily, connecting all necessary support points, and freeing up time for educators and staff to do what they do best: personal, human-centered teaching, learning and support. 

Here are a few product innovations coming next, from early 2026 and beyond:

• Proactive Messaging: Proactive messaging to inform users with relevant, timely information and increases interaction and adoption of the assistant across AI Campus Support and Student Tutor applications.
• Feedback Insights Dashboard: Sharing more granular insights into how teachers use the AI Feedback and Grader, helping institutions understand the adoption and usage of new AI tools.
• Chat Experience Integrations: Implement inline, clickable citations embedded within AI-generated responses, allowing users to view source material in every answer provided.

Expanding partnerships & communities

As our team continues to grow, so do our ambitions: as of December 2025, we currently work with 90+ global partner institutions, and cemented our partnership with Jisc/Chest in the UK, as well as existing partnerships with leading edtech providers across the world. We aim to grow our current footprint in the UK & Ireland, Europe and North America, with a special focus on growing our emerging markets in North America, APAC, and Latin America.

In the coming year, we are looking forward to scaling our communities of practice: currently focusing on the UK and EU, we’ll be expanding community events in North America, welcoming new education leaders across the world for more sessions to discuss ethical AI adoption and implementation across higher education.

We also look forward to building deeper listening channels, hosting and creating spaces to learn more about what educational institutions need, what challenges persist in the sector, and how AI can responsibly enhance learning.

We believe the future is not about adding more AI features. It’s about building the infrastructure institutions need to deliver ethical, scalable, human-centered AI at every level.

LearnWise enters 2026 with momentum, clarity, and a global community shaping the path forward. Want to stay in touch? Follow our product updates here and subscribe to community updates via the LearnWise newsletter.