A Praktika white paper for L&D and HR leaders. Evidence base: 125,000 learners, CEFR-aligned longitudinal data. August 2026.
Free, 18 pages. Enter your work email and the PDF downloads straight away.
Language training was never expensive because tutors are overpaid. It was expensive because practice takes hours, and every hour needed a person in it. That constraint has gone: an hour of one-to-one instruction costs $50–120, an hour of AI-delivered speaking practice about $3.
The market has already moved. AI tutoring is growing at 30.5% a year, four times faster than traditional corporate language training, and 87% of L&D teams now use AI in some form. Yet only 9% have scaled it. The experiment is universal; the advantage is still unclaimed.
This white paper sets out what the shift means for a 2027 budget: what a fixed spend buys under each delivery model, why 73% of active learners gain a full CEFR level in roughly 20 hours of AI practice against 80–120 guided classroom hours, and what 15 weeks of measured progression across 125,000 learners in nine languages says about who improves fastest.
What’s inside
- The adoption gap. Where L&D budgets are moving, and what is actually holding teams back.
- The 10× cost shift. Cost per hour, per employee and per CEFR level, with every assumption stated so you can re-run it on your own numbers.
- The evidence. Six findings from 125,000 learners: frequency beats duration, the over-45s progress fastest, and prior education stops predicting progress after nine weeks.
- What to do in 2027. Six decisions to make before the next planning cycle.
Enter your work email and the PDF downloads straight away. 18 pages, free.