How AI is Transforming Assessment - and Why We’re Just Getting Started

By Sam Sawyer, CEO of Accelerate People

On the day of the launch of Accelerate People’s first external platform, AP Gateway, I thought it timely to talk about my own tech development journey, and how I’ve come to understand the use of technology will only grow in importance as we head into a reformed assessment world

When we launched Accelerate People back in 2019, I never could have imagined that just a few hours later, the first COVID-19 lockdown would be announced. Talk about timing. But even in that moment of uncertainty, we had a clear mission: to modernise how apprenticeship assessments are delivered, starting with digital apprenticeships, where the need for innovation was most obvious.

Prior to founding Accelerate People, I led an Ofsted Outstanding training provider, so I knew the challenges of teaching, learning, and assessment from the inside out. I saw the pressures providers were under, the inefficiencies they battled, and the opportunities they were missing by sticking with traditional models. Setting up an end-point assessment Organisation (EPAO) felt like the natural next step. We had a chance to think differently, build for the future, and use technology to fix things that just didn’t work anymore.

But for our first few years, we weren’t exactly swimming in automation. Quite the opposite. Our assessors and back-office team were building and tracking everything in spreadsheets. It worked - but not efficiently and it was clear this wasn’t scalable, and certainly not sustainable if we wanted to grow while improving quality.

Then generative AI came along, and everything changed.

Blenheim Chalcot, our investor, immediately recognised the potential. They encouraged all businesses in the portfolio - including us - to explore what GenAI could offer. Not as a gimmick, but as a strategic tool. We knew that if we could use this technology properly, we could unlock enormous efficiencies, elevate quality, and offer a genuinely better experience for providers, learners, and assessors.

So, we got to work. We brought in AI architects and engineers and scoped out what a full tech-enabled EPAO could look like. Not just a few tools bolted onto our existing processes, but a business-wide transformation - from operations and compliance to the assessments themselves.

The first result was AP Comply - our complete platform for scheduling, compliance, and operational oversight. It replaced endless manual processes with streamlined, intelligent systems. It didn’t just make us faster; it made us more accurate, more transparent, and more responsive.

But we didn’t stop there. We turned our attention to assessment itself. How could AI amplify - not replace - the expertise of our assessors? That’s how we built AP Assess. It supports holistic assessment by combining human judgment with AI-powered analysis and recommendations. Our assessors are still very much in control, but they’re supported by a digital assistant that brings consistency, rigour, and speed to the process.

Now, we’re going even further.

This month, we’re launching our first external platform, AP Gateway. It’s designed for providers to register learners, monitor their progress, and dive into deep data analytics about performance. We believe this kind of transparency and insight has been missing from the system for far too long - and we’re offering it to all our customers for free.

AP Gateway is transformational. It puts powerful data tools into the hands of providers who’ve often had to rely on siloed, manual reporting. It helps everyone involved in the apprenticeship journey see what’s happening in real time: what’s working, what’s not, and where the real learning gaps are.

And we’re just getting started.

Innovation is part of our DNA at Accelerate People. We’re not interested in building a slightly better version of the old model. We’re here to build what comes next.

With apprenticeship assessment reform now underway, I believe more than ever that technology will play a central role in shaping the future. In fact, I think it will answer questions we haven’t even asked yet. From adaptive assessments to personalised learner feedback and real-time moderation, the possibilities are enormous. And we intend to stay at the forefront of it.

Tech alone isn’t the answer, of course. You still need people who care, who understand the context, who know what quality looks like. But with the right tools, those people can do extraordinary things. They can focus on the parts of assessment that really matter -judgment, insight, support - while the tech takes care of everything else.

That’s the vision behind everything we’re building at Accelerate People. AI isn’t a shortcut. It’s a tool to help us do our jobs better, fairer, and at a scale that matches the ambition of the assessment sector.

We’ll never stop pushing for what’s possible, and I’ll continue to engage with anyone who’ll listen about how tech can make us better. And we’ll never stop believing that the future of assessment will be built not on paperwork and process - but on innovation, intelligence, and trust.