AI: Are We Being Left Behind or Led Up the Garden Path?

AI is everywhere, apparently.

Every conference, every policy announcement and every other LinkedIn post tells us it will transform how we live and work. Depending on who you listen to, it will either save us hours of work or make half of us redundant. No wonder people are confused.

A recent Ipsos report, Making AI Work for Europe, commissioned by Google, suggests that AI could add up to €1.4 trillion to the European economy over the next decade. Yet in 2025, only 20% of EU businesses with ten or more employees were using AI. Among large businesses, adoption is much higher than among smaller organisations.

So, despite all the excitement, there is a considerable gap between the promise and the reality. The report identifies six questions people ask before adopting AI.

1. Is it relevant?
2. What is its value?
3. What are the risks?
4. What are the rules?
5. Can I trust it?
6. And do I have the skills to use it? 

They seem perfectly reasonable questions to me. In fact, I would be more concerned if people weren’t asking them.

For Early Years, the challenge is particularly interesting. We are a sector built on relationships, care, judgement and human interaction. Our work is not simply a collection of tasks that can be automated. Yet we also operate under significant financial and workforce pressures, with teachers spending valuable time on administration, documentation, planning and communication. If AI could reduce some of that burden and give teachers more time with children, surely, we should explore it?

But here comes the important qualification. More time for what? I have argued before that AI should strengthen rather than diminish our humanity. If technology saves time, that time should be reinvested in relationships, conversation, observation, reflection and play. Not simply used to increase productivity targets or generate another layer of paperwork.

There is also the question of trust. Another Ipsos report, the 2025 Veracity Index, found that nurses and engineers remain among Britain’s most trusted professions. Teachers also rank highly. Meanwhile, just 6% of respondents said they trusted social media influencers to tell the truth. That is quite a finding when you consider how much influence social media personalities now have over what people buy, believe and increasingly how they parent.

We have moved a long way from the early days of social media, when people shared photographs, stories and the occasional rather tedious account of their breakfast. Today, commercial influence is a sophisticated business. Products are promoted through apparently personal recommendations, sponsored content can resemble independent advice, and algorithms determine what appears in our feeds. AI is adding another layer. Content can be generated, personalised and circulated at extraordinary speed. Images, voices and videos can be convincing without being authentic. Recommendations can be shaped by commercial interests that are not always obvious to the person receiving them.

For parents, teachers and children, that raises serious questions about what is real, what is reliable and who benefits. And it takes us back to digital literacy. At EECERA, I was struck by discussions about how the foundations of digital literacy begin through play. Before children learn to navigate digital systems, they need opportunities to question, predict, investigate, recognise patterns, solve problems and make decisions.

They also need to learn about trust, consent and agency. Who made this? Why am I seeing it? Can I believe it? Who gets to decide? These are not simply technical questions. They are social, ethical and pedagogical questions. The same applies to teachers.

Critical AI literacy is not about everyone becoming a computer scientist. It is about understanding enough to make informed choices, recognise bias, protect children’s information and know when AI is useful and when it is not. It is also about resisting the assumption that adoption automatically means progress.

There is a social justice dimension here that worries me. Large organisations have the resources to invest in AI, train staff and test new systems. Smaller nurseries and organisations working in disadvantaged communities may have fewer opportunities to do so. Equally, they may be more vulnerable to buying inappropriate technology marketed as a quick solution to complex problems. We could end up with a digital divide in which some organisations benefit from technology while others are left behind, or worse, persuaded to adopt systems they neither understand nor need. That is not innovation. It is another form of inequality.

The Early Years sector needs to become much more confident in this debate. We should neither rush to embrace every shiny new tool nor retreat into the comforting belief that technology has nothing to do with us.

We need to be informed, curious and appropriately sceptical. We need to test claims, demand evidence, challenge commercial interests and insist that children’s rights and professional judgement remain central. Above all, we must not become complicit by allowing others to make these decisions for us.

I have been suggesting that we need a stronger collective Early Years voice on AI and digital childhood. Not to promote technology for its own sake, but to examine its opportunities, limitations and consequences through the lens of child development, pedagogy, equity and ethics. Perhaps the most useful question for our sector is not whether we are adopting AI quickly enough. It is whether we are adopting it thoughtfully enough.
And I would be interested to know what is happening in nurseries now. Are teachers using AI? Is it genuinely helping? What worries them? And who is providing the guidance they can trust? Because if AI really is going to change the world, Early Years needs to help shape that change. Children should not simply inherit the consequences of decisions made without them.