HumanX 2026: Coursera CEO Greg Hart on the Future of AI in Learning

Thank you very much, Ashley. Great to be here.

Absolutely. So, AI is really interesting because it's all the number one thing that people want to learn on Coursera right now. We're seeing one enrollment in an AI course every 4 seconds around the world right now. But it's also a tool that we can use to help them learn AI or any topic. And so shortly after ChatGPT launched back in November of 2022, Coursera introduced a number of AI features to improve the learning experience. So we have Coach, which is an AI tutor that rides alongside the learner in every single course on Coursera. So if you're going through a course, you can ask Coach questions. You can refresh your memory on material that might have been covered earlier. You can help prep for an upcoming quiz or test that you have in the course. And you can also role play with Coach. And so it's this, you know, really interesting dynamic experience that improves the learning experience. We also use AI, you know, of course in relatively standard ways with translations and things like that. More recently, we've started doing AI dubbing where we will take a course that's originally, you know, done in English by an instructor and we will translate that through dubbing into French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, etc. And we're doing it in such a way that the instructor's lips, you know, now look like they're speaking German natively. So it sounds, you know, exactly like it should in German and also looks like it should. And then finally one of the things that we do is we enable instructors or universities or enterprises to use Course Builder, which is an AI-driven tool that helps people create courses on Coursera or for enterprises create customized learning paths for their employees where they can marry content from Coursera with content that they've developed within their enterprise, you know, for a given employee.

I really think it's here to amplify it. I think there's a role for AI to play in a lot of different ways that are hard for humans to do 100% of the time. I mean, one of the great things about AI is it's always working. It's there 24/7 wherever you are. It's accessible through your phone, etc. And so you can access Coach on Coursera even though you can't actually directly access the professor, but Coach is trained in all of the material that the professor created for that class. And so it's true to the pedagogical goals that the instructor has and it also is following whatever rubric they've set up for their course. And so it's very true to their original spirit of what they're doing. So it's a great amplification of the instructor.

Well, when it launched in 2012, so we were founded by two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, AI professors at Stanford, and they thought what would happen if we took our courses and made them available to the world. And so that was sort of the birth of the MOOC movement. And then they founded Coursera out of that. And then of course COVID and the pandemic were a huge tailwind for lots of different online experiences. Learning being a central one. I would say one of the primary ways that we have evolved over time is we started, you know, really coming out of universities. Over time we augmented all of the fantastic content that we have from top universities around the world with fantastic technical job-focused content from some of the leading technology companies in the world. So we have a huge range of courses from Google, from Microsoft, from Meta, from AWS, from Anthropic, we have a few, you know, AI-specific courses on the platform. And so we have this blend of, you know, academic courses from top universities with very job-focused, very technology-focused courses from the top leading technology companies in the world.

So, as I mentioned briefly, every 4 seconds somebody signs up for an AI course on Coursera. So, incredible rate of interest and that's more than doubled year-over-year. So, it keeps going up. Some of the things that are most popular, we've got, you know, Google AI Foundations, Google AI Pro Certificate that just recently launched on Coursera. Andrew Ng, our co-founder, is also still an instructor and a teacher and so he's got a company, DeepLearning.AI, that has a number of courses on AI. We have AI for Everyone, AI Essentials, and so there's this blend of, I would say, intro-level AI courses with courses that are much more specific and more advanced. And so for example we have Coding with Claude, and so Anthropic has both a general intro-level course to how to use AI, but then they also have a more advanced Coding with Claude course that really is meant for people who really want to use Claude Code specifically, not just interact with Claude. And so we see this interesting blend of people moving beyond just the foundational introductory courses into more specific, whether it's AI for Product Managers or AI for Designers, AI for Sales, things that are meant to be tailored to a specific type of role or function.

Well, we're going to continue to use AI as a tool obviously to continue to enhance the platform. And so one of the things we are very focused on is how do we continue to make that learning experience more interactive, more engaging and more accessible to people and AI can be a phenomenal tool for that. One of the other things that is a big, you know, top-of-mind thing for everybody at the company right now is we are in the process of combining with one of our largest competitors, Udemy. So we announced that acquisition back in December. We should close it, you know, hopefully at some point in the coming months. And we're very focused on that because the companies while both being in the online learning space have taken very different approaches to it historically. So, Udemy has been more focused on enterprise. We have been more focused on consumers. Their model for content is a worldwide network of 85,000 plus subject matter experts. We obviously have our curated marketplace of content from universities and instructors. And so how do we blend the two of those different offerings and different approaches in a way that brings more value to everybody in our world? So whether that's learners, whether that's enterprise customers or our content creators.

Thank you so much, Ashley. Great to be with you.