Medly AI wins education award for Socratic tutoring approach
Medly AI has won Best AI Tutor or Personalized Learning Agent at the ETIH Innovation Awards 2026, recognized for building an exam-focused tutoring platform that guides students toward understanding rather than providing instant answers.
The UK-founded platform, created by doctors from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, addresses a straightforward problem: private tutoring costs exclude many families, while general AI tools often hand students answers without supporting learning.
Kavi Samra, co-founder and COO at Medly, is also an anaesthetist and honorary teaching fellow at UCL. He describes the first wave of AI in education as "essentially just answer engines" - powerful but transactional.
How Medly's design differs
Instead of a chatbot that responds to prompts, Medly built an AI tutor using Socratic questioning, scaffolded hints, and feedback. Content is mapped to exam boards including AQA, Edexcel, OCR, WJEC, and Cambridge, with teacher and examiner review built into development.
The platform covers GCSE, A-Level, IGCSE, IB, AP, and SAT students. It includes features such as handwriting recognition for equations, integrated graphing tools, mock exams with grade predictions, and teacher dashboards showing mastery heatmaps.
Samra says the design choice avoids a major risk: student dependency. "If we just gave students the answers, we would be building a generation of students who are dependent on a tool rather than their own intellect," he said.
Judge Tina Austin noted that Medly "guides students toward understanding rather than providing answers," separating it from generic AI tools.
What student behavior reveals
The platform processes between 100,000 and 200,000 tutoring interactions daily, alongside 300,000 signups. This scale has shown how students actually use AI when working independently at home.
Rather than using AI primarily to shortcut work, Samra says many interactions involve repeated questioning on difficult concepts. "It is often a late night, repetitive loop of asking for a concept to be explained one more time or asking why their specific logic was wrong."
AI tutoring removes a social barrier present in human tutoring. "In a human tutoring session, social norms often stop a student from asking the same question five times," Samra said. "With Medly, that social barrier is gone."
Access and affordability
Judges highlighted Medly's focus on making high-quality tutoring affordable. The platform offers Medly Mondays (free access to a subject each week), Medly Mocks (nationwide mock exams with marking), and bursary support.
"For us, scale is the actual vehicle for our mission," Samra said. "Our goal has always been to democratise the kind of high quality, personalized tutoring that was previously reserved for the few."
The company is now running randomized controlled trials within schools to build a scientific evidence base. Samra said the award marks progress but not completion: "This award is a milestone but the real work of proving how AI can fundamentally transform learning is just beginning."
For educators exploring AI applications in learning, resources on AI for Education and the AI Learning Path for Teachers provide practical frameworks for implementation.
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