Guillaume Montégudet on AI's Inevitable Role

The debate in educational publishing is no longer about whether to use artificial intelligence, but how to use it. This is according to Guillaume Montégudet, who was interviewed by Livres Hebdo. He states the potential for AI to serve teachers is now universally acknowledged and 'vertiginous'.

Montégudet argues the real industrial and political subject is ensuring teachers, as professionals, have access to reliable, secure, and sovereign AI. He warns that a failure to address this leaves educators to imperfect solutions.

The Dual Challenge of Content and Usage

A pressing reality, according to Montégudet, is that teachers are already using public large language models (LLMs) to prepare lessons. He reports that some even upload the protected content of school textbooks into their prompts to refine queries. This presents a dual problem: protecting certified proprietary content and the economic rights of authors and publishers from unauthorized, untraceable, and unpaid use.

Yet, he also sees an opportunity. AI can enrich, contextualize, personalize, and adapt content for different audiences. Publishers, he insists, cannot abandon teachers to uncontrolled uses of their own materials.

Montégudet suggests publishers are currently at risk of being sidelined. He points to new competitors with strong technological and AI software capabilities and innovative marketing, who are directly targeting the historical content of educational publishers. This 'platformization' movement threatens editorial and pedagogical guarantees and teachers' freedom of choice, raising a major question about an 'education Netflix' emerging without publishers.

Winning the Battle for Usage

For Montégudet, publishers must ask an unavoidable question: how to win the 'battle of usage'? This requires making certified content available where teachers and students actually work. Today, that environment includes a teacher's digital suite, course preparation tools, and exchanges with AI, not just a publisher's proprietary platform or a physical textbook.

If certified content is not present, traceable, and remunerated in these uses, he argues it will be consumed elsewhere in a diverted manner. This necessitates a deep transformation of the educational publishing economic model, not a cosmetic adjustment. The goals must be protecting expert content value, enriching it with AI, and increasing its volume of usage at the heart of teachers' growing practices with these tools.

Rethinking the Economic Model

The central question, often evaded according to Montégudet, is who pays for this new value brought to the teacher. Proposing solutions that combine reliable content with sovereign, high-performance course preparation tools and secure AI requires massive investments. Currently, the state or local authorities finance the pupil's textbook, and the teacher receives free copies.

Montégudet questions the sustainability of sending free specimens to teachers, which are massively photocopied, especially when pupil purchases are no longer funded. He advocates for an 'offre classe' (class offer): a global cost per class, calculated per pupil, that clearly distinguishes in its architecture what pertains to the textbook, the pupil value, and what pertains to the AI-augmented professional tool, the teacher value. The offer's structure must finally reflect this dual value.

He also posits whether a teacher, accessing such an interoperable ecosystem, could benefit from the content of all textbooks for the same subject and level when they have equipped their pupils with one of the market's manuals. Innovation, he concludes, must also be marketing.

Montégudet believes the most solid players will be those who can combine content excellence, deep integration into professional usage, and mastery of new AI capabilities. He calls for new alliances to be built between publishers and tech actors, based on a logic of creating equitably shared value.