Empowering Dual Teacher Classrooms in Vocational Education with Intelligent Agents: Challenges and Coping Strategies

Discussions of intelligent agents in vocational education often hastily equate tool access with overall teaching efficiency, which is not supported by this study’s interview data. The practical adoption of intelligent agents is explored in technical and vocational education and training dual-teacher classrooms from four stakeholders, including dual teachers, industry experts, students and administrators. The analysis differentiates streamlined routine tasks from new burdens arising from content validation, technical interpretation and risk assessment. Specifically, fifteen semi-structured interviews are conducted across secondary and higher vocational institutions. Firstly, all interviews are recorded and transcribed in Chinese. AI-assisted English translations of these transcripts form the primary coding corpus. The key citations are cross-referenced against the original Chinese transcripts. Besides, the constraints–mechanisms–enablers–outcomes (CMEO) framework is generated through the iterative thematic coding via NVivo 14. The results demonstrate that the respondents acknowledged limited efficiency gains only in repetitive tasks, such as material drafting and error screening. Nevertheless, intelligent agents created additional workloads, where practitioners have to verify technical accuracy and adapt artificial intelligence (AI) outputs to local training equipment and safety standards with special AI content interpretation for students. Within high-risk workshop training environments, AI outputs are only permissible when teachers and experts hold final decision-making power. Therefore, this study redefines AI teaching efficiency as bounded and multi-stakeholder professional judgment, rather than a neutral and universally applicable indicator. The constructed CMEO framework extends existing single-perspective AI education research and provides targeted institutional governance strategies for local vocational digital teaching reform.