Tutor
Academic tutoring sits close to the center of what current AI tutoring platforms are already built to do, and the scale of real, current deployment here is larger than almost any other occupation this site has researched: Khan Academy's Khanmigo, built on GPT-4, had reached roughly 5 million users and 15,000-plus U.
We have not ingested real-world usage data for this occupation yet. We show a band only where genuine data exists, rather than estimate one.
What a tutor actually does
Tutors instruct individual students or small groups in academic subjects, supporting classroom instruction or preparing students for standardized tests and college admissions exams. Daily work includes providing individualized instruction matched to a student's specific gaps and learning style, assessing progress against a student's own goals, developing lesson plans tailored to one learner rather than a full classroom, and communicating regularly with parents and classroom teachers about a student's development.
The work happens one-on-one or in very small groups, in person or increasingly online, and requires no state licensing, entry paths range from a bachelor's degree to some college coursework to, for some subjects, a high school diploma alone. Tutors work independently, for tutoring companies and learning centers, and through school-affiliated programs, and job titles include Academic Tutor, Test Prep Tutor, and Learning Specialist.
Why it reads this way
Academic tutoring sits close to the center of what current AI tutoring platforms are already built to do, and the scale of real, current deployment here is larger than almost any other occupation this site has researched: Khan Academy's Khanmigo, built on GPT-4, had reached roughly 5 million users and 15,000-plus U. S.
school districts by the end of the 2024-25 school year, with more than 108 million total interactions since its 2023 launch, and the broader AI-tutoring market drew $4. 2 billion in venture funding in 2025 alone, 62% of all edtech investment that year. That's a real, current, commercial-scale deployment directly performing this occupation's core task, one-on-one, individualized academic instruction, not just assisting a human tutor's work.
Some genuine friction exists and is disclosed honestly rather than ignored: only about 15% of students with school-provided Khanmigo access use it regularly, prompting a 2026 product redesign, and industry commentary frames the near-term effect as repositioning tutoring toward subject-matter specialists and premium pricing rather than eliminating the field outright. But unlike Middle School Teacher, this occupation carries no individual licensing requirement, certification through bodies like the National Tutoring Association is voluntary, leaving no legal wall to fall back on.
BLS projects only 1-2% growth through 2034, slower than average, a real, current demand signal consistent with, not contradictory to, the scale of AI-tutoring adoption described above.
Skills this role draws on
Range source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics / O*NET OnLine, 2020-2025
Average source: O*NET OnLine 2025 wage data (Annual Median Wage) for Tutors (25-3041.00); min/max from BLS OEWS May 2020 10th/90th percentile, the most recent detailed percentile breakdown found
Safer, skill-adjacent careers
These aren't generic "consider retraining" suggestions. Each one shares real skill or task overlap with tutor work, and each one scores meaningfully higher on our structural exposure scale, with the reasoning shown below.
The same subject-matter expertise and instructional skill transfers directly, and classroom teaching carries the individually-held state license tutoring generally lacks.
A related education role already published as Safe on this site, requiring an individual state license and applying similar individualized-instruction skill within a legally protected classroom role.
Builds on real one-on-one and small-group instructional and mentoring skill, moving toward a role centered on in-person physical coaching current AI tools don't replicate.
Tutor scores 37/100 on a single-pillar structural measure (this O*NET code isn't covered by the AIOE dataset, a real, disclosed data-coverage gap), and no individual license holds the verdict up. Real, current AI tutoring adoption is larger in scale than almost any other occupation researched on this site: Khan Academy's Khanmigo reached roughly 5 million users and 15,000+ U.S. districts by the end of the 2024-25 school year, and the AI-tutoring market drew $4.2 billion in venture funding in 2025 alone. Real friction exists (only ~15% regular usage among students with access) and industry framing describes repositioning toward specialists rather than full elimination, but with no licensing wall to fall back on and BLS's own slower-than-average growth (1-2%) consistent with this evidence, this occupation is classified At-risk.
This is a researched judgment (checklist v1.2), not a statistical measurement — it sits alongside, not instead of, the structural exposure signal above. Next scheduled review: 2027-02-19.
Sources (4)
- https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/25-3041.00
- https://www.skillademia.com/statistics/khan-academy-statistics/
- https://www.edtechinnovationhub.com/news/only-15-percent-of-students-with-access-to-khanmigo-actually-use-it-khan-academy-admits
- https://valueaddvc.com/blog/ai-tutors-are-here-how-duolingo-khan-academy-and-startups-are-personalizing-education
Data sources & methodology
Salary data: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics / O*NET OnLine, 2020-2025. Average figure sourced separately: O*NET OnLine 2025 wage data (Annual Median Wage) for Tutors (25-3041.00); min/max from BLS OEWS May 2020 10th/90th percentile, the most recent detailed percentile breakdown found.
Task descriptions: Based on O*NET occupational analysis (25-3041.00).
Real-world AI usage band: Microsoft's "Working with AI" study of Bing Copilot conversations mapped to O*NET tasks (arXiv 2507.07935), and corroborating data from the Anthropic Economic Index.
Growth projections: 1-2% (2024-2034, slower than average, per BLS Tutors outlook; ~37,100 annual openings), based on BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook.