The Leadership Series 2025: AI Edition with Alanoud Abdulrahman & Tina Kapp

1. Could you share the core mission and long-term vision that drive ALC’s work in education?  

Tina: Our core mission is to make Ed Tech equitable, accessible, and interesting. Just a tiny bit ambitious of us!

Alanoud: How we do that is still evolving, for sure. AI has brought a lot of new opportunities for Ed Techs in 2025, but we’re always conscious of the ethics as well. How do we make AI safe, reliable, and really, truly impactful for both teachers and students?

2. ALC positions itself at the intersection of AI, pedagogy and purpose. Could you walk us through how ALC’s flagship platform uses diagnostics and personalised pathways to drive learner growth in the K–12 environment?  

Alanoud: Our platform is designed to help schools solve challenges at the national and international assessment levels that have been there for years. The knowledge graph takes all these known factors and uses them to power “smart support” for admins in tracking and planning for areas of strategic improvement across multiple curricula. Those diagnostic results use dynamic and agentic RAG to create prerequisite games that support student improvement areas across both academics and social-emotional skills.

Tina: Just to add to Alanoud’s point, we always start from the problem point. We look at how the structural and statistical semantics of AI can be harnessed to solve real pain points.

3. Can you give us a sense of how AI is shaping the education landscape across the GCC? Within schools, what areas are we seeing AI come to the forefront?

Tina: Unsurprisingly, data and planning is in the lead, with school admins looking for strategies to automate assessment-derived data pipelines and centralize progress tracking. But I’ve also spoken to so many HODs and teachers who are using AI for incredibly creative purposes, combining math with visual art, or building characters for students to interview to learn primary research skills. There are almost infinite possibilities, but the one commonality is that we’re all still figuring out that balance of human creative input and prompt structure.

4. From your perspective, what sets ALC’s approach to AI and digital learning apart within the international education sector?  

Alanoud: One of the core problems that has never yet been fully solved with online assessment engines is what to do after results & reporting. The classic solutions are to either make intervention the teacher’s problem, or to automate learning pathways via digital lessons and games, but neither approach has had a solidly reliable track record when it comes to improving scores at the national and international level. We’re currently working on how semantic blueprinting lets us map the science of learning as a 3D space. Sounds fun! Tricky to do in practice.

5. Beyond academic outcomes, how do you see AI supporting the development of essential future-ready skills in students?

Tina: Yes, I guess first I’d have to define what I mean by future ready-skills. One OECD skills study published this month estimates that tech skills alone will require about 40% of today’s workers to completely reconfigure their skill sets, never mind the workers of the future. We’re building short courses for some of these emerging fields, like AI. But there’s also a whole dimension of soft skills that historically have been far more challenging to assess and track. That part is the piece of the puzzle that really interests me: how do we track something like critical thinking, in the way it’s assessed on international exams like PISA?

Alanoud: Yes, Vision 2030 is about creating a knowledge economy, which is linked to both academic and soft skills. I’m personally invested in how we can use gamification to better assess progress and proficiency on soft skills like initiative, persistence, leadership, cultural knowledge, and self-awareness.

6. What strategies do you believe are most effective for integrating AI into teaching and learning without losing the human element?  

Tina: One of my mentors once told me years ago, “All this digital stuff looks cool, but you can’t ever forget that in a classroom, it’s just another wrench in a toolbox.” I think she’s still right in many ways, but there’s one emerging difference when it comes to AI. If structured properly, it can aggregate predictive data on a scale we’ve not yet seen. In the future of teaching and learning, all the different facets of learner behavior, from leadership skills in a group chat to collaboration skills on problem-solving…maybe these end up getting tracked in an environment that’s more like a Roblox or Minecraft than what we now think of as a digital MOOC.

7. Where do you see the greatest opportunities for AI to transform education in the next five years — both in classrooms and at the systems level?

Alanoud: If I could answer this question, I’d be the next Steve Jobs! The best use of AI across the region will require us to do the hard, less glamorous work of figuring out where we really are, and what works within our education systems: enhance the things that are already working well for us, and figure out how to fix the things that aren’t. AI doesn’t replace people, and it won’t transform a whole country’s education system overnight. But it can help us to better accomplish the things we already do well.

8. For a school that is starting to embed ALC’s solutions (or similar learning tech platforms) what are the key strategic practices or change-management steps leaders should prioritise to maximise impact?  

Alanoud: We know international schools here deal with a lot of exams. National exams often compete for prep time with international exams like MAPS. To maximise impact from Al Mas, administrators need to focus on how ALC connects our local exam skills to broader student success metrics in meaningful ways. For example, the Al Mas progress reports give a granular track record of improvement for students against the same types of skills we see on TIMMS and PISA.

Tina: That’s a great way of looking at the ecosystem. The Saudi national exams are designed to measure achievement in a way that is well aligned to international exams across many different curricula. My dream when I worked in school administration would have been to see one matrix that links them all together, so I could push a button and cross-reference PISA against my Science National Exams, against NGSS, against leadership skills, resilience, dropout and failure prediction factors…a truly holistic view of my students as learners.

9. Many EdTech platforms focus heavily on technology, while ALC seems equally invested in pedagogy. How do you maintain that balance between technological innovation and sound educational research?  

Tina: The thing about the best digital tools is that they aren’t what we call “digital for the sake of itself.” If technology doesn’t solve a specific learning challenge in a useful and engaging manner, it’s essentially just bling. I could go off right now and build you a massively cool, expensive, award-winning digital lesson with a ton of flashy 3D stuff and AI elements. But if that lesson doesn’t address student learning objectives with real and reliable efficacy measures, and it doesn’t do so in a more engaging and useful way than a textbook, a teacher-led activity, a free YouTube video, or Chat GPT for that matter…I’ve just built something that nobody needs. It’s tempting right now for companies to lean into AI as the solution to all things, but the fundamental challenges of good, effective, equitable education are still going to be there.

10: As ALC expands its regional footprint, what opportunities do you see for collaboration with international partners or school groups across the GCC to further advance AI-enabled learning?

Alanoud: Big goals in K-12 education simply can’t be achieved without meaningful long-term partnerships across schools, industries, and governments. We’re very excited to be collaborating with large school chains here to run efficacy studies. I’d love to take a peek into 2026 to see where Al Mas is at this time next year. We have big dreams around enhanced gamification and predictive analytics.