The Rise of the Experience Economy in Learning

We’ve all heard the classic mantra that “knowledge is power.” But the internet era made it clear that anybody with a data connection could easily access raw information like facts and figures. And the age of AI now means that people skilled at developing prompts can quickly acquire fast expert analysis as well. So is the power of knowledge losing its relevance?

On the one hand, we’re rapidly learning that critical thinking is more important than ever if we want to unlock the power of AI, build guardrails around its weaknesses, and make it even better with human guidance. Yet it’s also true that the democratization of knowledge by LLMs, the large language models that drive generative AI, is reshaping our relationship with information. When facts and analysis become a widely accessible commodity, distinct personal experience takes on greater value than ever.

That’s why examples emerge almost daily of how much individuals prize new kinds of products, services, and entertainment built on authentic experience, human connection, and the emotional resonance they create. Japan has seen the advent of “rent a grandpa” and “rent a grandma” services that help clients seeking companionship, a wise perspective, and even help with tasks like breaking up with a boyfriend. The market for  social media influencers, who trade in personal narrative and emotional relatability, has exploded – from $1.4 billion in 2014 to $32.55 billion in 2025.

This pattern extends even to the tech-enabled worlds of augmented and virtual reality. Instead of just faithfully reproducing classics like chess or Risk, the most popular online games offer players interactive, immersive simulations of life-like scenarios: think Minecraft or Roblox, where players create their own worlds. Or consider travel and tourism: cutting-edge dream vacations have shifted from five-star luxury hotels to immersive experiences, whether that’s a mindfulness retreat in a medieval monastery or cooking lessons in a Sicilian village. According to Luxury Travel Magazine, cultural immersion has emerged as one of the strongest trends shaping global travel today, with 86% of travelers preferring authentic, hands-on experiences over traditional sightseeing.

For those of us who work in education, the growing premium placed on experience has enormous implications. For example, one early and closely watched model, the Alpha School, integrates experiential learning with personal development. Launched in Austin, Texas, with ambitious plans to expand to a dozen more locations, the school uses adaptive AI to condense core academic learning to two hours a day by providing personalized 1:1 learning, with the goal of accelerating mastery of traditional subjects. This design opens the rest of the day to hands-on, real-world projects as well as life-skills workshops.

A holistic approach, integrating social and emotional learning, makes student wellbeing a vital part of the curriculum. It certainly does not mean abandoning traditional academics, given that core skills, including critical thinking, remain crucial. But it does mean that educators have to be intentional about baking in social learning along with their other efforts, and not just assuming this vital aspect of preparing students to be active learners will take place on its own. Here at Kaplan, my colleague Kate Mishcon has developed a series of resilience-building programmes designed to help learners reduce stress, enhance focus and productivity, improve memory and executive functioning – with the goal of providing them with life-long skills to meet the demands of an ever-changing world. 

Still, it’s one thing to recognize the irreplaceable value of human experience and to design education to stimulate curiosity. It’s quite another to put this into practice with rigor and quality control. If we see education as taking place not in a single institution but in an entire ecosystem, there are multiple new roles and stakeholders to consider: coaches, resilience mentors, experiential curators, and AI curators (to name just a few). How will we know whether their work is adding any value to the student experience?

Trust and accreditation seem certain to be twin emerging needs in our new experience economy. Who will vet Japanese “rent a grandpa” and “rent a grandma”s? Who will vouch for the effectiveness of nontraditional mentors offering personalized experiential guidance? It’s too soon to know whether we’ll find broadly accepted institutional mechanisms to codify quality. With decreasing trust in the value of traditional degrees accredited by experts, evidence-based crowdsourcing may become a viable alternative - think web crawlers that can identify good coders based on their actual raw inputs rather than any credentials they may have earned.

Meeting these needs will no doubt require a lot of trial-and-error before we can identify reliable indicators of quality. After all, they will need to be accepted in an increasingly wide range of settings. Learning, including experiential learning, now happens across borders, disciplines, and generations.

Already, the need for some kind of authentic assessment of student knowledge and their experience-driven habits of mind has led to what New York University vice provost Clay Shirky calls “a return to an older, more relational model of higher education.” In a New York Times guest essay, he says student misuse of AI has not only led to more in-class blue book essays but will also require practices like oral exams, required office hours, “and other assessments that call on students to demonstrate knowledge in real time.”

In other words, even if many can credibly argue that experience has eclipsed old-fashioned factual knowledge as the true mark of power, we still have much educational work ahead of us. Ensuring that learners gain meaningful experience, that it comes from trusted providers, and that it can be validated in the marketplace, will be the next big test for us to pass.