October 25, 2025, Moscow: On October 24, the IX conference “More than Learning” was held on the campus of Sberbank University, dedicated to the topic “Homo cogitans: a step into a new stage of human evolution.” This year’s event has acquired an international scale and brought together more than 50 speakers from Russia, China, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, Canada and the United Kingdom.
The conference was opened by German Gref, together with neurophysiologist Alexander Kaplan and learning expert Nick Shackleton-Jones, they discussed fundamental changes in human thinking in the age of AI.
German Gref, CEO and Chairman of the Executive Board, Sberbank:
“Artificial intelligence is becoming a new participant in our lives. It helps people to master more and more fields of knowledge and activity, doing it faster and more accurately.
This requires rethinking approaches to education: the pace of technology development is outpacing the readiness of institutions, and it is important not to limit, but to intelligently integrate AI into the learning process in order to prepare a thinking person – Homo cogitans – for life in a new technological reality”.
This year, the conference program has been expanded. There are new tracks: “Continuing education” and “Higher Education”. The latter was organized jointly with National Research Technological University MISIS and was dedicated to the role of universities in developing students’ cognitive potential in the era of artificial intelligence.
German Gref, CEO and Chairman of the Executive Board, Sberbank:
“The use of AI in education is one of the most promising areas. Dozens of experiments are being conducted today, and artificial intelligence is already at the core of the entire Sber education ecosystem. And the key competence for an employee is the ability to work with artificial intelligence”.
The panel discussion was attended by Dmitry Livanov (Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology), Irina Martusevich (National Research University Higher School of Economics ), Ilya Obabkov (Ural Federal University) and Daud Mamiy (Adygea State University), who discussed which competencies — critical thinking, social intelligence and the ability to solve problems without ready-made algorithms — will preserve the competitive advantage of humans in the AI world.
Artyom Soloveitchik, Director of Sberbank’s Education Industry Center, took part in the track “Development of Organizations”. The speakers from School 21, Foxford, Netology, and other experts participated in studio inclusions and parallel discussions.
“More Than Learning” is one of the largest educational conferences in Russia, bringing together business, science, and technology leaders to discuss the future of learning in the era of artificial intelligence.