Recently, the plenary session of the 27th China Annual Conference for International Education (CACIE 2026) was held at the China National Convention Center in Beijing.
Xu Li, Chairman and CEO of SenseTime, was invited to deliver a keynote speech titled "In the Age of AI, Let Education Better Respond to Every Individual," sharing explorations and practices of artificial intelligence in personalized teaching, accessible learning, and international education cooperation.
As AI capabilities grow stronger, people often discuss which jobs may be replaced. Xu Li believes that technological breakthroughs can continuously respond to demands that were difficult to meet in the past, and education is precisely a field where demand is highly elastic.
AI is creating new conditions for teaching students according to their aptitude, enabling more people to obtain learning support suited to them, and in this process expanding their abilities and achieving growth.
The same story
Opens a different classroom
More than two thousand years ago, Confucius's disciples asked him the same question: What is benevolence? Facing different disciples, Confucius gave answers with different emphases. Xu Li believes that the essence of teaching students according to their aptitude is to provide guidance suited to students' different backgrounds, comprehension abilities, and learning progress, helping everyone achieve growth.
But personalized teaching has always been limited by teachers' energy and educational resources. From printing to the internet, technology has continuously expanded the scope of knowledge dissemination, giving more people the opportunity to acquire knowledge.
Today, AI is driving education from expanding knowledge supply further toward responding to individual differences, providing different learners with more suitable teaching content and learning methods.
Xu Li took the familiar story "Cao Chong Weighs the Elephant" as an example to show how AI helps teachers design different teaching content around the same story. For lower-grade students, they can learn new characters and understand the story through picture books, audio, and text; for higher-grade students, they can further study classical Chinese; for middle school students, the same story can also become a starting point for exploring scientific knowledge such as buoyancy and water level changes.
With the SenseTime Xiaohuanxiong Education Edition, teachers can, according to the teaching audience, subject knowledge points, and teaching objectives, use AI to assist in completing material collection, courseware production, and interactive content generation, transforming the same material into teaching resources suitable for different classrooms.
This not only lowers the cost of personalized lesson preparation, but also allows teachers to devote more energy to instructional design and individual guidance. Students can also gain more opportunities to explore knowledge according to their own interests and level of understanding.
A visible picture
May also become a barrier to learning
Around "Cao Chong Weighs the Elephant," Xu Li also shared the story of Cao Wenwei, a visually impaired person.
Cao Wenwei once worked in special education-related work, and he found that traditional textbooks contain a large amount of content that relies on visual experience; even if converted into text or audio, it may not enable visually impaired students to truly understand.
(SenseTime Jun recently also specially reported on Teacher Cao Wenwei's story; for details, please read: He cannot see the screen, yet uses AI to build a "bridge of light" for visually impaired children)
For example, "Cao Chong Weighs the Elephant" contains this sentence: "Along the water surface, draw a line on the side of the boat." For most people, combined with the textbook illustration, this sentence is easy to understand. But for blind students who have never visually perceived the side of a boat, the water surface, or changes in water level, these seemingly simple concepts are difficult to explain clearly through text and audio alone.
In an on-site video, Cao Wenwei said: "Many times it is not that the child cannot learn, or is unable to learn, but that we have not used the right way to pass knowledge on to these children."