Tag: Brainstorm Design

AI could spark a new age of learning, but only if governments, tech firms and educators work together | Fortune

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The way we teach students, from classroom structures to teaching methods and standardized instruction, has not changed much over human history. Despite schools, colleges and mass education becoming more important for social cohesion and economic development than ever, teaching has stayed remarkably consistent even as other sectors and institutions have been transformed by computers and smartphones.

But now it’s the classroom’s turn to be revolutionized, driven by rapid advances in artificial intelligence. This transformation has the potential to reshape education as profoundly as the internet reshaped entire industries.

If properly deployed, AI-powered education tools could deliver high-quality, personalized learning at a global scale. But realizing that potential will require a coordinated effort from educators, institutions, policymakers, and technology providers.

Around the world, education systems are stretched thin. In both wealthy and low-income countries, teachers are having to do more with fewer resources. In the U.S., schools are struggling to recruit and retain staff amid a persistent shortage of math, science, and special education teachers. In emerging economies, student populations are expanding far faster than the supply of trained educators.

At the same time, as the economy continues to evolve at a dizzying speed, there are concerns that teachers and schools could struggle to keep up. Current curricula may not fully prepare students for the skills needed in an AI-driven job market, potentially leaving some young people and mid-career workers underprepared. Teachers could also be left feeling unprepared as they navigate increasingly diverse classrooms, with students from a broader range of cultural backgrounds and learning needs, often without receiving sufficient training.

AI could change that. It could provide instant feedback on student work and deliver the responsiveness of one-to-one tutoring, which traditional classrooms have not been able to deliver at scale.

The automation of routine tasks like grading and administrative work can also free educators to focus on the human parts of teaching: mentoring, motivation, curiosity, empathy, and critical thinking. AI could thus empower and amplify the impact of teachers, rather than replacing them.

For students, learning will no longer be shaped by the accident of birth—where they live, the school they attend, or the resources available to them—but instead by their access to high-quality, personalized learning. In effect, AI holds the potential to help narrow the gap between those with access to the best teachers and schools and those without. While previous edtech developments have not fully closed this gap, AI could offer meaningfully new possibilities.

However, the extent to which AI can truly level the playing field should not be thought of as immediate or seamless, since accessibility to the technology will play a big part in its adoption. Factors such as cost or access to a stable internet connection require attention to truly reduce educational disparities, ensuring that quality education becomes more affordable and widely available to all.

Early signs suggest that AI-enabled approaches can improve learning outcomes at scale and at lower marginal cost than traditional models.

In Kenya, Eneza Education’s mobile-based platform has had over 10 million learners since its launch in 2022. Eneza Education supports literacy and numeracy in remote rural areas of Kenya and Côte d’Ivoire and has achieved a 23% improvement in academic performance after learning with the platform for nine months.

In Latin America, Efekta Education’s AI Teaching Assistant is helping four million students with their English language learning. The platform, which was first trialed in the Brazilian state of Paraná showed a 32.5% improvement in average English test scores on the state’s standardized assessment. Efekta is now testing the platform in the Philippines and Indonesia, where governments are looking to help teachers and students improve their English skills.

And in the U.S., a recent study by the EdWeek Research Center found that the use of AI tools by teachers had nearly doubled from 2023 to 2025, showing increased integration in education. The study also found that the amount of AI training for teachers has been steadily increasing from 29% of teachers reporting at least one training session in 2024 to 50% in 2025.

Parents and teachers often express concerns about introducing more screens into the classroom. However, the challenge lies not in the presence of screens, but in ensuring that technology does not isolate learners. When thoughtfully implemented, AI tools have the potential to enhance dialogue, feedback, and interaction, complementing personalised attention rather than replacing it.

Trust and governance will be essential if AI is to succeed in education. Teachers need to have confidence in the tools they are asked to use. Student data must be protected, and governments must retain control over curricula and standards.

Yet while privacy, transparency and cultural inclusion are critical, they can’t be reasons to delay progress. Instead, these should be challenges to address through policy as governments and education leaders work to integrate AI into the teaching process.

The stakes are high. UNESCO estimates that universal access to quality education could add trillions of dollars to the global economy as millions of skilled workers enter the workforce.

At the same time, there is a growing recognition that advanced economies might benefit from shifting their focus from merely transmitting information, a task machines increasingly perform well, towards fostering creativity, adaptability, and lifelong learning. While AI tools could support this transition, they should be seen as part of a broader educational strategy that includes traditional human-centred learning approaches.

This is not a distant prospect: AI-enabled teaching technologies are already being deployed and are advancing rapidly. The countries and societies that choose to embrace them early, and govern them wisely, will be best positioned to lead in the decades ahead.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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José Manuel Barroso, Stephen Hodges

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February 16, 2026
Design leaders are viewing their profession with a bit more humility: 'Not that many businesses are so fluid that they need constant reinvention'

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Are major companies taking the idea of design seriously? More companies are hiring top designers, with 36 of the top 100 Fortune 500 companies now having a chief design officer, compared to 18 in 2014.

Yet recent history is littered with new products, redesigns, and other design-forward initiatives that failed to get any traction in the marketplace. And then there’s general ignorance: A recent survey from McKinsey found that only a third of CEOs and their direct reports could confidently state what their designers even do. As Fast Company’s Suzanne Labarre argued in October 2022, design is “no magical solution for transforming companies and conquering competitors.”

The recognition that design may not offer an easy path to success pushed three design leaders last week at Fortune‘s Brainstorm Design conference in Macau to be more humble about what the practice can do.

“This sort of disappointment in the design discipline has to do with…the notion that was sold for a solid 20-30 years that design was a process, as opposed to a product or an outcome or a thing you made at the end of the day” said Cliff Kuang, author of User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play. Companies incorrectly hoped that by having a design process, hiring consultants, and then putting “all the people in the right room” would be enough to yield innovation.

“Not that many businesses are so fluid that they need constant reinvention. Not every business is going to be one that actually needs to introduce new ideas to people on a constant basis,” Kuang said.

Katrina Alcorn, the former general manager for design at IBM, dismissed the “magical thinking that you can just buy a bunch of designers, put them in a room and magic will happen.”

“It doesn’t work that way. You have to create the conditions for design success, and that involves the entire company and it usually involves culture change and changing mindsets,” she said.

Instead, a designer’s strength may be asking questions and connecting the dots, noted Ben Sheppard, partner at McKinsey Design in London.

“Maybe our role is best supporting actor. Maybe our role is to be the glue working alongside our friends in data and product, in engineering and project management and finance, bringing it together,” he said.

Yet AI will change what particular skills designers will need to do their work. Kuang said the trove of data that these new technologies can generate mean designers will have to change the way they approach a design challenge.

“It’s just really hard, right? You just don’t know what the data is going to draw. You can’t know every single instance,” Kuang said. “That notion that you totally control the experience is one that designers are actually having to give up a little.”

But Alcorn said she didn’t think AI will fundamentally change the role of the designer. “Designers have to be somewhat experts in people, and that’s not going to change. I think actually with AI, if anything, we’re going to have to understand ourselves better than ever,” she said.

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Lionel Lim

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December 12, 2023
Japan’s new tallest skyscraper is also fat

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On Nov. 24, a new skyscraper will officially loom over Tokyo’s skyline. The Azabudai Hills, at 1,067 feet, is now Japan’s tallest skyscraper, surpassing the Abeno Harukas tower in Osaka by 83 feet.

But the project is more than just a tall tower. For its developer, Mori Building Company, Azabudai Hills is a path to recast Tokyo’s future.

“Tokyo must evolve into a ‘city of choice’ among global players,” Shingo Tsuji, Mori Building’s CEO, says. “Global players are looking for more than just an office environment.” (A recent report from management consultancy firm Kearney ranked Tokyo in fourth place among global cities, behind New York, Paris and London, despite “declines in business activity and information exchange.”)

And to get there, Mori is pitching the project, designed by architecture firm Pelli Clarke & Partners, as a “vertical garden city,” a combination of green space, mixed-use buildings and public transit on a whopping 872,000 square-foot plot of land that reflects how city-dwellers want to live in a post-COVID world.

The main tower of Azabudai Hills is just a few feet shorter than Tokyo Tower, traditionally an upper limit on skyscrapers in Japan’s capital city, says architect Fred Clarke.
Richard A. Brooks—AFP/Getty Images

Pelli Clarke & Partners and its founder, Cesar Pelli, have a long history with Japan, after the Argentine-American architect helped design the U.S. embassy in Tokyo, completed in 1976. Since then, the firm has helped design projects throughout the country, like Abeno Harukas, formerly Japan’s tallest building, and Tokyo’s Nihonbashi Mitsui Tower, which combines a gleaming skyscraper with a 1929-era historic landmark.

PC&P’s Azabudai Hills project features a few traits that distinguish it from skyscrapers around the world. For one, it’s fat. The tower’s floor space is a lot larger than the needle-thin towers that puncture cityscapes the world over. That large floor plan is key to Mori’s vision of cramming the many different aspects of urban life in one single building.

Standard floor plans in Azabudai Hills’s main tower are about 52,000 square feet. That compares to skyscrapers like New York’s One World Trade Center or Hong Kong’s International Commerce Center that offer between 35,000 to 40,000 square feet of leasable area per floor.

And it’s not purely an office block. The Azabudai Hills project is three connected towers: a mixed-use main tower, with office, residential and hotel space, and two residential towers close by.

The architects tried to tackle two “contradictory” goals, says Fred Clarke, who founded the firm alongside Pelli in 1977. “Our thinking, from the beginning, was how to do a very large building that also had a serene and humane presence in the neighborhood,” he said.

“We’ve worked very hard to create expressive tops, particularly for the main building, to celebrate reaching upward, then create a transparent, welcoming, porous ground at lower levels that welcome the community into the building,” he says.

The Azabudai Hills project also features outdoor spaces designed by famed (and controversial) designer Thomas Heatherwick.
Toru Hanai—Bloomberg/Getty Images

Tsuji of Mori Building sees a different upside to a tall, mixed-use building: more green space at street level. One third of the 8.1 hectare space will be taken up by a park, with space reserved for an orchard and a vegetable garden.

The centerpiece of the ground level is a massive pergola, designed by famed designer Thomas Heatherwick, also responsible for the controversial Vessel structure in New York’s Hudson Yards. In 2019, Heatherwick said he “wanted to put some of the wildness squeezed out of cities back into the heart of the [Azabudai Hills] project,” in an interview with design outlet Wallpaper.

Tsuji believes the after-effects of the pandemic are pushing Japan’s urban residents to embrace Azabudai Hills. “People will increasingly desire to live, work, and relax in an environment that is harmony with nature, not to mention a place that is beneficial for their mental and physical health,” he says.

Sidestepping the skyscraper arms race

Despite being the tallest building in Japan, Azabudai Hills isn’t that high by global standards. At 1,067 feet, the building doesn’t rank in the world’s top 100 tallest skyscrapers.

No. 100 is currently Suning Plaza Tower 1 in Zhenjiang, China, standing at 1,109 feet, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. The U.S.’s tallest building, the One World Trade Center in New York City, is in 7th place at 1,776 feet. Dubai’s Burj Khalifa is the world’s highest skyscraper by a large margin, at 2,717 feet.

PC&P knows how to build tall skyscrapers; Pelli designed the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the world’s tallest buildings upon completion in 1998. (They are now ranked in 19th place).

Pelli Clarke and Partners also helped to design the Petronas Towers which, at the time of their opening in 1998, were the world’s tallest skyscrapers.
Syaiful Redzuan—Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

So why has Japan skipped the skyscraper arms race seen in countries like China, Malaysia and the UAE?

One reason, Clarke explains, is tradition. “It’s agreed that tall buildings, at least at this moment in time, in Japan will not be taller than Tokyo Tower,” he says. (Tokyo Tower is a major communications and observation tower in the city, and stands at 1,091 feet).

Clarke points to a few other factors that limit building height: cost, as well as the need to ensure that all buildings can withstand Japan’s common earthquakes. “Structural engineering is a limitation,” he says, “but at this point in history, they could go much higher if they really wanted to.”

Learning from Asia

Clarke noted that Asian cities were much more welcoming to mixed-use buildings that combine office, retail, and residential space together in one building or complex. That’s partly due to cost: Land and construction costs in cities like Singapore and Hong Kong can be expensive, forcing designers and developers to be efficient in terms of design.

But there’s a cultural aspect too: In Asia, “people really do want to live, work and recreate in the same place,” Clarke says. “People really don’t want to commute for eight or nine hours a week.”

Pelli Clarke and Partners is also designing South Station Tower, built over Boston’s South Station, first built in 1899.
Erin Clark—The Boston Globe/Getty Images

PC&P is now bringing mixed use buildings to the United States, such as the 30-year-long project to build a tower on top of Boston’s South Station. (Construction of the tower, which preserves the station’s design, started in 2020 and is expected to open in 2025).

“Society matures and evolves” around a lengthy project like South Station or Azabudai Hills, Clarke says. “The project can adapt and be responsive to societal change.”

Fortune’s Brainstorm Design conference is returning on Dec. 6 at the MGM Cotai in Macau, China. Panelists and attendees will debate and discuss “Empathy in the Age of AI” or how new technologies are revolutionizing the creative industry.

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Nicholas Gordon

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November 22, 2023
Architect of Shanghai’s most expensive district wants to end cities’ ’50 Shades of Grey’

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In his two decades in China, architect Ben Wood has helped build over a dozen commercial projects that combine historic architectural styles with modern commerce—most famously in Shanghai’s buzzy Xintiandi area, where you can find a Shake Shack or a Tiffany’s housed in a 19th-century styled building.

Now Wood wants more of his fellow designers to ditch the glass and steel of modern buildings and embrace more traditional materials and designs. “Whether it’s natural stone, wood…what’s the most sustainable resource we have in this world right now?” Wood said last Thursday at Fortune China’s ESG Summit in Shanghai, China. These materials are “overlooked by the ‘50 Shades of Grey’ that high-rise architects are selling people in this room today.”

“Why buy ‘50 Shades of Grey’ when you can have color?” Wood said. “It’s not a stylistic issue, it’s a meaning issue, of what does that material mean?”

For Chicago’s Soldier Field stadium, pictured soon after its renovation in 2003, architect Ben Wood tried to preserve the original facade while redoing the interior.
Jeff Haynes—AFP via Getty Images

Wood, who now runs Studio Shanghai, an architectural design firm based in the Chinese megacity, is famous for wanting to protect historic styles in his projects. The architect is perhaps best known for his work on Xintiandi, a high-rise shopping district near the city’s French Concession that opened in 2001, and the controversial 2003 redesign of Chicago’s Soldier Field, which preserved the external facade of the old stadium while renovating the interior.

Shanghai awarded the Xintiandi redevelopment contract to Hong Kong-based developer Shui On and its owner Vincent Lo on one condition: That the billionaire tycoon preserve some of the local architecture.

Wood remembers the need to preserve the area’s “shikumen” architecture, a unique blend of Chinese and Western styles from the mid-19th century. Upon visiting the French Concession for the first time, Wood says he remembered thinking, “All these buildings are going to be torn down.”

“My god, you can’t do that,” he said.

Shanghai’s Xintiandi emulates the “Shikumen,” or “stone gate,” style: a mix of Chinese and European designs that came to the fore in the 19th century.
Qilai Shen—Bloomberg via Getty Images

When it came time to rebuild Xintiandi, builders carefully dismantled the old buildings, then used the same natural materials to rebuild them in the same architectural style, only with modern trappings like up-to-date wiring and plumbing.

Wood’s fellow architects have since credited him for showing the value in preserving old buildings. “China needed someone like Wood to show them you can make more money by saving rather than tearing down old buildings. No one had done that before because it was so much easier to work with a blank slate,” Cliff Pierson, an editor at Architectural Record magazine, told The New York Times in 2006.

Today, Xintiandi is mostly shopping malls and high-rises, surrounding a historic-styled, low-rise compound of high-end shops, popular eateries, and a museum honoring the birthplace of the Chinese Communist Party.

Xintiandi is a jumble of Chinese history and modern commercialism, where a Shake Shack is down the road from a museum honoring the birth of the Communist Party of China.
Qilai Shen—Bloomberg via Getty Images

Ben Wood’s latest project—again developed with Vincent Lo and Shui On—is Panlong Tiandi, a commercial complex built from a renovated suburban village in southwestern Shanghai that opened in May. The developer says the shopping district attracted about 200,000 visitors a day after its launch, and has continued to attract similar numbers in the months since.

Panlong Tiandi’s popularity with Chinese shoppers is a bright spot amid a wider slowdown in China’s economy, particularly in its property sector, which Wood referred to last week.

“China is facing an economic crisis,” Wood said. “It won’t be solved by building more tall buildings.” Instead, it “will be solved by returning…to a more community-oriented life,” Wood suggests.

The country’s economic recovery has stumbled since the country lifted COVID restrictions almost a year ago. Consumption is not recovering as quickly as officials had hoped, putting pressure on local and foreign companies alike. A property bust—triggered by private developers who borrowed excessive sums of money to build more projects—is also dragging down a willingness to spend.

On Thursday, Wood called on conference attendees to push for better urban designs.

“You get the cities you deserve,” he said. “So if you don’t insist on a livable city? God help them.”

Fortune’s Brainstorm Design conference is returning on Dec. 6 at the MGM Cotai in Macau, China. Panelists and attendees will debate and discuss “Empathy in the Age of AI” or how new technologies are revolutionizing the creative industry.

Subscribe to the new Fortune CEO Weekly Europe newsletter to get corner office insights on the biggest business stories in Europe. Sign up before it launches Nov. 29.

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Nicholas Gordon

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November 9, 2023