Challenge 11.6

How can technology reduce teacher workload?

Challenge Sponsor: Scottish Government, Directorate for Learning

Zimplex.AI

Our tool, Guru, frees up teachers' time by automating the repetitive work outside lessons. It turns finding, formatting, and acting on data into single clicks.

Four steps:

Store: organise data from spreadsheets, documents, and live websites
Search: free, unlimited natural-language searches
Action: turn results into the next step
Automate: repeated patterns become one click, with teacher approval

Searches don't use AI on every query, so costs stay predictable. AI instead works in the background, deepening Guru's curated knowledge base.

Zimplex.AI responded to CivTech Challenge 11.6

The Opportunity

A workload avalanche is coming with Scotland's new curriculum in 2028. Guru is the tool teachers in Scotland and elsewhere need to handle the multiple sources of data to automate much of the repetitive work that comes with their current and future curriculum planning.

Next Steps

Guru launches in summer 2026, available directly to teachers, starting in Scotland and scaling across the UK and beyond. We're keen to start conversations with education leaders, public-sector and industry teams who see the same pattern of fragmented data and repetitive work in their own context.

The Team

Guru’s team combines experience in schools, with enterprise cloud architecture and product design. Kamran has taught maths in Scotland, England and internationally. Falak (CTO) is a cloud architect with experience across EdTech, FinTech and Defence. Ibrahim (Product Designer) has worked across EdTech and FinTech.