Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Behind the Scenes of Global Tutoring: How EDGE Tutor Powers 50+ EdTech Companies with Henry Motte de la Motte
Henry Motte de la Motte is the Founder and CEO of EDGE Tutor, a global tutor outsourcing company supporting over 50 leading education and training organizations. Under his leadership, EDGE Tutor has scaled to 1,000+ teachers across 30+ countries, delivering millions of live tutoring sessions with a focus on quality, reliability, and human-centered learning.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- Why tutor reliability matters more than most EdTech's realize
- How outsourcing enables high-quality tutoring at global scale
- What makes matching tutors to learners actually work
- How platforms use external tutor supply to handle peak demand
- Why AI works best as support and not a replacement for human tutors
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:02:23] EDGE Tutor as behind-the-scenes tutoring infrastructure
[00:03:32] BPO lessons applied to education
[00:06:18] Reliability as the core of learning quality
[00:09:46] Cultural training across markets
[00:13:08] Why EDGE Tutor chose white-label over brand
[00:16:21] Diversifying tutor supply to reduce risk
[00:21:47] How COVID reshaped online tutoring
[00:25:14] A pragmatic take on AI tutoring
[00:30:00] The rise of hybrid human + AI models
[00:42:31] Consolidation coming to edtech
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[00:00:00] Henry Motte de la Motte: If you think about it, education is an experiential service, and so I mean, yes, you can, obviously, you can always retrain, you can always get additional schooling. I would know this, we're in the tutoring space, but fundamentally, if you've had a bad educational experience for a long time, it's hard to claw your way out of it, right?
It's not like if it's about car, you resell it, you buy a better car, you move on with education, you are part of that service. You are the product, not just the customer. And so really diversifying risk and understanding. How to make sure there's no gaps in quality, which includes reliability in a space like tutoring.
[00:00:37] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all here at EdTech Insiders.
[00:00:53] Ben Kornell: Remember to subscribe to the pod. Check out our newsletter and also our event calendar. And to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoy today's pod.
[00:01:17] Alex Sarlin: We have a terrific guest on this week's EdTech Insiders. We're speaking to Henry Motte de la Motte. He is the founder and CEO of EDGE Tutor, Asia's fastest growing tutor outsourcing company, which offers fully managed, white labeled, highly qualified English and math tutors to over 50 of the leading education, tutoring and training companies in the world.
EDGE Tutor operates in over 30 countries in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific, and it's over a thousand Philippines based teachers have taught over 2 million lessons since EDGE Tutor's launch in 2022. Henry Motte de la Motte, welcome to EdTech Insiders.
[00:01:59] Henry Motte de la Motte: Thanks a lot Alex. Uh, pleasure to be
[00:02:01] Alex Sarlin: here. I'm really happy to have you here.
We have run into one another at a few different EdTech conferences. We've had some really great conversations at A-S-U-G-S-V, and what you do is just such an important, and I think, really not well understood part of the EdTech landscape. So before we get into anything else, give us the overview of what EDGE Tutor is and what services you provide to the ed tech industry.
[00:02:23] Henry Motte de la Motte: Sure. So we provide white labeled, fully managed tutor outsourcing services to education, and mostly tutoring, but not only companies around the world. And our focus is really on figuring out additional high quality and reliable teacher supply for the likes of a Pearson education First. Or Mentum and the focus has historically in the Philippines.
We actually just opened an office in Sri Lanka a few months ago. Wow. So we now also source teachers from there. And the idea is to then offer those teachers
[00:02:57] Alex Sarlin: to all of those companies. It's so interesting. It's sort of this infrastructural piece, but it's also human resources. It's also training, it's also tutoring.
It sort of plays a really interesting role putting all the. Pieces together within the EdTech environment. So EDGE Tutor has scaled really rapidly by drawing on some of these techniques, this sort of outsourcing strategies and BPO. What are the most valuable lessons that you've learned from other industries that move people around and do staffing and sourcing and outsourcing?
What has been valuable to you in the EdTech context?
[00:03:32] Henry Motte de la Motte: Sure. So I think for the listeners who are maybe not as familiar, the Philippines is actually the world's second largest BPO destination after India, despite being a attentive the size population wise. So it's an industry that's been doing incredibly well.
And when I set up my first ed tech company, I was based out of Manila. And so even though I was not in outsourcing, you know, I would socialize a lot with people in the outsourcing world. And couple of things that I found super interesting was one you only outsource. Existing business, if you will. So it's a lot around optimization, right?
This is not about like new frontiers. It's not about like launching new products. This is very much, this is my existing, these are my existing operations. How can I make them more efficient? How do I expand the pool of labor I can work with? How do I play the time zone arbitrage? How do I play the labor arbitrage, et cetera.
And so. It's an extremely practical industry, which I think is, and having been in ed tech for a dozen years now, we're not always the most practical people for certain types of operations and outsourcing is, I would say, the opposite of the spectrum. It's constantly focused on operations, so I think that's one thing that I took away from it.
It's. The relentless focus on existing operations and how you improve them. I think the second one is around the importance of diversifying risk. And I think that's quite interesting because if you think about it, education is an experiential service. Yeah. And so, I mean, yes, you can, obviously, you can always retrain, you can always get additional schooling.
I would know this, we're the tutoring space. But fundamentally, if you've had a bad educational experience for a long time. It's hard to claw your way out of it, right? It's not like if it's a bad car, you resell it, you buy a better car, you move on with education, you are part of that service. You are the product, not just the customer.
And so really diversifying risk and understanding how to make sure there's no gaps in quality. Which includes reliability in a space like tutoring. So I think that's the second thing that I took away from it. And then the third one is the importance of scaling. Outsourcing has scaled masculine in the Philippines, it employs 5 million people.
And so you see some of those operations, you know, people wouldn't know, but JP Morgan, I think has almost 25,000 people in the Philippines, like things like that, right? So you always think big scale very quickly, and you think about the operational challenges to scaling very quickly.
[00:05:41] Alex Sarlin: That balance between scaling and the quality and reliability that you mentioned in sort of 0.2.
There is something that I think EdTech companies struggle with a lot. They sometimes have these really beautiful, bespoke ideas of how to deliver a certain educational experience, but when you have to do it again and again at scale and keep the quality up, especially if it requires. Humans like tutors or teachers, it can become really complex.
How do you ensure that as you scale your company and as you help others scale, it doesn't come at the expense of reliability and quality and then down the line at the expense of learner experience and outcomes.
[00:06:18] Henry Motte de la Motte: Yeah, so I think all of these are intertwined. The first one is we're extremely strict in terms of the entry gate.
To give you an idea, we get anything from six to 10,000 applicants a month, and we accept less than 3%. And I would love to say we accept 10% because it's very expensive to reject 97% of applicants. But we have a very, very high bar for recruiting. So I think we accept maybe 5% into the program, into our own training program.
And then only about 60% of those we accept graduate from our internal training program. And it's only if you graduate from our training program that we basically can put you in front of clients. And so that's how you end up at about a 3% acceptance rate. So that's the first thing for quality, right? And then you do everything from accent check to teaching demos to criminal background checks, to backup internet verification, you name it.
We carry that. The second thing is. The quality is only as useful as the reliability. A great teacher who doesn't show up is much worse than an average teacher who shows up. And so we have an entire team that's, we call it lesson support. And their only job, which is a very important job, is making sure that teachers show up on time prepared for the class, which we, I think you mentioned earlier that we hit 2 million.
We're actually hopefully gonna announce our third million class in Q1, so the production volume is very high. And so you literally, in an army of people, we call them our internal firefighters, and they make sure that teachers are showing up on time. And if the teacher needs subbing, there's literally people who are prearranging it and figuring out who to sub with.
So that's, it's expensive. Frankly, it's a little bit too manual. It's one of the things that we're, where we're starting to use a lot more tech and, and even AI to, to kind of augment our team on that front. But you need to have that relentless focus, not just on quality, but in reliability, because when you have synchronous learning, reliability is quality.
So these are the two things. But the third one is around the relationship with the learner. We're a little bit contrarian that in we're very big believers in the role of the human teacher in a post AI world, but it's not just of a teacher, right? It's of a teacher that has a relationship with a learner that, you know, there's some fantastic research out there.
I highly recommend if people wanna understand. The relationship with learning with the teacher, with Joy, et cetera, like follow Isabel, how on LinkedIn. She's a wonderful expert on that topic, but so what we try very hard to do, which is. Hard is to make sure that we match the right teacher to the right learner.
And that's something that we work on with our clients. And then the really hard bit is making sure that that teacher actually can stay with that learner, right? So, you know, can still teach that same learner like math at 4:00 PM EST every Tuesday or. Is handling a class of three young professionals in Spain and Mexico and is constantly teaching them on a Wednesday.
So keeping that relationship, and it's hard because people's schedules change. Like teachers have like life events that sometimes they wanna switch careers, and so we spend a lot of time thinking about scheduling a lot more than people would maybe assume.
[00:09:13] Alex Sarlin: Well, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, given that you're talking about over a thousand teachers, teachers are coming from the Philippines and now Sri Lanka as you said, but you serve countries all over the world.
You serve over 30 countries. So time zones and scheduling, I'm sure is a huge part of the operation as is localization and understanding these sort of, some of the cultural context in which a group of Mexican students versus a single student in the US or in, you know, LA versus people in Europe. I'm sure there's so much.
Opportunity for sort of cultural match, but also cultural mismatch. How do you handle it?
[00:09:46] Henry Motte de la Motte: Yes, so it's super interesting because, so we, our model is train the trainer and so we work with the thing that's ing about tutoring spaces. A lot of players are actually single country. And so that actually makes life a bit easier.
So right. So when we work with like a large US player or a large Spanish or Chinese player, all of their learners in the same geography, and so whatever training we do for the teachers, for that client, we're able to keep it to that demographic. And then there we have different types of frameworks. I think there's the learning style, there's the preferred teaching style.
Some countries like very strict teachers, some countries like extremely conciliatory teachers. And so we, we will literally do the. Quote unquote perfect learner persona and then the perfect teacher persona. And so we have to match. Some teachers are great with kids in China. China's a huge market for us, and they will be terrible for adults in Latin America because it's just these learner types are not looking for the same thing.
And then obviously within the US are you teaching as part of a platform that offers premium B2C tutoring versus a platform that won an RFP in a school district that's having a lot of learner loss issues? Very, very different type of. Teacher expected, but also the intervention itself is very different.
And so our training team, we do cultural training, which is around teaching style, as I mentioned, learning style, but also around political sensitivities. There are topics that we do not discuss when we're teaching in China, same when we're teaching in the Middle East. These are probably the two geographies where we have to be the most careful.
But there's really a lot of cultural teaching to do. I think what's interesting is the us, the Philippines used to be a US colony, and so the cultural affinity with the US is very, very strong. And usually what we try to do is we try to have our teachers essentially almost pass off as Filipino Americans.
So if you've had a fill out teacher and you have an EDGE tutor, you shouldn't be able to tell too much of a difference in terms of accent. And in terms of like teaching style, that's one of our models, if you will.
[00:11:40] Alex Sarlin: That's so interesting. The combination of the, trying to keep the relationship between an individual tutor and an individual student.
Then trying to match, make the archetypes, right? The ideal student and the ideal teacher in that context. Then trying to think about all the different cultural things and the cultural third rail, the sort of, I taught in China for a little while and I remember doing a lesson on nationalism. We were talking about flags and Oof.
I know. And I was asking students to draw flags and they were like. Can we do, we do Taiwan? And it was like you just felt the air in the hall room go still as they were sort of waiting for me to, because I mean, it was an interesting moment. Yeah, we, those things, those things become my, my
[00:12:18] Henry Motte de la Motte: co-founder Cecilia, uh, who's our COO, worked in China for almost 15 years.
So she personally designed our cultural training for the teachers covering the China markets.
[00:12:28] Alex Sarlin: It's very important. So you do do a really interesting approach. You were mentioning all these different providers. Some of them are in individual countries, that's common, some may be international. But you decided that for EDGE Tutor, you chose a white label approach and any one of these companies you work with, it doesn't say this is an EDGE tutor, it says this is a Berlitz tutor education first tutor, a Pearson tutor, or you know, many different types of partners you have around the world.
What was the strategic thinking behind that decision? I think a lot of ed tech companies that build. Pieces of the educational experience, always have to think, do I wanna build the whole thing and brand it or do I wanna build one piece and the sort of fit in to an existing system and white label? Uh, how did you think about it?
[00:13:08] Henry Motte de la Motte: So we, the truth is we actually tried under our own brand in the Philippines. This was actually an offshoot of the first company that I started about 11 years ago. And initially it was just like another product of that company. And then we were trying to do tutoring in the Philippines. And then we realized that actually the Philippines was a pretty difficult market for tutoring.
And when we decide to go abroad, some of our investors said, you've got a great cost advantage. You've already built a brand. In your home market, like you literally have the brand just like start going abroad and just digital ads and you can compete on price. But my co-founder and I, the way we looked at it, tutoring is, you know, depends on who you wanna listen to, but it's call it a hundred billion dollar industry.
Some estimates are higher, similar, but in terms of magnitude, that's what you're looking at In terms of number of players. I mean, I've only been in this space for four years. I still don't know how many tutoring companies there are. Estimates are probably above 40,000. It kind of depends on how you cut it up, but there's essentially tens and tens of thousands of players in a growing market.
It is hyper competitive, and that's one thing I actually wanted to mention to earlier question around like, oh, how do you localize. The reason we're able to localize it's not 'cause we're some geniuses, is because we work with partners who are very, very good in their market. The amount of like internal knowledge, like some of these guys have been around for decades, right?
We always forget, we think EdTech is new, but no, like some of our partners have literally been around for decades. Like they'll invite us to their like 60th founding anniversary. And so the amount of knowledge about the local market. Is we think it's one of the biggest parts of their moat. And so instead of fighting head on with someone that has this six year advantage, why don't we focus on what we think we can do well, which is sourcing teachers in a few countries that have a teacher surplus and then partner with.
The people who we think are leading in their field. And it's what we find super interesting is that it was a bet, it was a risky bet, right? Like, 'cause this could have gone wrong very easily and we could have lost one or two years. But I think we've been happy with the outcome and even positively surprised by how much we've matched to learn from our partners in the process.
Because you know, you're going deep into people's operations, right? When you talk about scheduling, when you talk about teacher matching, it's not just a company in the US saying, okay, I need these kids to do like. Grade three math. They're literally walking you through their philosophy and their curriculum and their teaching style, and then you're training your teachers to match that.
And so we get to learn a lot as an organization. This is why we want to keep doing what we do. We don't want consumers to know about our brand, but we would love to build EDGE Tutor into the go-to brand for companies looking for additional tutors.
[00:15:46] Alex Sarlin: Makes a lot of sense. And the incredibly high selectivity that you mentioned, the ability to train really quickly to tailor the training to particular providers is a lot of value there.
So let's walk our audience through the other direction. So that was your decision to white label and to sort of work with all of these major providers around the world from the perspective of one of these major providers. Why do they come to someone like EDGE Tutor rather than branding their own?
Train the trainer, model their own training, their own whole process internally and sort of doing a branded tutoring solution there. What are the advantages of working with a specialist like Edge?
[00:16:21] Henry Motte de la Motte: So I think this goes back to the first topic we're discussing around like risk diversification. I think what's important for the audience, for your listeners to know is that we never aim to be the sole supplier.
In fact, in our client shoes, I would never outsource everything to a single party. That's the opposite of business sense in terms of like risk diversification. And so we really position ourselves as just an additional source. And so from the perspective of a tutoring company. You're constantly trying to figure out, you're two-sided, right?
You're constantly trying to figure out how do you lower your CAC and increase your LTV on the client side. And that's a whole other beast that, you know, we're not that involved in, even though we can help a little bit with conversion. But then on the tutoring side, it's always. How do I lower my cost of finding tutors?
But then how do I make sure they're very high quality? How do I make sure they're competitively priced and how to make sure they stay with me because attrition is high, which makes sense, right? People are busy, people have other opportunities, and so it can be a very expensive machine to build and operate.
So where we come in is we help you. With cost lowering. That's number one. Honestly, that's usually how we get the first meeting in the door, right? It's you don't win by saying, Hey, Mike, we're just as expensive as your existing supply. That's not a great foot in the door, but we come in and we say, look, we are competitively priced, but our quality is very high.
And that's always a challenge with outsourcing, right? And especially if some of our partners have never been to the Philippines. For some of them in the call, it's the first time they heard that Filipinos are native English speakers, right? There's even some countries where they wouldn't say that we're native English speakers because of history, and so there's a lot of customer education you have to do, but once you're able to prove that.
The price is good, obviously, but the quality is good as well. I think that's when you can get taken seriously and say, okay, how do I diversify my own pool? I think what's helped us a lot is this business couldn't have existed 10 years ago, and I think even really it started being possible five years ago, which is why we're about like four years old.
CO really opened the floodgates of this idea that talent is everywhere. And if you look at the trajectory of online tutoring. It got its massive break during COVID and some great companies, you know, like FEV or Third Space. Were doing this with other markets like India, Sri Lanka. So I wouldn't say we're revolutionary in any way.
We're just tapping into a country that we think has been a bit overlooked. And so you have the price, you have the quality. The thing that you also add is the flexibility. So our clients never stop recruiting their own teachers. They have their own teacher pool, very high quality teacher pools. But if you think about the business model, there's often like peak demand.
Right. In most countries, peak them amount is like four to 8:00 PM four to 9:00 PM their time zone. It's harder to staff peak them amount because that's when everybody wants a tutor and that's when your tutors have their highest utilization rate. And so that's usually when machines break. Systems break when you hit peak times, and that's where we can come in.
And so very often. We actually come and start taking some of the peak demand for them, and it allows them to just remove a lot of the stress on their organization. And then if they can see the quality is good, they can end up like increasing With us, we rarely get past 20% of supply
[00:19:28] Alex Sarlin: and we're
[00:19:28] Henry Motte de la Motte: perfectly happy at that ceiling, so we're really an additional source.
We don't aim to be the only source of teachers.
[00:19:35] Alex Sarlin: But you also try to have your tutors be consistent, even though it's something that might flow in at peak demand times, or that companies may use to cushion when things change within the org and they have a great source of high quality, reliable tutors.
You also want to keep a consistent relationship. It's an interesting balance there.
[00:19:56] Henry Motte de la Motte: Yes. And there's a couple of challenges, right? Because if it's hard for our clients to recruit a teacher to just do three hours a day, well, unsurprisingly, it's also hard for us to keep a teacher for just three hours a day, right?
So there's a couple of things that we do. The first one is because we operate across 40 countries, we'll typically staff a teacher. We never staff a teacher in a company that competes with another, but we'll put teachers on accounts that don't compete and have never heard of each other, right? So we'll have like a US client.
And it'll also put like an APAC client, or we'll pair like a European client with a, you know, Southeast Asian client. And so you basically allow three, four hours of peak for one client, three four hours peak for another, and you can basically build a six to eight hour day for a teacher. Without them having to go look for multiple clients.
So that's one thing that we do. The second thing that we do is we're the only company in the Philippines that offers private healthcare for teachers. And we do this for anyone I think, who works more than halftime with us. And that's a great way of, one, taking care of your own, but also two that actually has a massive impact on retention.
It's probably been one of our most successful retention initiatives.
[00:21:04] Alex Sarlin: I can imagine that's a big deal. So I wanna ask you a little bit about ai, but, well, something you said stuck with me and I think it would be interesting for me and for our listeners to dive into. You mentioned this business wouldn't have been possible a few years ago.
COVID really made it clear that there's talent everywhere. I think there's been this really interesting sort of roller coaster ride over the last few years between COVID and the SR Relief runs in the US and all of these new tutoring players and people going online. It's been like an adventure and I'd love to ask you to give a little bit of your perspective on what sort of the tutoring and the, especially the online tutoring landscape has looked like over the last few years, sort of in the pre and then post pandemic.
I think it would be just be interesting to contextualize this in everything that's been going on in the world.
[00:21:47] Henry Motte de la Motte: Yeah. So I think what's fascinating is because we're in different countries, we can also see the different funding systems. And I always joke that you know, the US the birthplace of capitalism, but your out of school education system is actually quite heavily state funded and many other countries that are far more to the left economically than the US do not have this kind of state support.
Like tutoring is very much a private industry there, whether you're talking K 12 or adult learning. So I think that's the first thing that I would find interesting. Right? Yeah. But so historically, the US has not had a massive. Tutoring industry on a per capita basis, but because your country is so huge, population-wise and so wealthy, that doesn't mean that it's a small tutoring market, but if you look at it on a per capita basis in terms of like hours of tutoring per learner, it's definitely not one of the more tutoring intense countries in the world.
I think what's changed is with Esser and, and you had similarish funding in, in some European countries, you had this democratization of tutoring. Tutoring fundamentally used to be a, it's either something for like the very wealthy or for those who are very far behind. I'm doing massive generalization here.
And then the Esther funding kind of broke that into saying, well, actually, tutoring has historically been one of the most effective. I think some will argue the most effective intervention you can make in a learner's journey. And so actually we think as many people as possible should have it. What we hear from our clients, from our partners is that the government market has.
Definitely shrunk post COVID. And that's been super tough for the industry and that's why you're seeing a lot of like restructuring and rationalization and it's definitely something that we see. And you know, I think that's pretty public news, but you have seen some shift in behavior where you have triggered a bit more private demand once you like wet people's appetite for two years now.
There's obviously an income consideration. Tutoring is expensive. Our hope is that. We can enable prices to eventually go down in a market like the US by having like blended supply. And what's interesting is some of the companies that we're working with, some are looking to fundamentally start offering more affordable tutoring packages as a result of working with us, which we think will widen the market.
'cause in other markets, especially in East Asia, there's tutoring at every single price point. So from the very wealthiest to, I mean literally people who are like. Two, $3 a day. Like they will have some kind of tutoring or tutor adjacent type of services. And I think that's where the US would be heading.
But again, I, I listen to my partners, they're much more knowledgeable than will ever be about the US market.
[00:24:23] Alex Sarlin: It's really interesting. So that's, I think, a really interesting segue to the question about ai. I mean, there's been all of this discussion, I think one of the very first use cases that came up. As generative AI hit the scene was this concept of tutor for every student.
Could we create AI tutors that could lower the cost? Because especially in the US, it's really pretty much reserved as a high income, high cost solution. Not always, but in many, many cases, especially when the government is not involved and they were like, imagine a world in which we know that tutoring makes such a difference.
Could everybody have a tutor through an AI solution? I have to just ask you about it because obviously you are right in this interesting different space. You said you're using AI within. You're training, you're using AI within what you do at Edge, but I imagine you have very specific ideas about the benefits and drawbacks of this concept of AI tutoring.
I'd love to hear them.
[00:25:14] Henry Motte de la Motte: Yeah, so I am, I'm actually quite bullish on AI tutoring, but I really look at it within the context of it is just one delivery mechanism. I think we often fall under the fallacy and Ed tech of, you know, we're always looking for that next silver bullet and you know, I remember.
Working in private equity 15 years ago. And then, you know, I think at the time we were looking at some companies basically, not to be rude, but it was kind of like glorified PDFs and they're like, these are like the apps of the future and you know, we're gonna solve literacy because of this. And I remember thinking, okay, you've scanned the book, that's good.
But I was new to the industry, so I was like, I'm sure I'm the dumb one who doesn't understand how this is gonna solve everything in the next three years. Unfortunately, it didn't solve everything in three years and, and that's always this whole, you know. There's even people who say that like the problem with Ed tech is that people forget that it starts with Ed, not with tech.
And so we look at AI tutoring as just a great delivery mechanism that is competing with offline tutoring, which is by the way, the biggest, let's not forget, our biggest competitor, by the way, is offline, not ai. It's offline convincing learners that online can be as good as offline. That is still a challenge today in 2026.
So offline is the biggest. Online has. Been the fastest growing for the last, call it like 10 years. And then you have AI tutoring, which, you know, I think there's a lot of great use cases in terms of like the cost, in terms of the reach of accessibility from a language perspective, right? Yep. So if you think about, you know, we teach English and math.
We teach math in English. And so we've got a great math teachers we're teaching in, you know, a dozen countries. I cannot teach math in Latin America. In North America, you know, the kids are not English native and so it would be a, the pointless to put them in front of an English being math tutor. So I think for me, this unlocks a lot.
And then even personally back home in the Philippines, we, we have 80 languages, like best of Luck designing an ed tech solution pre AI that can actually deliver meaningful learning outcomes and 80 languages in a low income country. And so there's so many use cases that are great. I think the biggest challenge for AI tutoring is that it works really well with self-motivate students.
We all wanna be self-motivated students. I don't know what stopped. You wanna believe whether it's one or five or three, or if you wanna be generous, you say 10% of students are super self-motivated. But I think unless you're living under a rock, you will have to accept that the majority, whether it's the majority, the vast majority, but the majority of students are not self-motivated enough that they could learn with an NI tutor.
And I think this is the whole point of the human coming in. Is the human there for the knowledge or is the human there for the engagement and the motivation and the accountability? Right. We teach simple things. We teach English and math. We don't even do university math by the way. We stop at like. AP and SAT and IB and A levels.
So we literally stop in grade 12 English. You know, we're not teaching someone to be the next, uh, you know, Nobel Prize winner. We're talking about K 12 ESL case, you know, K 12 for native English speakers, and then adult corporate English. So again, you could get all that stuff by yourself. You could have gone that stuff by yourself 20 years ago.
That stuff was already free. I mean, Google was already the game changer, right? You didn't have to wait for AI to get access to all that content. AI is much better at delivering and packaging and personalizing it for you. Mm-hmm. But I go back to are you a self motivated learner? And if you're not, for example, I'm not a self motivated learner, you will put value into having a human.
What we do see is that you get a hybrid of human plus ai. So our teachers, by the way, are AI trained. And they can even use AI when they're teaching, but it's still teacher centric, so the learner's still motivated by the other human. So yeah, so I'm, I'm basically, I'm bullish on ai. I don't think that AI tutors are gonna take over the world and, you know, I don't believe in that dystopian scenario, but it's, it's a contrarian bet.
So.
[00:29:06] Alex Sarlin: I don't think anybody knows. I think we're all speculating about how the pieces come together. I think you have a particularly unique perspective on this question because I think you've thought so much about how to bring the cost down of tutoring, using human resources, using lower cost labor, using faster training.
You know, all the things you've been doing already to change the economics of it. And so when you talk about that concept of it's, it'll probably be hybrid, it'll be human-centric, but hybrid when AI can play a role. What do you envision that might look like? How might we get to a place where, if you presume we are going to move into a place where you can continue to democratize tutoring, especially in places that don't have low cost tutoring ecosystems at all, and do it through a combination of outsourcing to countries where the wages are lower and AI in certain cases, like paint us a picture of what the future of tutoring might look like in that world and how, how you think it might actually be effective.
[00:30:00] Henry Motte de la Motte: This makes me think of the discussion we first had a couple of months ago. I think the question you asked Richard was like, you know, what does the future look like in five years? And I think my answer was like, well, it's actually happening now. So really what we're talking about is the next five months, and it's essentially the role of the human is really around the engagement and the accountability.
Almost everything else gets done by ai. And so I can tell you today. If I look at some of our classes, the curriculum was AI developed. We still had it checked by, you know, curriculum writers, but it's really not rocket science to develop. Good quality curriculum with AI today. That means by the way, the lesson plan gets prepared with ai.
The actual teaching the teacher is focused on. The learner doesn't have to take notes. We are phasing out post-class reports. 'cause you know, we use AI or our customers use ai, but like there's really no need for a teacher to spend, you know, 10 minutes writing out or typing out a report. These things get generated and so the teacher's able to.
Take a break or teach more, or, you know, do something more valuable with their time than writing a report that AI can write. And then the recommendation for the next lesson. And by the way, during the teaching, the teacher can use like an AI tool if they're like stuck in explaining a concept to a learner.
What then happens is, I think what we're gonna move towards is a decision around how many of the sessions. Are purely human led versus how many are gonna be for like a, a learner to do by themselves with an AI tutor. Right? And then what's the right cadence? But if you think about it, you know, kids are not that motivated, but kids when they go to school, they get homework and then they go home and they have to do their homework by themselves.
And that that was true when I was a kid many, many years ago. And it's still true for kids today, right? So even non-motivated learners or learners who have a difficulty like. Studying by themselves. If you put in the right rules, they will still study by themselves. And so I think now the difference will be instead of just being completely alone, they can do it with an I tutor.
And then the very, very self-motivated, very advanced learners will probably look at the teacher more as a coach or as a sounding board or as a mentor. And they'll have a much lower rate of like human interaction versus like dealing with ai. So that's the world that we're seeing where you basically have access to.
The human based on both kind of like your academic profile and then unfortunately also your socioeconomic profile. And we see this, right? Like we have clients where they're now doing a lot of group classes, which allows 'em to have like a tutor for six kids, which is still better than no tutor. But you obviously don't get to learn as fast as you would with, you know, one-on-one or one to two.
So that tension will always exist. I think we have to be realistic here. Unless we value labor at zero, the tension will always exist. And so it's like how do you use technology to like reduce that friction and minimize the gaps in learning outcomes between those who have high affordability and those who don't.
[00:32:58] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I think the metaphor with homework is a really interesting and a sort of illuminating one. Even though it's obviously one, it's very quotidian. It's one we know about all the time in schooling. But the idea that if you're meeting with a human tutor on a regular cadence, let's just say it's. Once a week for simplicity.
A student who's highly self-motivated, that ratio might be, you know, for every one hour of human tutoring they're doing 20 hours in that week of really intense training with an AI tutor going deep into certain subjects, trying to jet ahead and get, you know, the best scores on things. And then they come back to the tutor for support and, and continuing that.
Another type of student may feel most motivated by the accountability and the engagement, and might be doing sort of the minimum homework, but if that minimum homework is an hour or two a week. They're not doing it alone. They're not having to sort of sit down in front of a worksheet or a computer and self-motivate.
They have a intelligent partner, an intelligent something who, somebody who can answer questions, who can provide support, who can do some of the things not nearly as rich as a human tutor, but still can really add a lot of value. And maybe over time, maybe it could be as as rich a relationship as a human tutor or close to it.
And that homework ratio and that amount of motivation that can be pushed through. To a student when there is no other human around is, I think is a really interesting metaphor of how to look at this space.
[00:34:15] Henry Motte de la Motte: Yeah. And especially in an age of just massive overproduction of content, which AI is just gonna unfortunately boost.
And you know, I mean, I won't go on a round about AI slop, but I think about it just, you know, the value of what's human, what's genuine. And I'll leave you with like a little interesting piece of information. Like we've sometimes been asked like, oh, you know, would you consider. Using AI to start correcting the accent of your teacher.
So it's even more neutral, or would you consider using AI to change their appear so, you know, so they look more attractive? We've resisted that because I think that's, I mean, that's awful. I understand. Yeah. We can all appreciate that, but it's, for me, that's not what being human is. And, and maybe I am a ludite, but it's like, no, like I, I want you to learn with a real human.
And by the way, no one has a neutral accent. I don't have a neutral accent, nor do you. And so, you know, the day we all sound the same is, I think, gonna be a very sad day for all of us. And so we, we resist those calls and we're like, no, you're, you're learning with a real human. This is good for you.
[00:35:16] Alex Sarlin: And I think one of the positive byproducts of this age of online tutoring is that people get to connect with others who are not live in the same town as them, who don't live three blocks away and walk over to be a tutor.
It could be in another country, they could be halfway around the world. They may have a completely different type of background and lifestyle. I think that's something I love about EdTech and I particularly love about the EdTech tutoring ecosystem. When it's online, you just connects people who may have completely different worlds.
And then one thing I should ask you about as well is there's also AI dubbing, right? So the idea of AI to help translate in real time between students, even if it is two humans on either side. I'm curious if that's something you've thought a little bit about.
[00:35:55] Henry Motte de la Motte: So there's a couple of things here. I think the idea of not having to learn a language, but being able to communicate in that language, you know, I obviously get the appeal.
I think it's important to remember that. Firstly, and it's a, it's a start, I quote nonstop, so if you heard before, I apologize. But you know, IQ peaked in 2010. We're getting dumber. We're getting dumber because of smartphones. We're getting dumber because of social media, but we're also slightly getting dumber because we, in many education systems, unfortunately, many of which are in the west, we're trying to make things a bit too easy.
And as a very gentle reminder to everyone, your brain only develops when things are difficult. If you keep looking for ease, you are literally shrinking your brain. Now, you could argue that maybe if you know we all have super intelligence in our pockets, we don't need to be as smart. I am from the old school belief that it's better when people are smarter, and so I want people to develop gray mal.
This is why, by the way, and your audience knows this, this is why we teach math until people are 18. The stuff you learn at 18 in math is like you will not use for in 90, for 98%, 99% of students, you will not use that trigonometry. You know, at any point after you've done your grade 12 math exams. But because it was so hard, it literally built gray matter which, and that, that you're gonna use for the rest of your life, in your personal life, in your career, in all facets of your life.
And so learning a language for me is about gray matter expansion. And by the way, fun fact, 'cause we don't just teach K 12 where you teach a lot of adults. One of the best ways of reducing Alzheimer and dementia risk is actually to be multilingual. So again, you know, can we dub? Of course. Can you Google translate your way through life?
Of course. But the point of learning a language is from a brain perspective, from an aging perspective, and I think from a, you know, social, cultural understanding perspective is just, it's deep. And so I say this only speaking two languages myself, even though my mom speaks seven. So I'm, I'm not a good example, but.
You know, do what I say.
[00:37:56] Alex Sarlin: I'm the same way I am. Studied a lot of languages and none of them have stuck very well, but come from a family of lots of multi linguists. I feel a little bit of shame there, but I respect back that opinion a lot. I'm also a little bit surprised to hear you say that just as somebody who's all about optimizing these massive systems, you know, you're saying, oh, we have a somebody teaching three hours in one continent and three hours in another to give them a six to eight hour day.
If they could teach in another continent and it's dubbed into a language they don't speak, you can optimize it even further. So I just interesting to weigh the sort of philosophical value of language learning versus the engineering optimization of the system, you know?
[00:38:32] Henry Motte de la Motte: I was answering more from the perspective of the learners.
But yeah, if I put on my head as I think, so what's interesting for us there, my answer is still a bit of a no, but for a different reason. We essentially, you know, when we teach English, we teach it to non-native speakers or to native speakers, and so either way, you're happy to get the delivery in English for math.
The math systems are quite different between countries, so we, our teachers know how to teach Singapore math, US core curriculum, math, and UK math. Let's say, you know, I'm half French. Let's say we start teaching math in France. Well, in theory, sure. You can dub our teachers. But we would have to train them on the French math curriculum because the K 12 kids in France are not really interested in the US core or the Singapore math system.
And so I think it's not as simple as dubbing. You would literally have to create an entire new training program for teaching, you know, French math, not impossible, but it would be a different product line if you will.
[00:39:31] Alex Sarlin: That's fair, but I have a little bit of a dream when I think about the future of the tutoring space of, you mentioned that you have a 3% acceptance rate for your teachers and tutors and aspiring tutors in the Philippines.
Like there is so much teaching talent around the world that is sort of locked up by various types of barriers, by technical access, by linguistic barriers. So I'm imagining a world someday in which you can, some of this could be broken down, and you're right, there's lots of challenges including localization, different systems, different training.
But I dunno, maybe it's just the, the tech optimist in me. I just, I love the idea of being able to take an incredibly talented tutor in, you know, Malaysia. They can teach people in any country, I think in, in Mexico. It's just, that just gets me excited about the sci-fi version of ed tech. It's just cool.
[00:40:17] Henry Motte de la Motte: I mean, there's some great companies doing this with star teachers, which is a bit different from tutoring, right?
Like the Star teacher model is quite different. But I've seen some great examples of companies kind of like, you know, doing the star teacher model. We've seen this in Indonesia, we've seen this in the Middle East. So like Ron Guru in Indonesia, you know, I think Abwa, I was just with a founder in Yeah, in Wise a few weeks ago.
Like they're, they're doing a fantastic job of doing that. So, but that's not quite the same as what you're referring to, which is this idea of like, you know Yeah. Marching a teacher anywhere with a learner, anywhere. I still think it's possible. I guess the one thing where, I guess it's my controlling personality, I really like what's edited and curated and so that's why we're so straight.
Like we get applicants from plenty countries and we refuse them 'cause we say, for example, it's a lot of great teachers in Nigeria. I am not, our company's not equipped to say. To really know, okay, who, what, what do the top 3% look like in Nigeria? Doesn't mean that we wouldn't recruit there in the future, but we'd only recruit there if we literally had a team of Nigerians who'd be, you know, who had gone through that education system and will know what the best teachers look like in terms of profile.
So that's one. And also two as a, to our discussion earlier around. You can't just dub and start teaching in China like we Right. I wanna train you extensively on how to teach in China. So I think maybe the compromise is like a joint future for a joint vision where, you know, my OCD plus your sci-fi equals, you know, a system where, you know.
Teachers from many countries can teach learners in different countries, but always in a controlled environment with the right amount of training and systems. I don't believe in the free for all model. Some platforms have done super well with that and they're worth hundreds of times what EDGE Tutor is worth.
So. It's a model that works. It's just not what we're trying to build. We like the vertical integration.
[00:42:04] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I respect it. So for a long time we ended every podcast with these two questions and I still bring them out when there is somebody who I think will have particularly interesting answers to them.
What is the most. Interesting and exciting trend that you see in the EdTech landscape that you think listeners should keep an eye on. And I always mean that in your very particular perspective, 'cause you pay a lot of attention to the space, but you are very deep in online tutoring. What do you think is gonna be interesting moving forward?
[00:42:31] Henry Motte de la Motte: Sure. So there's a lot that we're seeing in terms of vertical integration. This idea that you are. And we haven't seen this as much in education as in other industries, right. But you know, the one-stop shop, whether you're servicing retail customers, whether you're servicing school districts, governments like NGOs, like whatever's your distribution channel.
We've historically seen a lot more innovation and new companies and ad tech than we've seen consolidation. And at some point, and this is, you know, me putting on my old m and a p hat at some point, like, you know, the musical chairs stop and then you just have to consolidate. And we're already seeing it now and it's super interesting, like.
We've had some clients merge with each other. We were working with independent companies that were competing and then studying like they're merging, but we think it's good. So there's gonna be a lot more consolidation. Especially now that funding and EdTech has kind of dried up pretty aggressively in the last three years.
Like a lot of companies are basically being pushed by their investors into, you know, some kind of consolidation place. So I think from the investor perspective, I think from the client perspective, people will want. Single destination brands who are committed to the learning outcome of the learner. We see this in retail, so I think for example, go student in in Europe is doing this really well.
They literally have now like live human tutors. They have AI tutoring and then they even have physical tutoring centers. It's all under the ghost student ground. And I think that makes a lot of sense because as a parent, I don't really care what method you're using. I want my kid to be better at math or at German or at English.
And so if I'm gonna pay you a certain fee every month. This is the outcome that I'm expecting. Don't just tell me that you're using AI this or that you're an innovator that like it's what's my outcome? And then so that's on the retail side. And then what we're seeing, I think on the more B2B side, there's just too many vendors.
And so we actually, you know, one of the things you're asking me in earlier was like, why would companies work with us? And I, I mostly answered from the perspective of companies that already offer tutoring, we're now starting to get clients. Which I won't name yet, but hopefully you'll see it in the news in 2026, who didn't offer tutoring, but are being asked by their clients to offer it because the clients are now saying, you know what, I don't want to have a curriculum person, a, uh, LMS person, a tutoring person, and when I say person, I, sorry, I mean supplier.
I want an all-in-one. And so your competitors are doing all in one, so you need to offer me an all-in-one package. And so I think that kind of integration consolidation is the trend that I find super interesting in this space. 'cause it's gonna make it really hard if you're a single product or single service operator, you're gonna have to be very, very good at what you do.
And so, you know there is gonna be a flight to quality, but that's gonna mean a lot of consolidation in this space for the next. Five, 10 years.
[00:45:18] Alex Sarlin: Very interesting. What is a resource that you would recommend for people who wanna learn more about your world in EdTech? That could be a website, that could be a paper, a a book.
What would you recommend for people who wanna bone up on this particular subject?
[00:45:32] Henry Motte de la Motte: So I think knowing how busy people are, I usually actually would recommend kind of like people to follow on LinkedIn. I think, you know, we're kind of like newsletters, like that's like a great way of kind of getting smart on on the space.
As I mentioned, a big fan of Isabel, how. Not just 'cause she's also French. You know, she's, she's really a, I think a legend in this space, but she, you know, fully deserves it. There's doubt at amplify, very contrarian takes, but they're great, right? Because look, if you type AI tutoring and you know, you, I don't know, like on LinkedIn or on Google, wherever, like you will get a hundred thousand posts that all explain to you how AI tutoring is the future.
So I think. You don't need me to tell you where to look for that content. It's all over the place. Like it's my, my LinkedIn feed is like throwing up AI on my face every single day. So I'm more interested in like the slightly contrarian and so I think down at Amplify is a great resource for that. Uh, Isabel I mentioned and then obviously, you know, oh, uh, VCA Pota from the Educational Leaders Forum.
I think what's interesting is that he comes from a very broad education viewpoint. He's not purely an EdTech guy, he's really an education guy. And what's quite interesting is when you talk to someone who's, who considers themselves an education as opposed to an EdTech person is, you know, they're not wedded to a particularly method.
It goes back to the parent who's like, well if the learning outcome is good, then it's a good enough method for me. And so he's knowledgeable about all things K 12, all things ed tech. And so I think he's a great resource. And then obviously, you know, I think ed tech insiders like that's the reason I joined.
Gotta get the condensed insights.
[00:47:04] Alex Sarlin: That's so nice. I appreciate that. So yeah, that's Isabelle Hau who is a for the Stanford Accelerator for learning. Amazing. Also in the Ed tech insiders community. Dan Meyer from Amplify, who has called me out publicly to debate him and he has debated Ben about because we tend to take the upside take on ai, but he's skeptical.
And yeah, for very, you know, informed skepticism and Vikas Pota from T4 Education and the Education Leaders Forum. Great suggestions, great people. Thank you so much. This is Henry Motte de la Motte. He is the founder and CEO of EDGE Tutor. Asia's fastest growing tutor outsourcing company, which offers fully managed, white labeled, highly qualified 3% acceptance rate, English and math tutors to over 50 of the leading education.
Tutoring and training companies in the world. Thanks so much for being here with us on EdTech Insiders.
[00:47:53] Henry Motte de la Motte: Thanks so much, Alex. Super. Appreciate it.
[00:47:55] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more, EdTech Insider, subscribe to the Free Ed Tech Insiders Newsletter on substack.
