Every company has a soul that defines what it stands for. Google became synonymous with search through "10 blue links." Facebook built its identity around social connections with "like and tag photos." Amazon won hearts with "customer first," while Apple captured minds with "impeccable design and user experience." Reliance thrived on "value at affordable cost," and Tata earned trust through "reliable business ethics."
But what happens when a company's soul doesn't match what an entire industry needs?
The Chatbot Identity Crisis
Today, when you think of OpenAI, one image comes to mind: a chatbot. A smart conversation partner that can write emails, create Excel sheets, generate images, write essays and answer questions like a true expert. This identity works perfectly for general users who need quick help with everyday tasks.
However, this same identity creates a significant obstacle when OpenAI attempts to enter the education domain.
Teachers don't just need a chatbot.
Teachers need cutting-edge tools to inspire, motivate, and engage students in training the future job creators, not job seekers.
They need a complete ecosystem that understands the unique challenges of education. They need tools that can handle lesson planning, student assessment, parent communication, curriculum alignment, progress tracking, and classroom management - all in one place.
Why Current Solutions Fall Short
Consider a scenario where a teacher creates a comprehensive prompt to develop a practice exercise. The result is an exercise that works for the teacher. A lot of this prompt that achieved this result is general instruction, different from topic-specific content.
Whenever the teacher wants to curate such a practice exercise, they would either go back to a past prompt from history, extract the relevant part, and then run the prompt again. Or they would keep a track of the prompt like a template, which they can reuse again and again.
As such, because ChatGPT is a general tool catering to billions of users, they are less likely to think about solving such problems, which are specific to domain-specific users. One reason is that they can’t add such features, which feel like bloating the app with features which the majority of users wouldn’t find useful.
Google is currently facing the same conundrum; they wrestled with it internally and ultimately decided to incorporate generative responses into their legendary Google search. However, users still don’t go to Google looking for instant generative-powered responses (answers) because they have strong associations with 10 blue links and see Google as a link-producing machine, not an intelligent answering machine.
The OpenAI Education Dilemma
OpenAI recently announced its Learning Accelerator program, promising to "deploy tools for learners" and help partners drive access to ChatGPT's study mode at scale. This sounds impressive, but it has a hidden core “perceivability problem”.
OpenAI is still (and will continue to) thinking like a chatbot company trying to fit into education, rather than an education company that happens to use AI.
Real educational transformation requires understanding that:
Teachers need integrated workflows, not isolated tools
Student learning happens over time, not in single conversations
Educational success involves multiple stakeholders: teachers, students, parents, and administrators
Classroom management is as important as content delivery
Assessment and feedback form continuous cycles, not one-time events
What Teachers Actually Need
Imagine a platform that truly puts teachers at the centre:
Smart Lesson Planning: Not just generating lesson plans, but connecting them to student performance data, curriculum standards, available resources, and upcoming assessments.
Integrated Assessment: Tools that can create, deliver, grade, and analyse assessments while automatically updating student profiles and informing future instruction.
Seamless Communication: Parent updates that pull from real classroom data, student progress reports that write themselves, and administrative reports that require no extra work.
Adaptive Classroom Management: Systems that learn each student's needs and suggest personalised approaches for engagement, behaviour support, and learning acceleration.
Professional Development: AI that grows with teachers, learning their preferences, strengths, and areas for growth while suggesting targeted improvement strategies.
The Courage to Evolve
For OpenAI to truly serve education, it would need the courage to move beyond its chatbot identity. This means building education-specific solutions that might not look anything like their current products.
But this transformation is unlikely. Why? Because it requires companies to cannibalise their existing successful products and rebuild from scratch with a completely different user in mind. It’s one of the most difficult counterintuitive approaches in product development, where you move away from your core strengths, distribution, and well-established image, and try something entirely different without leveraging any other advantage other than distribution.
It’s not impossible, but if history is any predictor of future behaviour, it won’t happen realistically.
Most tech companies prefer to take their existing tools and adapt them slightly for education rather than reimagining what educational technology could be.
The Opportunity Ahead
This creates a massive opportunity for companies willing to build education-first solutions. The education sector is hungry for tools that understand their actual needs, not general-purpose tools with educational add-ons.
Teachers believe that education is one of the most disruptable sectors in the age of AI.
Teachers want technology that makes their jobs easier, not more complicated. They want platforms that understand education from the ground up, not chatbots trying to learn education on the fly.
The company that gets this right won't just capture market share - they'll earn the loyalty of millions of educators who are tired of forcing square pegs into round holes.
Having said that, I believe OpenAI will make a lot of money early on. They will sell many licenses to educators. The educators will use, to an extent, new tools that will evolve to replace the OpenAI chatbot with better-integrated and educator-first solutions. The David & Goliath drama will play out, and new specialised tools will ultimately prevail.
The Bottom Line
Every successful company has a clear soul that guides everything they do. For education technology to truly succeed, we need companies whose soul is education itself.
Until then, teachers will continue to work around the limitations of general-purpose tools, waiting for someone to build what they actually need.
The question is: who will have the courage to put teachers first and build the integrated, education-focused platform that could truly transform learning?
The future of education depends on the answer.