With tools like Amira and Khanmigo, ‘the take-up is very low,’ according to Stanford University’s Susanna Loeb.
Wendy Graham’s two kids first encountered Amira, a popular artificial intelligence tutoring platform, in 2025, during a summer reading program in New Mexico. She also used it at home with her daughter, now a fourth grader.
But she found that the purple-haired avatar with the big, round glasses didn’t seem to understand where her daughter was struggling. When she stumbled over “usually,” the “learning agent” wanted her to repeat the word and spend time defining it.
“She knew what the word meant; she just didn’t decode the word,” Graham said. Amira, in her view, “got hung up on all the wrong things.”
Her son, on the other hand, never gave Amira a chance.
“He just looked at me and looked at the screen like, ‘This isn’t happening,’ ” Graham said.
Her kids’ lack of enthusiasm for the program reflects what researchers have concluded so far about AI tutors. While some states are spending millions on Amira and other virtual tutors, most kids aren’t sticking with them long enough to benefit. For now, high-dosage tutoring models proven to be effective are human-led and depend on “a relationship that keeps students showing up and engaged,” according to a recent brief from the National Student Support Accelerator, a Stanford University center that conducts tutoring research.
“We don’t have solid research showing that AI tutoring can work in the U.S. at scale,” said Susanna Loeb, the center’s executive director. Researchers’ “biggest finding is that the take-up is very low.”
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