Over a bright couple of days at the end of March, members of the CORE community from as far afield as Honduras, Indonesia and Kazakhstan convened for a series of sessions about the future of economics and inequality education, and to ask what teaching economics looks like in the age of generative AI.
The 2026 CORE workshop was hosted by Loughborough University on March 30 and 31. A huge amount of ground was covered. Below, we have selected a small number of highlights, particularly around the challenges economics education faces from AI. Much more was discussed at the workshop, so please do get in touch if you’re interested in a particular set of slides or a session recording.
Tamo’s zero-cost AI assistant to help students read and comprehend
Tamo Halder (Azim Premji University) opened his session with a critical question: who can afford to learn? One-to-one tutoring is too expensive for many students and to succeed, they need to become independent and confident readers. Generative AI could, in theory, democratise expert-level clarification. If access depends on corporate APIs and paid subscriptions, however, this promise may not come to pass.
Tamo set out to build a zero-cost AI assistant for economics students, built around CORE’s The Economy 2.0, . Tamo’s AI assistant gives students guided contextual assistance in reading and deliberately sequences the interaction so the student does the reasoning first. AI is only introduced to clarify, classify queries (factual, contextual, or language-based) and refuse out-of-scope questions. Built on freely available models, it runs at near-zero cost per session. Student trials begin in July.
See Tamo’s interview with the Stone Centre at UCL for more details.
Mapping the “jagged frontier” of LLM competence
Georg von Graevenitz (Queen Mary University of London) presented the CORE LLM project, which begins from the premise that open-ended assessments are pedagogically valuable but vulnerable to LLMs, and employers want graduates who can use large language models well. Banning students from using them is counterproductive . Georg’s team is mapping the “jagged frontier” of LLM competence, the zones where models are reliable, where humans hold an advantage, and where the two overlap or fall short. They ran eight random multiple-choice questions from each unit of CORE’s The Economy 2.0: Microeconomics through Claude 4.6 Sonnet, Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview, GPT 5.4 nano and GPT 5.4 pro, finding wide variation in performance between models. One implication: if expensive models substantially outperform cheaper ones, new fault lines of AI inequality could emerge. The research project will investigate how to use the findings from assessing AI competences to guide instructors in developing exercises that teach economics and the informed use of LLMs.
Echoing this point while presenting on CORE’s Doing Economics, Ralf Becker (University of Manchester) highlighted that students will increasingly read and submit code that AI has written and will remain accountable for their submissions. Critical reading and modular code design stand to become essential parts of the curriculum.
Coworking with Claude: How AI is transforming textbook and exercise creation
Simon Halliday (Johns Hopkins) demonstrated his reorganised authorship workflow, using Claude’s Cowork mode, and reusable Claude Skills. He demonstrated a multiple choice question generator and reviewer Skill, and a rubric-based self-evaluation loop in which Claude scores its own outputs against criteria set by Simon. Static figures from CORE’s The Economy, including Karim’s feasible frontier figure from Unit 3.4, were turned into interactive HTML graphs students can manipulate. At the scale of a textbook with many chapters, AI also helps surface what a single author cannot easily track: persistent themes and consistency across the whole book. Simon closed his session by emphasising that institutions which are the most “AI forward” will be the ones to produce the best outputs.
AI and the future of the economics undergraduate degree
Christian Spielman’s analysis of US occupations highlighted that AI exposure is high for economics graduates, and complementarity is not automatic. In other words, roles traditionally taken by undergraduates are at risk. Skill demand is shifting toward customer-facing and “soft” skills at undergraduate level, while financial-analysis and statistical-software skills are migrating towards master’s-level roles.
Parama Chaudhury (UCL) surveyed employer practice and university policy, observing a fragmented response in which only a minority of institutions are adapting, and made the case for a “traffic light” system signalling where AI use is permitted, encouraged, or off-limits. Alvin Birdi’s pitch was for an inquiry-led, “minimalistic” pedagogy that creates narrative gaps to hook student curiosity for which, he argued, CORE’s modular textbook structure is well-suited.
Read more about Parama’s research in the Stone Centre at UCL’s write up of their AI and Economics workshop.
The pedagogy behind Understanding our Economy (UoE)
UoE is CORE’s forthcoming foundation textbook, designed for students with limited prior economics experience, a particularly visible gap in the US and, as Annika Johnson (University of Bristol) argued, the bridge between A-level and undergraduate study in the UK. Annika explained how, compared with The Economy, UoE strips out best-response functions and calculus, and introduces ideas through simpler visuals and more accessible language. Fellow UoE author Eric Bottorff (Oakton College) showed how Chapter 10 reframes labour-market matching around social norms, stereotypes, and the long-running income consequences of layoffs, using diagrams that are deliberately less mathematical than their counterparts in The Economy.
Anastasia Papadopoulou (University of Bristol), another of our UoE authors, presented a re-imagined “bathtub” model (see The Economy 2.0: Microeconomics Unit 9.2) with colour-coding to help students track calculations from diagrams into equations. UoE aims to help students with less maths background to develop understanding without getting bogged down in the algebra.
Keep up to date on Understanding our Economy
We look forward to sharing more about UoE with you later this year. To be the first to know, be sure to follow CORE on social media (Bluesky, LinkedIn) and subscribe to our newsletter via the My Account area of the CORE website.
Contact us for more information
We are grateful to the speakers and attendees who joined us, and to our colleagues at Loughborough University for their support in putting on the CORE workshop. If you would like to find out more about any aspect of the workshop please do get in touch. Lecture slides and session recordings are available by request.
