Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and use AI instead

A Sydney tutoring company has told parents to save their money and use AI instead. Dymocks Tutoring and Talent 100, which runs five centres across the city, will close at the end of the week, telling customers that artificial intelligence has made its service effectively obsolete and pointing families to Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude.

Dymocks Education chief executive Mark Buckland said the cost comparison no longer works: parents paid between $800 and $900 per subject each term, while a consumer AI subscription costs about $30 a month.

Cheaper than a human tutor

"Most of our customers would be better off using their hard-earned cash on cheaper solutions rather than simply paying for overpriced tutoring," Buckland told The Australian Financial Review. "Sure, AI won't perform as well as our human tutors, but it's also $30 a month."

He added that the Dymocks Group no longer believes the trade-off in cost is worth it, calling AI "the best compromise solution" for most users. Tutoring, he argued, sells nothing unique: "Strip away the marketing speak, it's drill and skill... it is actually just time and practice."

Buckland also predicts the high-achiever segment, students who buy tutoring for a competitive edge, will disappear within five years as they generate their own practice questions, essay marking guidelines and tests with AI.

An industry worth up to $1.3 billion

Rivals disagree. David Ramadge, chief executive of Matrix Education, said his company teaches about 8000 students a term in Greater Sydney alone, and the number is growing. Top students will keep seeking in-person tuition, he said, while those "in the middle of the academic bell curve" are more likely to embrace AI.

Australian Tutoring Association chief executive Mohan Dhall puts the industry's value at between $750 million and $1.3 billion. At least one in seven children in urban areas receives tutoring at some point, he said, and in Sydney the rate reaches one in three or one in four.

Screens, PISA and the HSC

Social media groups now feature former high-achievers charging around $50 an hour, alongside AI chatbots trained on the curriculum and sold as 24-hour "study buddies". Ben Zunica, a maths teaching expert at the University of Sydney, said such tutoring agents will improve, but warned students are tempted to simply ask for the answer where a human would insist on working through the problem.

The latest PISA results showed Australian teenagers' literacy and maths skills at their lowest level in two decades. New South Wales has announced limits on classroom screen time and will move away from take-home HSC assessments to guard against AI-driven cheating, meaning more in-person exams for students starting the HSC next term.