Speaking with TechGraph, Priyanka Kapuria, Founder of TSU, discussed how AI is shifting children away from working through information independently and toward relying on technology to shape their responses, and how this growing dependence could make it increasingly difficult to distinguish polished work from genuine understanding.
Kapuria further highlighted the role of schools and families in preserving opportunities for children to develop their own ideas, allowing confidence to grow from what they genuinely understand rather than from how polished an AI-assisted response appears.
Read the interview in detail:
TechGraph: Children today have access to more information than any previous generation, yet that access does not necessarily translate into confidence or clarity. What are you seeing among children today that makes the ability to think independently and express ideas clearly more important?
Priyanka Kapuria: In the past, if you wanted to understand something, you had no choice but to go through several books, sit with the material, and build the structure yourself — that structuring was the whole exercise; that’s where the actual thinking happened.
Today, that step has quietly disappeared. There’s almost always something else ready to organise the information for a child, so the focus has shifted from processing and understanding to simply completing the task.
The bar looks higher because the output looks more polished, but that polish isn’t coming from a child processing information better — it’s coming from a tool doing that processing for them. What kids are actually getting good at is prompting, not thinking. And that’s exactly why, despite having more information than any generation before them, clarity is the thing that’s missing.
TechGraph: Schools have limited time to develop skills that fall outside the core curriculum, even though communication and collaboration are becoming increasingly important beyond the classroom. Where do you see the biggest gap between what schools teach and what children are expected to handle in real-world situations?
Priyanka Kapuria: I’d actually push back a little on that framing. In my experience, schools — especially the tier-one, metro schools — have moved quite a bit on this already. The format of teaching has changed, and communication and collaboration have become a real priority for them, not an afterthought. I don’t see much of a gap there. Where it gets more interesting is in tier-two schools.
What I notice is a genuine trade-off: the schools that stay tightly focused on the curriculum produce students with excellent subject knowledge — they’re the ones acing quizzes and exams. But the moment a school tries to go beyond the curriculum to build in these broader skills, the depth of knowledge tends to take a hit.
So it’s less that schools everywhere are ignoring communication and collaboration, and more that going deep on the syllabus and going beyond it tend to pull a school in opposite directions — and which one wins depends a lot on which tier of school you’re looking at.
TechGraph: Parents often see children who perform well academically but hesitate to speak up, participate in a group, or express an opinion. Why does doing well in the classroom not always translate into confidence outside it, and what can help bridge that gap?
Priyanka Kapuria: Here’s where I’d actually flip the question around. In my experience, students who do well academically tend to be more confident about speaking up, not less — because they know they’re right. That certainty comes from being appreciated and rewarded consistently: when a student gives the correct answer, they get facilitated, congratulated, celebrated, and that appreciation is what builds the confidence to raise a hand or walk up on stage.
People get comfortable being visible when they’re excited about what they know. So the real gap isn’t between academic success and confidence — it’s about what a classroom chooses to celebrate. We’re very good at recognising academic excellence, but we rarely celebrate the student who was an excellent collaborator, or who led a group quietly, or who did the actual thinking behind an idea but didn’t want to be the one to present it.
Those students never get that same repeated appreciation, so they never build the same comfort with being visible — even though what they contributed was just as valuable. What would help is classrooms getting just as vocal about crediting that kind of contribution as they are about crediting the right answer.
TechGraph: Confidence is often treated as something children either have or lack, but the right environment can change that significantly. What role do parents, teachers, and peers play in helping children build confidence without making them feel pressured to perform?
Priyanka Kapuria: For me, it comes back to the same thing — confidence starts the moment a child actually knows something, has genuinely prepared or read about it, and then someone notices. That’s the trigger. So what parents, teachers, and peers can do is appreciate that specifically — a real “wow, I didn’t know that” reaction, a compliment tied to what the child actually did.
I want to be careful here, because that’s not the same as praising everything a child does regardless of effort. It’s not blanket appreciation. It’s about recognising and encouraging real knowledge and real effort when it shows up, so the child learns that being prepared and being right is worth the work — and that connection between effort and appreciation is what confidence is actually built on.
TechGraph: The Speakers United works beyond conventional curriculum-based learning and focuses on practical skills that children can carry into everyday situations. Which skills have you found take the longest to develop, and where do parents tend to underestimate the time and effort involved?
Priyanka Kapuria: Honestly, I don’t think of it as a skill so much as a gap in exposure. What we struggle with most is that families don’t really have hard or sensitive conversations at home. We don’t sit our kids down and talk about the people who work in our own homes and what they’re actually going through, or how we think about voting, or what we’d want from the government versus what someone from a completely different background might want.
A lot of children come from fairly privileged backgrounds, and without those conversations, they only ever learn to see the world through their own lens.
So the thing that takes the longest — and the thing parents most underestimate — isn’t something we can teach in a session; it’s perspective: getting a child to genuinely think from someone else’s position, someone with a completely different set of needs, instead of assuming everyone experiences the world the way they do.
If I had to put a name to it, I’d call it sensitivity. And it takes far longer to build than parents expect, because it isn’t something you can train in isolation — it has to start with the conversations happening at home.
TechGraph: Children are growing up with AI tools that can write, explain, translate, and even speak on their behalf. Do you think this will make young people better communicators, or will the ability to form an original thought and express it independently become even more important?
Priyanka Kapuria: My honest answer is no — I don’t think it’s helping. If anything, AI is giving children a false sense of who they are as communicators. Someone else is doing the writing, someone else is doing the structuring, and all a child has to do is deliver it.
That might make them sound like great speakers — polished words, good gestures, the right modulation in their voice — but it won’t make them the thinkers we actually want them to become. Because being a good communicator isn’t really about delivery at all. It’s about listening, which is something no AI tool can teach you. It’s about processing information and genuinely thinking through a situation from multiple angles — going deeper into who’s affected and how — and AI does exactly the opposite of that. It thinks for you instead of teaching you how to do it.
So no, I don’t see this making young people more independent. I think it’s making them more reliant, even while it looks, on the surface, like it’s making them more capable.
TechGraph: Looking ahead, what changes do you expect in the way children learn and develop skills outside the classroom, and what do you think parents and educators will need to rethink as those expectations evolve?
Priyanka Kapuria: Looking ahead, I think the biggest change actually needs to come from institutions themselves. If things keep getting this easy for children, schools may need stricter rules around how AI is used in learning — because right now, a lot of children need a push from AI just to even start thinking.
That dependency is, to me, the real problem we should be worried about. So I think what parents and educators will really need to rethink is how they measure a child’s work in the first place. A polished essay or a fluent answer doesn’t tell you whether a child actually did the thinking or just prompted their way there — the finished product looks the same either way.
We’ll need more moments, at home and in school, where children are asked to start from a blank page with no tool to lean on, just so that muscle doesn’t fade. That’s really what we try to protect at The Speakers United — giving children practice at originating a thought, not just polishing one that someone or something else already handed them.