Advantage AI: How ALLEN is personalising test prep and enhancing learning outcomes for each student

Far away from the classrooms of Kota where test-prep institute ALLEN began its journey three-and-a-half decades ago, a not-so-quiet digital revolution is brewing in Bengaluru, the startup capital of the country. 

At ALLEN’s office in Embassy TechVillage, a team of 200-odd techies are brimming with bright ideas and innovative solutions to harness the power of AI and personalise every aspect of the student’s preparation journey—right from lecture delivery, testing and grading to practice and feedback. 

The team is also toying with generative AI (GenAI) to enable conversational learning experiences that are akin to interacting with a human mentor or teacher.

After bagging massive funding of $600 million from Bodhi Tree Systems, ALLEN entered the digital universe with ALLEN Digital in 2022—just when the buzz around AI was starting to gather steam. 

The timing was perfect. 

The company not only jumped on the digital bandwagon but also made sure it capitalised on the AI wave along the way through ALLEN Digital. 

For the last two years or so, ALLEN Digital has stood its own in the education domain with the freshness and curiosity of an early-stage startup. At the helm of this transformative journey is Abha Maheshwari, a former Meta executive, who was chosen to head the digital arm—as its first CEO—about a year ago. 

These are interesting times as the boundaries between online and offline experiences are blurring, with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) all set to shape the future of teaching and learning. 

Here’s where ALLEN Digital thinks it has an edge over its edtech counterparts who have been in the space for a good number of years. 

It’s new, young, and standing at the cusp of AI disruption, not saddled with any baggage in the digital space—unlike older edtech firms that may have to tweak their existing models to accommodate AI. 

ALLEN Digital may not have a time-tested playbook to follow, but a clean slate may prove to be a blessing in disguise in its case. 

Existing tech companies—to a certain extent—find themselves needing to rebuild or completely redo their work to adapt to evolving technology, says Maheshwari, adding that newcomers (like ALLEN Digital) have the advantage of starting fresh and leveraging the latest advancements in AI.

And Maheshwari is no stranger to leveraging the latest to build something new. 

A product development veteran, she spent a decade at Facebook (now Meta) developing products and forging partnerships. She was also instrumental in building and scaling Instagram Shopping. 

A leader with a growth mindset, Maheshwari brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to ALLEN Digital. What’s more—she has a powerhouse team to aid her in her efforts. 

The team boasts leaders with enviable tech and product expertise—Ankit Khurana, CPO, who spent a decade at Flipkart before joining the product team at ALLEN; Saurabh Tandon, CTO, who brings with him over eight years of experience at Flipkart; and Apoorv Sharma, CMO, who jumped aboard ALLEN after nearly six years at Apple. 

The rest of the team comes from tech giants including WhatsApp, Meta, Google, and Amazon, with experience in product launches and scaling technology for the masses. 

Tech boost

ALLEN Career Institute, with 300+ centres across 60+ cities, is a prominent coaching institute for medical (NEET) and engineering (JEE) entrance exams, having coached over 2.8 million students to date.

Capitalising on its academic expertise and pedagogy, the company is now integrating technology, including AI and ML, into the students’ learning journey. This integration can be felt across its properties, including a revamped website, a sleek mobile app, and other behind-the-scenes tech upgrades—all developed by Maheshwari’s team. 

About 70% of the funds raised from Bodhi Tree is earmarked for expanding digital assets and digital coverage across India.

Over the recent past, ALLEN has transitioned from an Infosys stack and a third-party platform to its own technology platform, built from scratch. Its new app, launched in January, helps offer personalised learning at scale and develop AI and ML experiences on top of the knowledge graph.

A knowledge graph is a comprehensive representation of educational concepts, topics, and their interconnections. It organises information about subjects, learning objectives, resources, assessments, and student progress in a structured format.

“What we have now built with our platform is the ability to monitor a student’s journey and personalise the whole experience for the student based on their understanding and knowledge,” says Maheshwari.

AI integration and personalisation

Essentially, AI and ML operate on the data fed to the platform and determine actions accordingly. 

The data includes how students perform on tests, how they learn, and how interested they are in the lessons. It also includes details about the lessons, how challenging they are, and how they relate to other topics.

AI analyses a student’s strengths, weaknesses, and learning patterns and recommends relevant resources and learning paths tailored to individual needs. AI is also used behind the scenes to help with lecture delivery and power other activities such as practice, clarifying doubts, homework, and mentorship. 

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Two AI-powered features on the app and website are highly valued by students, according to the CEO. 

One is the ‘improvement book’—a collection of learning journey mistakes that help students enhance their revision and practice—and ‘custom tests’ that enable students to personalise their testing experience.

Here are some examples to demonstrate the kind of micro-personalisation that ALLEN Digital is striving for. 

Let’s say a student excels in algebra but struggles with geometry. AI intervenes by suggesting more geometry practice or recommending interactive tools for better understanding.

If a student errs in a thermodynamics problem, assigning more questions may seem logical. But with a deeper knowledge graph, AI can identify if the issue is with the concept itself, a calculation error, or something else and suggest suitable course correction. 

For concept gaps, AI could suggest interactive exercises, and practice problems for calculation errors. It can also recommend seeking human help or alternative exercises.

ALLEN Digital has also developed a biology bot to enable conversational learning experiences. The bot has been integrated with questions from Doubtnut, an AI-based doubt-solving platform which ALLEN acquired for $10 million in December.

Using GenAI, the edtech firm is looking at ways to efficiently provide diagnostic feedback to students by capturing their mistakes in homework via images and delving into the ‘what’ and ‘why’ behind them.

It is also exploring AI-powered testing and grading to enhance teacher efficiency and reduce the time spent on grading.

With AI being used extensively, ALLEN realises the need to establish clear guardrails to ensure 100% accuracy in its technology-driven communication.

These are high-stakes exams; so, if AI hallucinates or provides incorrect answers, it directly impacts a child’s career, says Maheshwari.

To ensure hallucinations don’t happen, training datasets are sourced from consistently high-performing students. The company also conducts ongoing evaluations to ensure the accuracy of its AI responses.

Focus on learning outcomes

Even as it embraces the new digital era, the company has not ditched its classrooms or compromised on learning outcomes. In fact, ALLEN has extended its digital features (the new app and website powered by AI) to all offline students.

ALLEN’s approach to building and scaling, according to Maheshwari, is based on its vision of a world without artificial boundaries between online and offline education, a world where learning outcomes still matter. 

“Ensuring learning outcomes is of utmost importance because, unlike a shoe or a dress that can be returned if wrong in size. A mistake made here affects a student’s entire career,” she says. 

In a like-to-like comparison, ALLEN evaluated the learning outcomes of students who were not using the new digital learning experience and those who were exposed to these features. It discovered an increase of almost 5% in test scores among students exposed to digital features.

Maheshwari emphasises that a 5% improvement is “very meaningful”—for a student at the borderline, it could mean transitioning from non-selection to selection in a competitive exam, and for a student who has cleared the cut-off, it might mean upgrading from an average college to a good one.

Supplementing offline education

Post-pandemic, a lot of attention has shifted to offline education, a space where ALLEN has a stronghold. Online firms like PhysicsWallah and Unacademy have intensified offline expansion. That said, online education still holds significant potential in reaching more students and supplementing offline efforts. 

Anil Joshi, Managing Partner, Unicorn India Ventures, which has made investments in the edtech space, believes online education may not become mainstream soon, but it will play an important role in supporting offline education.

There is significant demand for ALLEN’s digital offerings from students of grades 11, 12, and 12+, especially for full courses, in regions beyond Tier II where access to quality offline courses is challenging, according to Maheshwari. Students of grades 6 to 10 from Tier I regions also show sustained interest in digital learning, she adds. 

A full course is a one/two-year programme which includes comprehensive study materials, live and recorded lectures, interactive sessions, doubt resolution, and mentorship. 

The company coached 3,60,000 students for full courses in FY2023-24, up from 2,90,000 the year before. The coaching institute is targeting nearly half a million students in FY2024-25 for full courses, excluding distance learning and test series, via both offline and online channels. Through the online channel, it aims to reach 40,000 to 50,000 students in FY25.

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Growth strategies

The road ahead is long and challenging, and Maheshwari acknowledges this.

However, she adds, “We have a huge advantage because we have come at a time where technology is also going through a tectonic shift.”

She says her focus for the next five years is on creating a personalised experience for each student that exceeds the current offline classroom experience. 

“If we do that right, while providing quality experience, then scale, revenue, and all of that will follow naturally,” the digital chief explains.

In the process, ALLEN is open to acquisitions if it finds a business that aligns with its approach to building its online business. 

Commenting on the company's performance, Joshi of Unicorn India Ventures observes: “ALLEN has shown good growth over the past year and is profitable. The majority of its revenue comes from classroom teaching which has picked up well post-pandemic.” 

In FY2022-23, the firm’s overall revenue surpassed the Rs 2,000-crore mark, while profit after tax was Rs 429 crore. In FY25, ALLEN expects to more than double its online business revenue to Rs 200 crore to 250 crore. 

Joshi says going forward the test-prep market will see robust growth, and ALLEN is also likely to benefit from it. 

While ALLEN has adequate capital to leverage technology for growth and maintain its position as one of the main contenders in test prep, the space is competitive with marquee players including Aakash and Pace. The key is to produce good results consistently.