From July 19 to 25, 2026, the 21st YMCA World Council was held in Toronto, Canada. As the highest-level gathering within the global YMCA movement, the World Council convenes every four years and serves as a platform for strategic decision-making, international exchange, and dialogue on key social issues.
Founded in London in 1844, YMCA is one of the world’s oldest and largest youth organizations, with operations spanning 120 countries and more than 12,000 communities, serving over 65 million people annually. This year’s Council, themed “Transform,” brought together approximately 1,300 delegates from around the world, including YMCA leaders, staff, volunteers, and partner organizations. In his opening remarks, YMCA Secretary General Carlos Sanvee emphasized that the world is undergoing profound change and that YMCA must lead transformation from within.
Amid this global dialogue on transformation, Squirrel Ai Learning’s Intelligent Teacher officially entered into a global strategic partnership with YMCA, becoming a Global Impact Partner. The partnership marks the integration of Squirrel Ai Learning’s AI capabilities with YMCA’s global community network.
Derek Li, Founder and Chairman of Squirrel Ai Learning, was invited to attend and delivered a keynote speech at the session “Solutions Studios Plenary 1: Understanding the Shift.” He shared with global youth development leaders how artificial intelligence can enable every child to access world-class teaching through scalable, technology-driven solutions.
A Simple Beginning: Bringing World-Class Teaching to Every Child
Derek Li’s father was a nationally recognized “Master Teacher” who transformed the trajectory of his students, guiding those once ranked in the lower tiers of their class to achieve top provincial scores in China’s highly competitive college entrance examination and gain admission to leading universities. While such educators can profoundly impact individual lives, the number of students a single master teacher can reach over a lifetime remains inherently limited. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of children worldwide continue to lack access to high-quality education, and the supply of top-tier teachers can never fully meet this demand.
It was this conviction around educational equity that led Derek Li to found Squirrel Ai Learning. Today, more than 43 million students globally have engaged with the company’s multimodal adaptive learning large model.
In parallel, Derek Li currently serves as Chair of the IEEE Working Group on AI Large Model Agents for Education. The group brings together leading experts across AI and education, including Tom Mitchell, former Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University; Bart Selman, former President of AAAI; Carles Sierra, President of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence; Chris Dede, Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education; and Stephen Ciesinski, former President of SRI International. It also includes chief scientists and chief learning officers from leading global education organizations such as Pearson, ETS, and Khan Academy. This marks the first time a Chinese company has taken a leading role in shaping international top-level standards for AI in education, positioning Squirrel Ai Learning as a co-creator of global industry frameworks.
Over the past decade, Squirrel Ai Learning has conducted more than one hundred comparative studies between human teaching and AI-driven instruction. Across these evaluations, results consistently indicate that the Squirrel Ai Intelligent Teacher delivers learning outcomes that surpass those of top-tier human educators.
From “Unable to Learn” to “Able to Learn”: How AI Redefines the Starting Point of Learning
In traditional classrooms, when a student struggles with a particular concept, the typical response is to reteach the same material and assign additional practice. However, if the student continues to struggle, the root cause often lies not in the concept itself.
In his speech, Derek Li shared the case of Qingqing, a sixth-grade student diagnosed with osteogenesis imperfecta, who had been unable to attend school for extended periods. Over six years of continuous learning with Squirrel Ai Learning, her total exam score improved from just over 200 points to 621, ultimately earning admission to a top university in China.
Li explained that when Qingqing first began using Squirrel Ai Learning’s multimodal adaptive learning large model, she scored only 20 points on questions related to the volume of a cone. Through diagnostic analysis, the system identified that her difficulty did not stem from the cone volume calculation itself, but from gaps in foundational knowledge, including basic concepts of volume, area formulas, and decimal operations. Repeatedly reteaching the same topic would not have resolved the issue.
By tracing these prerequisite knowledge gaps, the system was able to design a structured and personalized learning pathway. Through targeted intervention and continuous feedback, Qingqing steadily improved her performance and ultimately achieved a significant academic breakthrough.
Notably, according to third-party assessments by organizations such as Frost & Sullivan and IDC, Squirrel Ai Learning’s multimodal adaptive learning large model is currently the only system globally to reach L5-level capability, comparable to full autonomous driving. This enables a fully closed-loop process from diagnosis to instruction and feedback, without the need for human intervention.
Measurable Impact: Evidence of Learning Outcomes Across Diverse Contexts
Qingqing’s case demonstrates that Squirrel Ai Learning’s multimodal adaptive learning large model has developed a scalable and replicable instructional capability. This enables students to achieve consistent learning outcomes without reliance on specific teachers, schools, or learning environments.
Notably, Squirrel Ai Learning launched a public welfare initiative in Baishaping Primary School, located in a nationally designated impoverished county. The school faced severe shortages of qualified teaching staff, with frequent turnover of math teachers and, at times, classes taught by instructors from unrelated disciplines such as physical education and music. As a result, students’ average math scores had long remained below 50.
As featured on China Central Television’s program Super Brain, after just one month of learning with Squirrel Ai Learning’s multimodal adaptive system, students’ average scores increased from 56 to 89, an improvement of 33 points.
In another controlled study conducted at Wenyuan High School in Liaocheng, Shandong Province, 84 first-year high school students across two classes were selected as the experimental group and received instruction using Squirrel Ai Learning’s system, while 198 students across four classes served as the control group under traditional teaching methods. Midterm exam results showed that the experimental group achieved an average score of 104.7 in the sections supported by the AI system, compared to 73.55 in sections without it, a difference of 31.2 points out of a total score of 120. The findings were later published in China Educational Informatization, a journal under the Ministry of Education.
Despite originating from different regions and student populations, these results point to a consistent conclusion: when an educational AI model can deliver verifiable outcomes across highly varied environments, it reflects the emergence of a stable and scalable instructional capability. This also underlies Squirrel Ai Learning’s recognition as one of TIME100 Most Influential Companies of 2026, with TIME noting that the company is “bringing personalized tutoring to a global scale.”
A Global Collaboration for Educational Equity
Educational equity has always been at the core of Squirrel Ai Learning’s product philosophy. Over the past decade, the company’s multimodal adaptive learning large model has enabled more than 43 million students to access high-quality educational resources, spanning from major metropolitan areas to remote rural regions.
At the same time, Squirrel Ai Learning’s global expansion is accelerating. In 2026, the company officially launched large-scale commercial operations in the United States and introduced a fully English-language teaching engine and localized curriculum products aligned with North American standards. Unlike many technology companies expanding internationally, Squirrel Ai Learning’s globalization strategy is built on preserving its core curriculum system and teaching methodology while deeply adapting to local cultural and linguistic contexts.
While technology can address questions of what to teach and how to teach, it cannot by itself reach every child in need. This requires a broad and deeply embedded distribution network. As one of the world’s largest youth-serving organizations, YMCA operates in more than 10,000 communities globally and has long been committed to supporting education and youth development in underserved areas.
The convergence of Squirrel Ai Learning’s technological capabilities and YMCA’s community network is rooted in a shared mission: ensuring equal access to learning opportunities for every child.
In this context, Derek Li outlined a global collaboration plan during his speech: providing free full-version access to Squirrel Ai Learning’s adaptive learning system for children in the lowest 20% income households worldwide, with over 10 million free public-benefit accounts already deployed. In addition, all YMCA partner centers will be equipped to implement Squirrel Ai Learning’s after-school enrichment programs, leveraging its cross-generational technological advantages to deliver higher-quality educational support to families in local communities.
True transformation is not simply the upgrading of tools, but the redistribution of opportunity. When students in remote villages and urban centers learn through the same multimodal adaptive learning system, each progressing along their optimal learning path, and when geography and socioeconomic background no longer define a child’s ceiling, this represents the deepest contribution of technology to educational equity.
The collaboration between Squirrel Ai Learning and YMCA is actively embedding this possibility into more than 10,000 communities worldwide, turning it into a tangible reality for millions of children.
