Online education platform Khan Academy is shifting a portion of its cloud workload to Microsoft Azure under a partnership announced Tuesday morning.
Microsoft says it will donate access to its AI cloud infrastructure to allow Khan Academy to offer Khanmigo for Teachers free of charge to K-12 educators in the U.S. The AI assistant will now be powered by the Azure OpenAI Service, according to the company.
Khanmigo for Teachers previously cost $4 per month to cover the cost of developing, testing, and deploying the AI technology to educators.
Khan Academy is a longtime Google Cloud customer, based in the search giant’s hometown of Mountain View, Calif. Microsoft, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and other cloud platforms are competing aggressively in AI to grow their businesses, attract new customers, and expand the use of their cloud technologies.
Tech companies including Microsoft have a longstanding history of offering software and hardware for free or reduced prices to schools in hopes of entrenching their software and creating lifelong loyalty to their platforms.
Khanmigo for Teachers integrates with Khan Academy content and streamlines the process of creating lesson plans, quizzes, and other tasks, with the goal of freeing up more of teachers’ time to work directly with students.
Microsoft said the Khan Academy partnership also includes a collaboration to improve online math tutoring using Phi-3, AI technology from Microsoft based on a small language model, designed to be more efficient and lightweight.
In addition, Microsoft said it will work with Khan Academy to integrate more of its content into Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant and Microsoft Teams for Education.
Microsoft announced the partnership at its Build developer conference in Seattle.
