ChatGPT’s rise is changing how students look for help with schoolwork, and education technology companies are already weighing what that means for their products. Chegg reported that the service was affecting new customer growth, while other leaders described ways AI might support learning inside classrooms.
Chegg sees a change in new sign-ups
Chegg is known for textbook rentals, but its services also include Chegg Study, a subscription product offering homework help. The company has a large collection of answers to academic questions, and the source reports that students have used its services to cheat. Chegg has also done some work to help schools prevent cheating.
On its earnings call, company executives said they had seen no noticeable impact from ChatGPT on new account growth in the first part of the year. Since March, however, student interest in ChatGPT had increased significantly, and Chegg said it believed the change was affecting its new customer growth.
The company described the issue as a slowdown in attracting new users, rather than a change in how well it retained existing customers. Chegg also said it would not know the full effect on growth until the new school year. That uncertainty followed a quarter in which results bested analyst expectations, but it was the comments about ChatGPT that investors focused on as Chegg’s shares fell sharply.
AI can give students detailed help
To explore how these tools might affect homework, the TechCrunch article describes a test using questions listed on Chegg’s website. ChatGPT provided detailed answers across topics, though the writer could not fully check all of the math. Wolfram Alpha struggled with the combination of words and numbers in the questions used for the comparison.
The writer then tried questions from a Berkeley calculus workbook. ChatGPT solved the problems to a level that appeared accurate to the writer’s limited retained math knowledge, and it explained the steps along the way. That ability to show a process matters: a student can receive something closer to a short explanation than a bare answer.
Such assistance could help students check their work or get another explanation of a concept. It also raises a challenge for homework and grading if students can use AI to complete work outside class. The source points to in-person testing with pencils as one way to assess learning under different conditions. The tension is not only about technology: it also concerns what teachers can reasonably ask students to do independently and how they evaluate what students understand.
Education companies are exploring classroom uses
Edtech leaders in the article described AI as both a competitive pressure and a chance to build new forms of support. Class CEO and founder Michael Chasen said students had previously turned to services such as Chegg for help writing papers, conducting research and finding tutors. Class has spent months developing an AI teaching assistant, with possible uses that include summarizing what a student missed after joining class late, explaining a lecturer’s phrase, and defining terms.
Making a feature useful in practice is a separate challenge from building it. Chasen said Class was working to make the assistant easy for teachers and students to use without requiring them to understand how AI works. The product had not yet been rolled out to classrooms, and the company was still addressing the risk that it could produce negative or offensive responses. Inappropriate questions were visible only to the student who asked them, according to Chasen, but classroom adoption also brings concern that a bad response could be shared widely.
Philip Cutler, CEO and founder of Paper, described generative AI as a new form of calculator. Paper had recently launched a reading practice product that uses artificial intelligence to help students understand what they read, assess reading in relation to grade level, and find more material.
Adoption brings questions about trust
Cutler also raised concerns about bias. Curriculum and content are personal to communities, and he said that uncertainty about bias in an AI model could create conflict over what is taught. The concern points to a broader requirement for education products: their usefulness depends not just on whether they can answer questions, but on whether schools and families can understand how they behave.
Some large U.S. school districts had blocked access to ChatGPT on their networks, reflecting concern about its use in schools. At the same time, the examples from Class and Paper show companies looking for ways to apply AI to teaching support and reading practice. For edtech, the central question is becoming how to put these tools to work in a way that helps students and teachers while giving schools confidence in the results.
The effects are still emerging. ChatGPT had come out less than a year before the article was written, leaving companies, schools and investors to make decisions while the longer-term impact remained uncertain. Chegg’s experience showed that student interest could influence an established product’s growth; the classroom experiments showed that the same technology might also become part of new learning services.