Multiverse teachers say AI surveillance is costing them sleep
Teachers at Multiverse, the £1.6 billion tech training company co-founded by Euan Blair, are reporting severe stress, sleepless nights, and a need for therapy after the company introduced an AI surveillance system that monitors, transcribes, and scores their online classroom sessions. The system tags each instructor with a risk status, calculates a confidence score, and flags potential problems for human managers to review, ranging from using too many filler phrases like "sort of" and "kind of" to failing to resolve a connectivity disruption within roughly a minute. Several instructors who spoke anonymously described the experience as "remorseless" and "unnerving," with one saying they had never before woken in the middle of the night from work-related stress.
The AI is trained to identify patterns across entire session transcripts rather than isolated moments, and instructs managers to apply negative marks even when a teacher self-corrects an unclear explanation. Teachers say the system has caused managers to flag them for alleged digressions when they were simply answering a student's question, and that the constant scrutiny shifts their attention away from learners and toward self-monitoring. Multiverse says the tool does not replace human judgment but directs managerial attention where it is most needed, and insists that only human managers write formal performance reviews. Pressure on Multiverse is likely to mount given that Ofsted earlier this year praised its instructors as skilled and effective even as it found the company fell short in other areas.