The year of AI in numbers

AI – whether thinking about how to handle students using AI for schoolwork or creating innovative AI solutions for operational backlogs – has been at the forefront of conversations in schools across the country. 

With the summer holidays upon us, we thought it would be a good opportunity to look back at the year of AI in numbers. 

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Who’s using AI in schools?

Sources: GMB (2025), Save My Exams (2025), Greenshoots (2025), Browne Jacobson (2024)

The data tells us that the most prolific users of AI in schools are the students, followed by teachers. 

Seperately, a survey by The Key, which asked school staff what they mostly use AI for, found that the two most popular uses of AI in schools are:

Drafting, improving or summarising comms: 63%
Teaching and learning activities: 55%

Combined, these two sources reveal a gap: that AI is not being used nearly as much to drive back-office efficiencies, and is much more focused on what goes on in the classroom or for other generative purposes. 

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How we’re thinking about AI at Arbor

At Arbor, we’re on a mission to change the way schools work for the better, and we believe that AI can and should play a big part in reaching this goal. We know that AI can do the heavy lifting when it comes to burdensome admin. That’s why we’ve been focused on purposefully building and launching features specifically designed to help admin and back-office teams, so that the ease of AI benefits the whole school. 

Here’s a quick look at AI this year at Arbor:

• 4568 Arbor schools made a report using Arbor AI
• Our AI Student Summary tool was used over 60,000 times
• Over 55,000 absences have been processed by Auto Absence in just 3 months
• Over 1,000,000 chats were had between our users and Arbor AI, a quarter of which took place on the Student App
• From our survey of 9,956 schools we found that our AI features alone save 70 minutes per week, every week, per staff member

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What’s next?

We believe that next year will be bigger and better when it comes to AI: new features, increasingly thoughtful design, and more time saved for admin and leadership teams in schools. 

Keep your eye out for an exciting launch coming in September!

Can’t wait?

Get stuck in below with some of the exciting AI content we’ve released over the past few months.