From October 8 to 13, 2025, Naples hosted the "Next Generation AI -
International Summit on Artificial Intelligence in Schools," an eventpresented by the Ministry of Education and Merit as "the largest
initiative ever held in Italy on AI applied to educational and training
processes."
A full week of conferences, workshops, masterclasses, evening
performances, guided tours, interactive installations, and-most
importantly-a huge turnout of companies, startups, and educational
technology providers ready to showcase their products to teachers,
administrators, and school staff.
The official program distributed to delegations and institutions is
impressive in terms of the number of names involved and the lack of
policy reflection. The topics discussed included "personalization of
learning," "efficiency of school processes," "digital tutoring,"
"virtual reality," and "conversational AI." But the underlying theme
running through the entire summit is clear: the school of the future
must become a market and a system to be optimized, not an educational
community to be strengthened.
Leafing through the program, one gets the impression not of a public
event on education but of a trade fair, a showcase summit for the AI
industry. Google, Amazon Web Services, Adobe, DXC Technology,
Campustore, Giunti, Zanichelli, Lutech, Hevolus, STEMBLOCKS: dozens of
companies, large and small, present "innovative solutions" for every
aspect of the school ecosystem.
Schools become places of private experimentation, where AI is used as a
tool to introduce proprietary platforms, immersive environments,
tracking systems, and "intelligent" tools for monitoring students,
teachers, and administrative processes.
Nothing, however, is mentioned about privacy, digital rights,
technological sovereignty, maintenance costs, the risk of dependence on
foreign vendors, or the sheer volume of data collected and processed by
these solutions. The only intervention dedicated to data protection was
a brief appearance by the Italian Data Protection Authority, wedged
between panels: the fig leaf needed to certify the operation as
"responsible."
The summit revolves around the salvific rhetoric of AI and the now
ubiquitous mantra: AI will improve schools, personalize learning,
simplify procedures, and make teaching more inclusive and creative. This
narrative presents technology as a technical solution to political
problems: job insecurity, overcrowded classes, insufficient staffing,
regional inequalities, dilapidated school buildings, and educational
poverty. All issues that no algorithm can resolve. Paradoxically, the
summit is taking place while many Italian schools lack teachers,
janitors, administrators, adequate classrooms, and functioning internet
connections. But AI is becoming the new decoy: a way to divert attention
from what one does not want to address.
It is also worth noting that students played no leading role in this summit.
Students are present in the program, but only as delegations, extras,
and audience members.
There are no panels where students discuss what it really means to live
in an increasingly digitalized, data-ified, and platform-mediated
school. School, instead of being conceived as a living community, is
reduced to a field of application for digital innovation. Students are
not political subjects, but "users of intelligent technologies."
The underlying message is clear: schools must become "more efficient,"
"data-driven," more like businesses. AI not as a critical tool, but as a
management infrastructure that helps monitor, simplify, optimize, and
control. There's talk of "AI for school administration," "AI for data
security," "AI for institutional management." This is the neoliberal
agenda that has been affecting education for years: transforming public
schools into measurable, segmentable, and profileable systems.
And yet, this is certainly not what schools need. The educational
challenge of the future isn't equipping students with digital assistants
or VR headsets, but something very different. It's strengthening
academic freedom, investing in stable staff, reducing regional
disparities, ensuring dignified educational spaces and time, and
building critical and inclusive communities. Technology can help, of
course. But only if it doesn't become a Trojan horse for the digital
colonization of public schools.
The NextGen AI Summit, however, tells a different story: that of a
school transformed into a playground for companies, where the state acts
as a political guarantor and education becomes a market opportunity. A
story that deserves to be told, and criticized, precisely because
schools should be defended as a common good.
Totò Caggese
https://umanitanova.org/scuola-e-intelligenza-artificiale-nextgen-ai-cresce-laziendalizzazione-del-settore-educativo/
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