Conversations around inclusive education are evolving in India, but there remains a long way to go. Our country is home to more than 35 million children with special needs, but fewer than one percent have access to educators or institutions with appropriate training. With limited infrastructure to support students for inclusive education, AI could offer a way to adapt the pedagogical process for children with special needs in school.

This is the principal of Cognitii, founded by Falguni Shrivastava, Jhillika Trisul, and Souvik Ghosh in 2024. This AI-powered ed-tech platform addresses barriers to inclusion in the school system for children with special needs, combining artificial intelligence with human-centered design to not only screen children for ADHD, autism, dyslexia, and other intellectual disabilities, but also provide appropriate classroom strategies and trace student performance over time. 

Operating primarily from Gurgaon and Hyderabad, Cognitii offers schools and government stakeholders a scalable, technology-enabled solution that helps teachers more effectively support students with special needs.

Why does India’s education sector need something like this? 

Falguni notes that the country has only approximately 120,000 trained special educators — a ratio of roughly one educator for every 290 children — and of these, many come from clinical psychology rather than education backgrounds, indicating more training in therapy than in pedagogy.

Special educators note that this distinction is significant. Diagnosing a child’s condition and teaching them effectively are fundamentally different roles. While psychologists focus on assessment and therapy, educators must develop classroom strategies that help students learn, build independence, and navigate everyday environments. Yet many teachers in India have limited exposure to the specialised pedagogical tools required to support neurodiverse learners.

The shortage is further compounded by the geographic concentration of trained professionals in metropolitan regions, leaving Tier II and Tier III cities underserved. Existing interventions are often prohibitively expensive or inaccessible. 

At the same time, special education workflows remain largely manual, relying on paper-based documentation, which tends to prolong assessment cycles. The development of an Individualized Education Program (IEP), which Falguni highlights is a cornerstone of special education practice, typically takes six to eight months and requires collaboration between educators, therapists, and caregivers. This creates a significant administrative burden and delays timely intervention.

How Cognitii tackles this roadblock 

Cognitii’s core innovation lies in building an AI–human interface that digitizes and automates support for special-needs students across three integrated layers.

The first layer is an AI-driven early screening proxy. Children undergo an onboarding assessment through interactive games and structured prompts delivered via a mobile application. These assessments are supplemented with structured inputs from parents and educators. Using classical machine learning models and artificial intelligence techniques, the system generates a cognitive profile for each child, mapping strengths, weaknesses, and preferred learning styles. This profile can then be tracked to identify interventions to boost learning for the student.

The second layer focuses on personalized curriculum delivery. Based on the cognitive profile, the platform automatically generates learning objectives and recommends a customized learning pathway. 

The curriculum spans academic skills (literacy and numeracy), social-emotional development, and functional life skills. The app delivers content through gamified modules, which adapt in real time based on the child’s engagement and performance. Each component of the app’s UI, from its color scheme to its fonts, is designed to be as appealing as possible. As the child demonstrates improvement — for instance, in number recognition or language comprehension — the AI recalibrates lesson plans dynamically. Throughout, parents can access a dashboard that tracks analytics such as their child’s usage patterns, time spent, and developmental progress.

Neelanjasa Mukherjee, a special educator based in the UK, played an instrumental hand in designing these learning experiences. She notes that teaching neurodiverse learners relies heavily on visual supports, structured routines, and personalised strategies; elements that differ significantly from mainstream classrooms. 

Even seemingly small factors such as colour schemes, sound levels, fonts, and visual layouts can influence how comfortably a child interacts with a learning interface. For some students who are sensitive to sound, for example, having the option to disable audio cues can make the learning environment far more accessible.

The third layer is an AI copilot for educators. Through a web-based dashboard, teachers can automate IEP generation, lesson planning, and outcome reporting. Educators put in baseline learning objectives and contextual history; the AI synthesizes these inputs with student performance data from the app to generate structured lesson plans and measurable goals. Early pilots indicate that planning timelines have reduced from several months to approximately two weeks. This compression of administrative cycles enables educators to redirect time toward direct, one-on-one engagement with students. Government dashboards further enable aggregated outcome tracking, making it easier to draw upon empirical data for future policymaking.

Neelanjasa says that for teachers, this shift can be significant. In special education classrooms, educators often spend extensive time tailoring lesson plans, visual supports, and behavioural strategies for each student. By automating parts of this process, AI tools can allow teachers to focus more on direct interaction and instruction rather than administrative documentation.

Where the impact lies

The platform is currently live across five schools — four in Hyderabad and one in Delhi — reaching 643 learners through screening and app-based engagement. Cognitii is actively engaging with the Government of Kerala for deployment across special schools and with the Government of Telangana to build a large-scale data exchange framework focused on disability prevalence and inclusive education outcomes. These partnerships are designed to shift inclusive education from policy intent to measurable implementation. According to a report on the AI Impact Summit of 2026, Cognitii can reduce the time taken to develop IEPs by up to 90%. The app is currently working with the Indian Council of Medical Research to clinically validate the results of usage.

Falguni says that a challenge Cognitii faces is that it works within a data-scarce domain. Limited structured datasets on special education mean that there is room for more efficient AI-driven personalization. Addressing this gap through institutional data partnerships and public-sector collaboration is crucial in order to scale impact.

Additionally, awareness remains a significant challenge, adds Neelanjasa. Even among urban and well-educated communities, understanding of neurodiversity is often limited, with conditions such as autism frequently reduced to narrow stereotypes. Autism and other developmental conditions exist across a broad spectrum, and students may demonstrate widely varying abilities and learning needs. Increasing awareness will be critical to ensuring inclusive education policies translate into real classroom outcomes.

A model blueprint for inclusive education 

The venture has received multiple recognitions, including the Unlock Her Future Prize by the Bicester Collection, in partnership with Oxford University’s Saïd Business School and Ashoka University. It also won the Jury Prize under HEC Paris’s WomenEntrepreneurs4Good program, was awarded second place at the Social Shifters x Fitch Group Global Education Challenge 2025, and is recognized under Emergent Ventures and Startup India.

Through its use of AI-enabled cognitive profiling, adaptive learning systems, and automated educator workflows to support students with learning disabilities, Cognitii demonstrates how frontier technology can counter inequities in the mainstream education system. Its model is one that can be scaled to improve inclusive education infrastructure, train more effective special educators, and more rapidly identify pedagogical interventions across India. This is in alignment with the principles of the NEP 2020 and Samagra Shiksha and, on a broader level, the UN’s SDG-4 (Quality Education for all). Further aid from both the government and the private sector could allow millions more special-needs children to participate and thrive in classroom spaces.