D2L’s new survey reveals that Gen Z educators are twice as likely to use AI tools in the classroom compared to Gen X, with a staggering 88% adoption rate in the 2024–25 school year.

The report, which polled 1,200 U.S. respondents, shows most younger educators see AI as essential to the future of teaching, with 63% of Gen Z and Millennials calling it important or vital by 2030.

Despite the AI hype, most educators still want to keep humans involved, voicing concerns about losing student connection, over-reliance on automation, and a charming mix of privacy and academic integrity worries.

AI-enhanced efficiency is welcomed, with 44% of educators admitting it helps speed things up, though not necessarily making lessons more engaging or personalized—because who needs excitement in school anyway?

Cheating tops the list of suspected student use cases according to Gen Z educators, proving that even digital natives know when someone’s gaming the system.

A strong majority of educators (65%) believe decisions on AI in the classroom should be made by, surprise, themselves—not by federal bureaucrats or distant policymakers.

The most popular AI tools among educators are ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot, while 24% are paranoid their schools are spying on them for using them.

AI usage among educators is already at 54% and is expected to creep up to 56% next academic year, mostly for accessibility, plagiarism detection, and turning lesson planning into a button-clicking exercise.

The findings come just ahead of D2L’s annual Fusion conference in Savannah, where presumably nobody will talk about how AI is slowly eating their jobs—just making them more “efficient.”