Coursera CEO Greg Hart: AI Is Rewriting How The World Learns | Voices From The Valley

It's been fantastic. So, as you mentioned, I started in February of 2025 at a time when AI had already been a burgeoning topic of interest for learners around the world. That has just accelerated. We are seeing the pace of interest in AI skyrocket. A year ago, we saw about 15 enrollments every minute in AI content. So far this year, we're up to 20 enrollments per minute on Coursera. So, one every 3 seconds.

Yes, somewhere around the world, somebody enrolls in an AI course on Coursera every 3 seconds. So, it's been phenomenal. And then, of course, as you know, we announced and then closed the acquisition of Udemy, one of our competitors, about a month or so ago now. And so, a lot of focus on bringing the two companies together. So, it's been an eventful first year.

Well, I have a really strong perspective on that. First of all, everyone around the world needs to upskill and reskill in this age of AI. Because AI is changing what's possible so rapidly that if you are not upskilling and reskilling yourself to enable the right way to take advantage of those capabilities, you will be left behind. That's true of companies, that is true of individuals. That is Coursera's mission. We are aiming to help upskill and reskill the entire modern world for the moment that we're in. There has never been a more pressing need for upskilling and reskilling, post-secondary education, than the moment that we're in right now with the way that AI and technology generally is changing the landscape of what's required in the workforce.

Well, I think that one of the things that we're seeing is that there's skepticism that in an age of AI, the content that Coursera has to offer and Udemy has to offer is less valuable. I have a different perspective. My perspective is that in an age where it's easier than ever to create content, the value of expert human-created content from the leading universities in the world, which was how Coursera was founded, and the top technology companies in the world, because we have content from Google, from Meta, from Microsoft, from Anthropic, from OpenAI, from AWS, is even more valuable. And then what Coursera brings to the table is not just a catalog of that content, but a deeply rooted in academia and in education perspective on how to deliver that learning in a way that gives verified assessment and proof of learning. And we see that reflected in the huge demand for micro-credentials across all of our platform. And so I think we are uniquely positioned to actually help with that.

Well, I think that that gives us an opportunity to both do a few things. One, continue to expand the audience that we serve. So, with the combination of Coursera and Udemy, we now have close to 300 million registered learners around the world. That is a massive, massive number. And we serve 18,000 enterprises. So, we're not just a consumer-focused company, but we also help both businesses and universities and governments adapt to the pace of change by enabling them to leverage Coursera to help upskill and reskill their constituents, whether those are employees or students or faculty or government civil servants.

That number is actually a combined number across both enterprise in terms of enrollments across enterprise and consumer. But we're seeing huge interest in AI-related content, not surprisingly, on the enterprise side as well. And so the primary reason that enterprises come to Coursera or to Udemy is to help upskill or reskill their workforce. Historically, pre-ChatGPT, in November of 2022, that was probably on more technical content or a more general learning and development type benefit. Now, that is increasingly on how do I leverage AI within my workforce? And so, what we do with enterprises is really sit down and try and understand the objective that they're trying to accomplish and then work with them to craft exactly the right approach to enable them to get that upskilling and reskilling in a function-by-function way. So, it's not just general AI education, but it's actually very practical, targeted AI upskilling for a given function within an enterprise.

Well, in terms of rules of engagement, we have content from Anthropic on our platform. With OpenAI, we both have content from OpenAI that is offered through Coursera to some of their partners. And then, we've actually helped to develop capabilities on OpenAI that they leverage in their OpenAI certificates. And so, which are all AI-focused certificates that they offer primarily for education purposes. And so, we are both a content creator, a content receptor, and a technology creator that works with them.

I think one of the big things that we're focused a lot on right now is learning about AI through AI deployment in the flow of work. So, using technologies like MCP, Model Context Protocol, we have integrations already with ChatGPT. We were one of the very first partners that they had there. We recently launched our integration with Microsoft Copilot. We have integrations as well with Anthropic, with Claude. And so, deploying that within the flow of work and then also leveraging all of the data that we have on the right way to help people learn. What is most effective at not just going through content, but actually delivering true learning. And we're very focused on skills and skill delivery, skill assessment, and proof in a verifiable way of mastery of that content. That we believe will be what sets us apart. It's the history of the company coming out of academia, but it's also what we believe will set us apart as well.

So, obviously AI is the topic du jour around the world, but there are a lot of other things that we see not just in response to AI, but generally. So, huge amount of interest in human skills right now. Creative thinking, communication skills, resiliency, flexibility. And I think one of the reasons for that, and we've seen interest in content and courses in those areas more than double over the last year. One of the reasons for that I think is that people recognize that as technology is capable of doing more and more, and your technical skills might not perhaps matter as much as they used to, that the human skills you have actually become a really important differentiator. That's one of the big areas of interest. We're also seeing a big increase in more domain-oriented learning. So, in particular, healthcare has been a big increase over the last year. It's one of the few sectors in the US economy where you're seeing a lot of job growth within that sector. And so, we're seeing a lot of need for training and learning around healthcare as well.

Well, it's an extremely important market for us, both strategically and also from how we build what we build. So, more than 20% of our workforce is in India, and that's not just engineering and product. That's across data, operations, marketing, finance, sales, content. We have a huge set of teams in India that are helping us continually improve the product and grow the business. It also is one of our most important strategic markets from a business perspective. So, on the Coursera side, it's our number two market in terms of registered learners behind the US, and my bet is that India will pass the US at some point in the next few years in terms of sheer size of number of learners. And then on the Udemy side, it's also an incredibly important market. We believe that there is a real need within India to benefit from exactly what Coursera and Udemy offer. Obviously, the Indian population is massive, and India has historically had a really powerful and important role in initially offshoring and service organizations, etc. That's still an important part of the economy in India. A lot of those roles are being directly impacted by AI. And the Indian government forecasts that AI can add about 40% to the economy by 2035. That's only going to be recognized if India can actually upskill and reskill their population to take advantage of that opportunity. That's where we come in. It's one of the reasons that we're partnering with the government on Karmayogi Bharat, and we think that's a really important part of helping the government achieve their overall goal of Viksit Bharat. And so, we're looking to partner not just with the government on things like that, but also with universities in India. And one of the things that we see a huge interest in India is micro-credentials. Because the Indian government has what I think is a very forward-thinking approach to online learning, where you can take up to 40% of your credits online, we're very focused on working with NSQF to get as many micro-credentials as possible available for credit. Because we see really strong signals not just from students who are interested in those, but also from employers. 100% of Indian employers would be willing to pay a higher salary to a student who comes out of university not just with a degree, but with a micro-credential. So, there's clear demand for that, and my perspective is for India to actually address that opportunity that AI represents, they need to continue to be very forward-thinking, and we're very excited to continue to play a role in that.

It's definitely helped. I think we've been really pleased by the fact that number one, we're more affordable and therefore more accessible to a much broader set of the population. We're priced in a way that makes much more sense than it had historically. And I think it helps have a broader portion of the population really understand the value of the offering that we had. Whereas before, it was priced in a way that a lot of people just unfortunately couldn't afford. Now it's much, much more accessible. And so we've seen that help with the growth acceleration perspective.

Everybody is using AI all the time, every day, in many, many different ways. And so when I joined in February, one of the first things that we focused on is, how do we make sure that, because we had been using AI obviously, we had lots of courses on AI on the platform like we've talked about. We've been using AI on the platform as well as part of our product efforts from very shortly after the launch of ChatGPT back in November of 2022. But I felt like internally we weren't necessarily upskilling and reskilling ourselves as quickly as we needed to. And we're a learning company. We need to make sure that we are not just preaching it, but also practicing it. And so one of the things that we did is we created a tops-down and a bottoms-up approach. The bottoms-up approach is something that we call AI Sparks. So everybody has access to Gemini, to ChatGPT, and to Claude. And we were...

Yes, we are very mindful of token limits. But actually, when we started it, we weren't focused on that. We were focused more on making sure that we just gave people the ability to experiment and to really learn. And what we wanted to do is bring people together on a regular basis to just share what they'd learned. And so every month we do an AI Spark session, which is people across the company are volunteering to share, here's what I did, here's how it changed the flow of my work, here's how it improved it. And then people just start sharing and they're among the most popular meetings that we have as a company. We also have a centralized organization in India, the SSC we call it, and the SSC takes in requests from any different department within the company of we have a need for a workflow that we've been doing by hand or we've been doing in a semi-automated way, but it's not nearly as efficient as it could be. Can you help us create a better workflow leveraging AI? The SSC will take in that request, in a week they'll turn around a pilot, they'll then work closely with the team that submitted it, in another week they'll hand it over. And so we go from idea submission to handover of an actual workflow in 2 weeks where the SSC has also trained the team in how not just to maintain it and run it, but also to improve it. And because one of the real things that we're focused on doing is every time any team is engaging with AI, we want to make sure that they are improving their baseline of what's possible tomorrow or next week, etc. So it's not just using it for a query to get a question back, but how do you actually create a workflow? How do you create an agent that can help you be more efficient in your role? And how do you start measuring the impact of all of that? Both in terms of cost savings from efficiency perspective, but also in terms of ROI for things like outbound sales on our enterprise side. And we see really positive signals across all of that. One of the things I'm most proud of about the SSC is that their pilot success rate is 95%.

And so very few of them fail.

All happening out of India. In collaboration with folks around the world. But that is very different than what we've seen from other companies. MIT cited a study that the opposite was true. Most of the time, 95% of them fail. And so, I think that's in part because of the passion of that team and the way that they engage and the way that they are very focused on not just creating a tool, but then also training and helping the people learn how to fish.

I think we will, for two reasons. One, not everybody's going to work for big tech and the ability to create a startup is far easier now than it was 20 years ago. And if you think about just the US technology industry, one of the reasons that the US technology industry is often the envy of the rest of the world is because it created an environment in which it was easier to create startups and raise money for startups in the US than anywhere else. Well, now AI is democratizing that around the world because you don't necessarily have to have access to nearly the capital or the network or the engineering talent to create an idea and create a business around it. So, I think it will be very much a diffusive force in terms of the number of ideas that come up, not a destructive force, and in terms of the pace of change that we see.

Well, one of the things we're very focused on right now is bringing the two companies together. So right now we have Coursera platform and a Udemy platform. Our goal is to obviously get to a single unified platform. That is the number one focus for the company right now.

But we're prototyping on that now and we've been doing a lot of planning on it. What I can tell you is that that platform will look very different than either Coursera or Udemy do today. It will be, we believe, a far more effective vehicle for not just learning but skill delivery and not just skill delivery in a checked-the-box sense but in actually a verified assessment and proof of that skill delivery because that's what employers are looking for and that's certainly when consumer learners are coming to us, that's why they're coming to us. It's why our certificates are so popular, our micro-credentials are so popular. And so it will have AI as a core feature of that platform and one that helps us deliver an experience that is more in the flow of work or in the flow of life, more interactive, more engaging, and more effective at delivering outcomes.

In terms of the skill that I think I always want us to improve at as a company is how do we move faster. I just think there's so much benefit from speed that even if we're moving at 2x the pace that we are today in a few months' time, I'll still want us to move faster. So, that's always the thing that I'm focused on for improvement. In terms of what I've learned over the last year, I would say the one thing that stands out for me is how important it is to ensure that the entire company is aligned around our mission and that no matter how much you think you've said that and made that clear across the organization, reinforcing that on a regular basis both for the wins and where you might be struggling against that mission is so important to give people context and help focus their attention. And so, that would be the thing that I would say I've taken away from the last year.

Well, I would say first of all, thank you for everything that you do for not just Coursera and for Udemy, but for all of our customers around the world, whether those are individual learners, whether those are enterprises or universities or governments that leverage Coursera and Udemy, thank you. Second, continue to focus on those customers, continue to invent the future of learning every day on their behalf, and I look forward to seeing you on my next visit.

Thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure.