This is a great way to finish our main stage presentations. We have the privilege to have the leading learning platform in the world, the founder, Andrew Ng, with us as well as the CEO of Coursera, Greg Hart. Andrew, it's almost impossible for me to believe that Coursera is 15 years old. And I think Lucy combined you and Udemy already because with the number of learners will be on the platform once the acquisition is done, but as of the last quarter, a couple hundred million on the platform. Can you, when you started Coursera, what was your kind of vision? Did you think you'd be at 200 million learners in 15 years or what was different than what you expected when you started the business?
I think when we started Coursera, frankly, I was so naive back then. I thought, how hard could it be? So part of me wonders, you know, put this on the internet, surely there'll be billions of people that use this. I think we're still on that journey to keep on working hard to serve learners every day.
So, and just to give people an update in the room, so obviously the merger was announced with Udemy. What's the status of that and when do you expect that to come together? And then maybe just very quickly, why are you excited about the combination?
Sure. So, we hope that it will come together very soon. We got shareholder approval from both Coursera and Udemy shareholders a little bit more than a week ago. Still going through the regulatory approval process and so hopefully that will wrap up in the near future here. We're very excited to get on with it and really move forward. The things that excite me the most about the combination of Coursera and Udemy are both companies were founded out of a passion for and a mission for education and the power to transform lives through access to education. And over the last year, the companies have both simultaneously and independently really focused on skill delivery as the next stage of evolution. Nine out of 10 learners who come to Coursera are coming to grow their careers, to advance their careers, and they want to do that by gaining skills that are relevant in the workforce. The combination of Coursera, which is a more consumer-focused platform, two-thirds of our revenue comes from our consumer business, and then Udemy, where two-thirds of their revenue comes from their enterprise business, really marries two strong brands with strong platforms and a shared mission and gives us the capacity to invest at a faster pace in better learning and skill delivery experiences. So that's what excites me the most about bringing together the two companies.
So, when you do a ChatGPT query and say who's the top AI person in the world, the name that comes back is Andrew Ng, which is pretty cool. So to have Andrew here, you know, with all the things that AI is doing, it's pretty special. But Andrew, from your standpoint, how is AI, how do you think the integration or the collaboration between AI and education is going? And where are you seeing the ROI, or are you seeing the ROI?
It feels like the integration of AI and education is still in the very early phases. What has rapidly changed, as Greg was alluding, is the skills that all of us should be learning. And so companies like Coursera, DeepLearning.AI, Udemy have been shifting what we deliver to learners in terms of helping them build more relevant skills in this AI era. And then I feel like all of us have this instinct that we can accelerate the delivery of learning, or more importantly, accelerate how much individuals can learn. And I think that's been much tougher. One of the great limiters for how fast people can learn is just the biology of the human brain, right? Our brains can only process so much information so quickly. And so there will be an acceleration. Coursera and others were delivering better learning experiences. But will the human brain ever learn 10 times faster than it does today? I don't know. But certainly what we have to teach people is rapidly changing. And I've been excited about, for example, I think everyone should learn to code. I feel like all job roles should embrace AI skills. I feel like every knowledge worker should be able to use AI to write code, to prompt, to more effective workflows. So that delivery of new sets of skills is really important and that's been moving quickly.
So, and Greg, you've now been with Coursera a little over a year. What is different than what you expected when you came in? And what were you most excited about right now?
Well, I think one difference that we're all feeling, so it's not just true for me in my role, is the pace of what is happening with AI and how it's transforming every potential job out there and therefore what you need to know and the skills you need to develop. And that is a huge opportunity for us at Coursera. You could argue also potentially, and the market perhaps perceives it as somewhat of a threat for us. I'm a huge believer in the opportunity that we have in front of us to rise to that challenge and help people adapt. You know, I mentioned earlier that nine out of 10 learners come to advance their career. There's a huge amount of focus on AI in doing that. We see one enrollment in an AI course on Coursera every 4 seconds. And that number keeps going up.
One enrollment every 4 seconds. Somewhere around the world, somebody is enrolling in a course on AI on Coursera every 4 seconds.
Yeah, a year ago it was half that rate and it's getting faster, not getting slower. So for us, that creates a huge opportunity to make sure that at the same time that we're growing our offering of more and more courses that deliver AI learning, and also doing that not just for general intro learning courses but also for more specialized courses. So we have, obviously, we have courses from Deep Learning from Andrew, we have courses from Anthropic, and those both include general courses but also using Claude to code and more advanced courses. And so for us, we're very focused on how do we continue to evolve the learning experience as well, leveraging AI to deliver more effective outcomes for learners and more effective skill delivery that they can then demonstrate out in the workforce.
And you're kind of saying it, but you know, are the LLMs a friend or are they a foe?
Yes. So the way that I think about the LLMs, you know, it's a very nuanced relationship. Obviously, we have relationships with all of them. We have courses from Anthropic on the platform I just mentioned. We have an integration with ChatGPT. We have an integration with Copilot. We also help OpenAI create content that's on our platform and also available via ChatGPT. So it's a very multifaceted relationship. Also, of course, aside from being a topic that people are learning about, it's also a technology we use to deliver that learning. And so my perspective is that it's actually a fantastic thing for Coursera and for the world that we now have access to a more full source of knowledge than we used to. Having said that, there is no substitute in my opinion for human-centric learning from experts. And so obviously that was how Coursera was founded. It's how everybody in this room got their education. And I believe that in an era where it is easier than ever to create content with AI, the value of trusted content from either our university professors, you know, whether it was Stanford or Yale or Michigan, Penn, etc., or from our industry partners, Google, Anthropic, DeepLearning.AI, Microsoft, Meta, etc., has never been higher. And so I believe that it's up to us to demonstrate how we evolve that experience to take that human-centered learning and add AI to it to make it even more effective.
And so, and you look at, I mean, by the way, this is an issue in education overall. It's certainly been an issue overall for online learning. And Coursera has created amazing access, but like, again, how do you, one of the things is how do you make sure that they complete the course and are they using it to advance their lives? How is AI, what are you doing in creating better engagement and helping the student complete a course and keep on going?
So, much to Coursera's credit, I think shortly after ChatGPT launched, long before I joined, Coursera introduced Coach, which is an AI tutor that rides alongside the learner in every course. So, as the learner's going through a course, they can ask questions to refresh their memory on material that might have been covered earlier in the course. They can do roleplay. They can prep for an upcoming quiz or assessment in the course. Instructors can leverage Course Builder, another AI-driven course creation capability that Coursera introduced a number of years ago, to structure courses and insert AI-driven Socratic dialogue into the course so that the instructor can make sure that the course stays true to the rubric that they're working within and their pedagogical goals that they're trying to deliver on. But also enables a more one-to-one interaction which before AI wouldn't have been possible in an online learning situation. So for us, we're constantly thinking about how do we improve the learning experience to make it more engaging and more effective? And AI is a fantastic tool to help us do that. And one of the things that we're increasingly experimenting with is outside of the course itself, how do you use AI to keep the learner engaged, to remind them about what they've accomplished so far, what lies ahead of them, bring them back, and keep them motivated.
So you both were at the HumanX conference in San Francisco, was it earlier this week or last week? I'm getting blurred. And we certainly have a theme here of this kind of collision between learning and earning and the workforce and education. Again, I think Coursera is positioned really terrifically to be a part of this wave that's taking place. What did you learn there about workforce in adopting AI and how that's applied to the jobs of the future and how that ultimately fits in with the Coursera vision?
So, you know, one thing we chat a lot about, HumanX, is the question of ROI from AI. Over the last year, a lot of businesses have let a thousand flowers bloom, bottom-up innovation spread, and that's great. We should absolutely keep on doing that. But the ROI from a lot of this bottom-up innovation is just not there yet. And I have a strong point of view on why this is the case and the important role that training has to play in resolving this. It turns out that most bottom-up innovation results in point solutions. A business often does multiple things to create value. A lot of bottom-up innovation will have someone identify one step of a process and automate it and make it a little bit more efficient and save some money. But this gives you incremental efficiency gains which is nice but not transformative. The challenge I see when I speak with a lot of C-suite from Fortune 500 is it takes a top-down motion, some of the broader scope to look at all the steps to decide with this step optimized, I'm going to redesign this whole workflow and that drives business growth. Maybe one tiny example from edtech is years ago we started auto-grading and if you swap out a human grader for an AI grader, that's nice, it saves a little bit of labor, we should absolutely do that. But the thing that's maybe more transformative is you can say, oh, with AI grading, I can now get back to the learner in five minutes rather than a week. That gives you more opportunities to change the learning experience. So I think we're still in the very early stages of educating across many businesses entire teams to enable more bottom-up innovation but then also delivering that executive-level education so that bottom-up innovation or top-down innovation can meet and someone can say, oh, if you can redesign this part of the workflow, let's change the way we do business to drive business growth. And I think this is one of the reasons why it feels like there's almost unlimited demand for learning these new AI tools both from businesses and from individuals. And I think we're all eager to serve that to help drive that ROI from AI.
