The 2026 Kids AI Summit — South Korea’s first child- and youth-led global AI conference — was held Saturday at the Incheon Metropolitan Office of Education’s AI Convergence Education Center, drawing about 250 students and education professionals from South Korea, Hong Kong and elsewhere.
Kids AI Summit spotlights student-led discussion on AI and learning
The event departed from conventional one-way lectures by AI experts, positioning elementary, middle and high school students as active participants rather than passive users. Students, parents and educators exchanged ideas on AI’s future, reflected on the skills needed in an AI-driven era and discussed how education should adapt.
Kim Sung-yun, CEO of iPortfolio Reading&, delivered the keynote titled “The Most Important Education in the Age of AI,” outlining how AI is reshaping human thinking and learning and what capabilities future talent will need. “The more AI handles finding, summarizing and generating information, the more humans need the ability to read, think, question and express their own ideas — not merely absorb information passively,” Kim said.
Kim argued that English education must move beyond simple score improvement to build competencies for global citizenship, enabling learners to understand diverse cultures and communicate across them. He also presented a Reading& learning model that connects reading, critical thinking and expression in AI-era education and illustrated it with the company’s AI-based English education cases.
New AI-driven education tools introduced at the summit included the LISA™ Growth Report, which analyzes student progress data throughout the learning process without separate testing, and Harmony Hills, a program designed to expose students to diverse cultures and perspectives.
Special lectures were delivered by Sean McMinn of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology on AI and human agency, and by Jason Kiper, a professor at George Mason University Korea, on learning and autonomy in the AI age.
The summit was co-hosted by Unione Communications and the Hong Kong Smart City Consortium, organized by UCG Playground, and supported by the Incheon Metropolitan Office of Education and the Korea Tourism Organization.
