NortonAI is a new feature in select Norton Illumine ebooks for Fall 2026. NortonAI boosts student engagement and understanding with personalized, self-directed practice and reading support—grounded in your textbook’s trusted content.
Features like Smart Highlight rephrase complex ideas or provide helpful examples, and on-demand questions allow students to work through important concepts in a private practice environment. With NortonAI, students stay focused, supported, and connected to the content that matters most.
Learn more about the titles featuring NortonAI
How to Enable/Disable NortonAI
If NortonAI is enabled for a Norton Illumine ebook, you can manage the instructor settings directly from the account menu in the top righthand corner of Norton Illumine.
When you open the NortonAI settings, you can turn off the feature for all students in your student sets by selecting “Disable NortonAI.”
If you choose to disable NortonAI and select “Save,” the NortonAI setting will be labelled “Off” in your account menu. You and your students will no longer see NortonAI as an option in the Norton Illumine toolbar. At any time, you can also go back to the account menu and reenable NortonAI for your students.
Can instructors assign NortonAI for points? Can they see how students are performing on these the practice questions?
No, NortonAI is meant to be a self-study tool for students to engage with the material without the pressure of assessment or observation. Therefore, it is not assignable for points, and there is no way to monitor students’ engagement with the feature. However, if you would like to make students accountable for engaging with the textbook and to gain valuable insights into that engagement, then Norton Illumine provides a wealth of options. The rest of Norton Illumine is assignable for a completion grade and the NEW ebook Analytics Dashboard shows instructors how long students are spending in the ebook, which Check Your Understanding questions they struggle with, how long they spend on each interactive, and more! To access those analytics, click the “Ebook Analytics” button in the Norton Illumine tile.
Can instructors edit NortonAI practice questions?
No, these questions are personalized to each student and are not editable by the instructor.
Which large language model (LLM) powers NortonAI?
To build NortonAI, Norton used multiple models from AWS Bedrock's LLM Service, which allows us to utilize a wide array of foundation models. Not being tied to one model gives NortonAI flexibility, allowing us to continuously improve the feature in response to student and instructor needs. NortonAI currently uses Anthropic's latest Claude models, but that may change over time.
What guardrails are in place to protect students’ privacy when they use NortonAI?
NortonAI is designed so that no personally identifiable information (PII) about students is shared when they use the feature within Norton Illumine. Our systems are built to keep student data secure and confidential, ensuring their privacy is protected throughout their experience.
What efforts has Norton taken to mitigate the environmental impact of NortonAI?
At Norton, we take our environmental responsibilities seriously. NortonAI is intentionally designed to limit computational power with limited student interactions and a dynamic, cloud-based database service that streamlines data processing and dynamically adjusts computing power to demand. As a result, each session with NortonAI consumes only a fraction of the energy and resources required by a comparable session with a commercially available large language model.
How does NortonAI attempt to avoid providing distracting or incorrect information?
NortonAI is a walled garden, meaning that it is trained to pull concepts and vocabulary only from the text of the ebook file. This means that the Smart Highlight results and Practice Questions are designed not to produce any topics that are outside the level, scope, and academic context of students’ exact textbook.