Hello everyone, and welcome to FORWARD [inaudible] 2026. I am Anthony Salcito, Global Head of Enterprise at Coursera. I am super glad to have you with us today. We have had over 12,000 people register for this event, representing more than 100 countries around the world. Welcome to all of you. It is awesome to see so many countries represented today. Thank you very much for joining us in the chat. Today marks an important milestone as we bring Coursera customers together for the very first time since we combined our company in May. This event is about you, the leaders, the innovators, and the individual learners that are helping shape the future of work. At Coursera, every step we take starts with understanding what organizations like you and individuals need to succeed.
Across global markets, navigating AI and rapid tech adoption requires two things at once, both broad practitioner-led agility and deep certified domain expertise and experience. Bringing our platforms together will give you the complete coverage you need, paired with the innovative tools to help organizations build a resilient workforce capable of leading through these shifts. We know your time is valuable, and leading workforce transformation today comes with real complexity. That is why we have designed today's event to give you immediate and actionable value. You will gain perspective on the future of learning and how our joint capabilities create new opportunities for your organization while helping you plan your talent roadmap. You will also learn real-world strategies from learning leaders who are driving measurable business impact and navigating AI transformation inside their teams and organizations.
Lastly, you will get an exciting preview of our combined platform experience that we are building to help you accelerate enterprise-wide skill adoption and drive meaningful business outcomes. We will also have an opportunity to recognize organizations and leaders that are achieving exceptional results through our global Outstanding Achievement Awards. Before we begin, though, let us have a little bit of housekeeping. Closed captioning and live audio translations are available in the drop-down directly below the video window if you need. We also encourage you to share your experiences and questions throughout the session in the chat so we can continue to learn together. To kick off our program, there is no better person to discuss the technology and learning shifts ahead than Andrew Ng, Coursera Co-Founder and Chairman. Andrew is one of the world's foremost AI experts.
He co-founded and led Google Brain, served as chief scientist at Baidu, directed Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and most recently founded LearnVector, an AI learning company, and we are excited about that. He also co-founded Coursera in 2012, and since then has taught AI to millions worldwide. What truly sets him apart, though, is his dedication on making education more accessible and using AI to benefit humanity. With that, I am super thrilled to have him join us today. Andrew, over to you.
Hi, everyone, and welcome to Forward. I am excited to kick off Coursera and Udemy's first flagship event as a combined company. Having co-founded and worked on and with Coursera for many years, I have long admired and been a huge fan of Udemy. For a long time, I have actually personally been a user of Udemy and enjoyed taking a lot of courses there. To see these two institutions come together, both committed to serving learners, serving businesses, helping people gain the skills they need, has been a unique privilege in my career. To see the great work that the Coursera and Udemy teams are now coming together to do to serve learning brings me a lot of joy and makes me feel like together we can help make a lot of people's lives better off. We live in the age of AI, and AI is progressing rapidly.
What is the role of learning in this exciting world? One of the things that a lot of people still ask is, will AI lead to a job apocalypse or a jobpocalypse? One narrative is that, will AI become so smart that no humans are needed to do any work? Maybe 50% of people end up not needed for work and there is rioting in the streets. I do not know. It is very clear to me that there will be no AI jobpocalypse. A lot of the hype around AI jobpocalypse was kind of PR to drive hype or to try to make technology sound more powerful than I think it actually is. I want to share with you as one example, one data point on how much AI actually is and is not displacing jobs. In a lot of headlines, there are a lot of supposed AI layoffs.
I was speaking recently with Denis Machuel, who is CEO of a large workforce company, Adecco, and he ran a study where people that were recently laid off were asked, "Were you or was your work actually replaced by AI?" With all of these headlines saying AI is causing all these layoffs, what do you think the percentage of people that were actually laid off will say their job was actually replaced by AI? Is it 50%, 40%, 20%, maybe 10% if there is a bit of hype? The data came out that 1.4% of people that were recently laid off self-reported that their work was actually replaced by AI. I actually feel a lot of sympathy, and I am moved by every individual and every family affected by layoff. I think these are very serious matters, and we owe it to society to give people a safety net.
At the same time, this hype that AI is leading to people to be laid off is mostly AI washing of other things that are causing companies to change their headcount. One thing that is happening with the rise of AI is all of us need to develop new skills. If I look at what is happening in jobs, it turns out that maybe the sector that AI has affected the most by far is software engineering, because it turns out AI is very good at writing software. Do we see a shortage of software engineering jobs? Turns out no. Software engineering job postings are higher than ever before. Frankly, we just cannot find enough good software engineers that also know AI can use AI to work in this highly transformed workflow.
Because AI has entered software so strongly and is now entering other sectors as well, AI is becoming increasingly useful for sales, for HR and recruiting, for back office operations, for finance, for marketing, and on and on and on. As AI starts to enter these other job functions, I think what we saw in software engineering will be early signs or a harbinger of what we will see in all of these other job professions as well. What has happened in software engineering, and what happened in other disciplines as well, is that we have to learn new skills. But when we do so, we become more productive, often have more fun at work, sometimes even get paid more.
It turns out that a software engineer that still writes code like it is 2022 before ChatGPT, that is just not how any of us should build software anymore. But a software engineer that has mastered AI tools are incredibly productive. The other interesting trend I have seen is that software engineers, and I talk about this not because I want everyone to do software, because I want you to see the signs I am seeing that I think will affect other knowledge work as well. But it turns out that software engineers are now playing much broader roles. For example, there are a lot of people that were previously playing a narrow, say, front end development role, so building, say, the part of the website. Many of these engineers are now playing what is called full stack development roles, where they build the entire application rather than just one piece of it.
That is because if they start from their deep front end engineering skills and use AI to help them with the parts that they may not be as good at, they can take on this much broader job scope. But this requires two things. One, it requires learning AI skills, so how to use, apply, understand the latest AI techniques and tools. Then second, they needed to learn more software engineering, to learn more things about how to do these adjacent tasks. I think this will be a trend that we will see in a lot of other job roles as well. In fact, take marketing. I am seeing early signs of this happening in marketing as well, where someone that previously was a marketing coordinator, they kind of program manage or coordinate marketing campaigns.
With AI assistance, a number of them I see growing to be full cycle marketers to run campaigns end to end, even analyze data and drive much more value. I see early signs of this in recruiting as well, where we have had a lot of people that do sourcing, kind of looking for candidates, but with AI assistance, many of them are now stepping into the full cycle recruiter role. It turns out the job market cannot seem to find enough. We cannot seem to find enough of these people that are highly AI enabled, software engineers or marketers or recruiters or sales professionals and what have you. What I see is that businesses that hire and upskill, as well as individuals that gain these skills, will do well.
One unfortunate thing that has happened is the hype around the AI jobpocalypse has led a number of CEOs to under-invest in hiring and also to under-invest in training. Because if AI will do everything, then why would you hire more people? I think in this fog of war in which all of us operate a little bit, uncertainty about the future has led CEOs that I know personally to, I think, under-invest in what has been very productive growth. Two great ways to invest are to hire AI-native teams to really get a lot more work done, so it is not just cost savings, but business growth. Also to give the teams the new skills, both in their discipline and also to learn the AI skills relevant to discipline to allow them to do a lot more great work.
Now, how do we enable our teams to do all of these wonderful things that certainly I think they should be doing? I am going to say something that may be controversial to this audience, but is very obviously true and very backed by data, which is that chat is terrible for learning. Chatbots in general are just not good at learning. Mind you, I think AI chatbots are wonderful. I love them, use them all the time, and they are amazing at getting things done. By all means, encourage your teams to learn to use them. It will boost productivity. But many studies are coming out that show that while chat is great for getting things done, they are terrible for learning.
For example, there was a recent Penn study that showed that when students have access to chat, they have a significant improvement in their homework scores, like a 40% improvement in grades, but a significant reduction in learning, 17% reduction in learning. The authors actually wrote, I quote, "Unfettered access to GPT-4, the more they use, can harm educational outcomes." This study and other studies are frankly showing just what all of us have known informally already. If you give a learner access to chatbot, they can do their homework or do the work much more quickly, which is important. In businesses, we want work done quickly. But cognitive offloading to chatbot, it harms learning, and so you end up with more work done, but worse retention and worse educational outcomes.
While this is possible in theory, I think there are ways to use all of these resources to learn, just like I think there are ways to use social media. You can learn stuff from Instagram. You can learn stuff from TikTok. But the vast majority of ways that the vast majority of people use chat results in not-so-good learning. I think this is why using AI technologies, it is incumbent on all of us that work on and care about training and education and learning to work on creating the next generation of educational products using AI that is actually helpful for learning. Because I think we owe it to our teams to give them skills to function well in the AI world.
For what it's worth, I know businesses that train subsets of employees, which is fine, but I personally really believe in training every single employee. On my teams, every single person on my team. When I say on my team, I want to bring them with me. The future's uncertain, but I personally think we owe it to our teams, every one of them, to put the skills they'll need to evolve in the future, even if there's a small subset of them that may end up leaving for whatever reason in the future. My teams, I actually ask everyone, including recruiters, marketers, the front desk receptionist, operations people, everyone participates in upskilling. I hope that many of you that lead organizations or lead teams will consider that approach too, even if you maybe take a few steps to get to let's bring everyone with us.
In terms of how we create this future together, about 15 years ago, I was privileged in the early days of Coursera to participate in creating online courses that change how education is delivered. One of the things I'm excited about is at LearnVector, which is funded by Coursera, to build agentic AI that can change how learning happens. Rather than the one-to-many model of education that we've worked on for many years, and it works well, but where one instructor delivers really the same course to a lot of people, I think we have an opportunity to evolve learning toward a much more of a one-to-one customized experience. Working hard on that and will have more to say on that by early next year.
The Coursera and Udemy teams are also working hard on many new pedagogical innovations as well to improve learning for everyone. More broadly, the challenge and opportunity that this changing world, especially driven by AI, brings us means that I think all of us here at this conference have an important role to play to shape learning, to help others, to help ourselves gain the new skills that will let all of us do really not just important work, but fun and exciting work as well. To share how Coursera and Udemy are approaching this moment and what this expanded Coursera and Udemy community can accomplish together, it's my pleasure to welcome our wonderful CEO, Greg Hart. Greg, over to you.
Thank you, Andrew, and welcome everyone. As you all join from around the world, I can't think of a more important topic than the one that we're here to discuss today. Unleashing the combined power and promise of human and AI potential at a global scale. As we all know, AI has extraordinary potential, but realizing that potential depends on equipping people everywhere with the skills to use it effectively. That's why I am so thrilled to be with you today. It's the first time that we are coming together as an expanded community across Coursera and Udemy. We have leaders from organizations around the world all working at the forefront of one of the most consequential shifts of our time. You're navigating rapid advances in AI, changing workforce needs, and an urgent demand for new skills.
My hope is that FORWARD 2026 gives all of us a chance to exchange ideas, learn from one another, and collaborate on the opportunities ahead. Thank you all for joining us. I am incredibly excited about what we can build together. There are three main things that I want to cover in the next half hour or so. First, the scale of the problem in front of us as AI completely transforms businesses and the skills that people need. Next, how both Coursera and Udemy are responding to that opportunity as a combined company. Finally, how our customers, who are the real heroes, are leading this change, turning skills into real outcomes for their organizations. We are meeting at a critical time in history. AI is reshaping nearly every job across every industry.
Currently, there are 3.7 billion people in the workforce who will need to upskill and reskill. In the next four years, one billion more people will enter the workforce needing the skills to compete in an economy that looks very different from the one that we know today. This is a skilling challenge that traditional models of education alone cannot solve, and that creates both an urgent global need and an enormous opportunity for all of us. As I talk to leaders across businesses, campuses, and governments around the world, one of the questions I hear most often is this: How can we keep up with the accelerating pace of technology? It is easy to see why that is the question everyone is asking. AI is projected to generate trillions of dollars in economic value over the next several years.
That economic value will not be gained equally by everyone. Today, 74% of AI's economic value is being captured by just 20% of organizations. We are seeing this trend reflected as we talk to our customers. Simply providing access to AI won't help capture that value. We have to equip people with real skills that enable them to entirely reimagine their workflows. When BCG studied the companies getting real value from AI at scale, they saw a clear focus on people. Companies capturing value are upskilling their workforce and are much more likely to have structured learning programs. To speed up business transformation and unlock real value of AI, BCG introduced a 10/20/70 rule. 70% of your strategic focus should be on the people and process, 20% on tech, and 10% on algorithms. Yet, most organizations have this inverted.
Right now, we are in the middle of one of the largest technology buildouts in the history of mankind. Companies are making outsized investments in AI tools and technology. But the investment in people isn't keeping pace. More than 40% of leaders say that they are highly prepared when it comes to their technology infrastructure. But when it comes to talent, that number falls to just 20%. While technology may power AI infrastructure, it is people that will determine its impact. How we address the 2x gap between deployment and talent readiness will determine the winners and losers in the AI era. That is why I am so excited about the Coursera and Udemy combination.
Not only have we created one of the most comprehensive skills platforms in the world, we now have more reach, more resources, and more talent to scale the impact of our mission, solve real customer problems, and deliver even better outcomes. Our combined ecosystem and trusted content is a true differentiator. Together, we serve 300 million learners and 12,000 enterprise customers. That incredible scale attracts trusted partners and content creators who have produced more than 335,000 courses across both platforms. AI acts as both an enabler and an accelerant across our ecosystem. It is the underlying infrastructure that enables us to drive new innovations and new experiences at a faster pace, allowing us to dramatically increase the impact of our content by connecting learners to the right skills at the right time. Bringing our companies together is about much more than just creating a bigger content catalog.
It is about becoming a true skills delivery platform. That is a fundamental shift. Historically, learning platforms focused on content, on courses, videos, quizzes. While content remains foundational, it is no longer sufficient. We need to do much more. Outcomes matter more than content completion, and that is where we need to focus. Ultimately, we want to become the skills foundation of the modern world. One of the most in-demand skills today is, of course, generative AI. Across both platforms, we are currently seeing 45 enrollments per minute in GenAI content. That is up from 25 enrollments per minute last year. Our ecosystem is moving just as quickly to meet that demand. In the last year, our combined GenAI catalog has grown from 5,200 courses to nearly 10,000, covering everything from AI fundamentals to vibe coding and loop engineering. This tells us two things.
GenAI skills are essential for learners and organizations, and what people need to know is changing incredibly fast. As demand for GenAI skills accelerates, we are seeing a new trend emerge among our learners and customers. They are pairing AI skills with human skills. As AI takes on more complex and high-stakes tasks, human judgment becomes that much more important. We see that learners who are building skills in areas like GenAI, machine learning, and agentic AI are also building skills in critical thinking, communication, and strategic decision-making. Businesses need employees who can ask the right questions, evaluate what AI produces, and make decisions, all while communicating and leading effectively. This is exactly what our upcoming Global Skills Report will examine. It launches on September 29th, and we are excited to introduce the world's first-ever AI Human Skills Synergy Index.
The report reveals where AI and human skills are advancing fastest and how learners are combining them so institutions, businesses, and governments can shape their workforce strategies. One thing is very clear. The workforce of the future will not be defined by AI skills or human skills. It will require both. Another major trend is the growing demand for micro-credentials, which are shorter programs focused on a specific skill or job. Enrollments on Coursera are up 33%, and our catalog has grown by over 90% year-over-year. A big reason for that is their impact. Micro-credentials are becoming an important currency in a skills first economy. For employers, they provide a powerful signal of verified job relevant skills, which helps you identify the right talent. Data from Coursera's Micro-credentials Impact Report 2026 shows these hires perform better on the job.
Increasingly, universities are also providing credit for these programs. Something we are really proud of is our partnership with the American Council on Education. We offer more than 50 ACE credit recommended professional certificates and specializations. Recent data shows that these programs on Coursera have generated nearly $60 million in estimated tuition savings by helping learners apply eligible learning toward college credit. That is a powerful example of how skills-based learning can make education more flexible, more valuable, and more affordable amid rising tuition costs. That is why we continue to invest in these programs. Today, I am excited to announce more than 30 new professional certificates and specializations on Coursera, all from leading partners like Microsoft, Google Cloud, the University of Michigan, and many more. What is striking is the breadth and relevance of these topics.
As you can see, highly technical skills like agentic AI and engineering alongside communication and leadership. That goes back to my prior point. Preparing people for the AI economy requires both technical fluency and durable human capabilities. Our partners are helping us deliver both. The need for these skills is becoming even more urgent. As we talk to customers around the world, we are hearing a similar story. Organizations have invested heavily in AI, and in many cases, they have reduced headcount, expecting AI will deliver the necessary capacity. However, that promise is yet to be realized at scale. That puts pressure on existing employees to do more with less. One of the fastest paths to unlock AI value is to start with the people who know the work best.
Equip your subject matter experts with the right AI skills to solve problems in their functions and then scale that across the organization. On the left side are the latest AI and business skills that employees are asking for. On the right side, you see learner demand reflected in searches across our platform, and that helps our instructors respond quickly. When a new Claude model launches, your employees can enroll in a course in days, not months. Or they could learn Claude from the Anthropic catalog right on Coursera. Content is only part of the equation. It also has to fit into how your organization delivers skills. That means mapping learning to specific roles and your internal skills frameworks, delivering employees the stackable credentials they want, and ultimately turning learning into organizational transformation. Delivering on these priorities requires the right content.
Our expanded catalog gives you access to the best learning from across our combined ecosystem. Your workforce can learn from world-class universities like Stanford, Yale, Penn, Johns Hopkins, alongside companies that are defining the future of technology and work, from Google and Microsoft to Anthropic, Meta, and more. While still having access to the freshest content from our trusted instructor community, practitioners who deeply understand how to apply these skills on the job. That is where the strength and breadth of our combined ecosystem becomes a major advantage. You will have the speed and practical know-how of Udemy instructors with the trust and rigor of our university and industry partners on Coursera. Expanding our ecosystem of trusted content creators continues to be an important priority for us.
Today, we're excited to welcome new university partners like Harvard Business School Online, Texas State University, and ESSEC Business School in France, as well as new industry leaders like Perplexity and GitHub. Over the last year, more than 5,000 new instructors in domains like AI, IT, and project management have joined the Udemy platform. Each brings something different, and together they give us the ability to combine trust, expertise, and speed so we can deliver the right skills as you need them. Now that we've talked about the skills you can learn from the amazing instructors on Coursera and Udemy, I want to talk about how we're enabling our customers worldwide with new product and platform innovations. First, I want to update you on how we're bringing learning into the flow of work with LLM integrations.
Second, I'll invite our Chief Product Officer, Patrick Supanc, to show you a very special first look at our new AI-native platform that we internally call Project Helix. Then I'll come back to share some new product updates. Learning has become one of the most dominant use cases on LLMs. When an employee has a question about how to get work done, they often start by asking an LLM. That's why it's so critical that we meet learners where they are, in the flow of work as part of their everyday tasks. That's one of the reasons I'm really proud that in October of last year, Coursera became the first learning partner with an app in ChatGPT. It started with discovery. You could ask, "How do I learn data analytics?" and discover a video from a leading institution on Coursera right in ChatGPT.
Udemy offers a similar experience in ChatGPT, helping employees discover practical learning on emerging skills from real-world instructors. Apps like these make trusted learning more accessible and relevant. That's why we launched a similar app with Microsoft Copilot 365 in March. If employees need help while building a complex Microsoft Excel model, they can use Copilot to surface relevant content from leading university and industry partners right on Coursera, so they can build expertise as they execute on a task. Similarly, the Coursera Connector for Claude, which launched in June, provides answers grounded in the trusted content from our catalog. The experience is similar across all three LLMs. Through ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot, learners can watch a video, dive into a reading, or get hands-on practice through AI-powered dialogues and role plays, all without leaving their current workflow.
It's the strong foundation of Coursera and Udemy that's fueling these innovations. Before I share what's next, I want to emphasize how we're approaching the future. We are not building AI for the sake of AI. Everything begins with the problems our customers are trying to solve, and it's an iterative process. We listen closely to the outcomes you need, whether that's closing critical skills gaps, preparing people for new roles, or demonstrating the impact of learning. Then we work backward to build differentiated solutions that can deliver those outcomes at scale. That customer-led approach is shaping our roadmap across the combined company, and it's the foundation for the new platform we're building next. As we look further ahead, we're doing two things at once, continuing to invest fully in our current Coursera and Udemy platforms while also building what comes next.
Altus was Udemy's early vision for how agentic AI could connect business priorities, skills development and validation, and workforce outcomes. As one combined company, we are extending the spirit of that vision through a new AI-native platform codenamed Project Helix. Coming in 2027, Helix is designed to become an adaptive skills platform for the modern AI-powered workplace. It will help people identify the right skills, build them through personalized learning, demonstrate what they can do, and connect that proof to meaningful workforce and business outcomes. It brings together the unique strengths of Coursera and Udemy and the extraordinary expertise of our combined ecosystem to create the future of how we build measurable skills. Rather than simply describe that vision, let's take a first look. To take us deeper into Project Helix and what it will make possible, please welcome our Chief Product Officer, Patrick Supanc.
Thank you, Greg, and thank you to everyone for joining us today. Before we look forward, we have to start where we always do, with you. We have spent hundreds of hours listening, and your feedback has become the blueprint for our new unified platform. We are focused on solving five core problems you have told us you face. First, you told us you need trusted proof of capability and a clear way to connect your learning investment to the business or strategic outcomes you are accountable for. Activity reports and course completions are not enough for your boards and CFOs. We also heard loud and clear, nobody wants another destination to log into. That learning needs to be seamless. Meet your learners where they are and where they work, and not a disruption. Many of you have invested in your own skills, frameworks, internal tools, HR and talent and learning management systems.
Our job is not to force a new model on you, but to integrate seamlessly into your talent ecosystem and elevate it. You also pointed out the fundamental problem with simply serving a content library. One size fits none. You need personalized and contextualized learning for your people based on their role, goal, and current abilities, as well as a flexible set of controls for your leaders to directly tailor learning to the needs of their team. Finally, you told us that you will only act on an AI recommendation if you can see the basis for it. Knowing the origin of your learning experience and trusting its quality and brands is important to you and what you value on our platforms today. These problems are guiding the work of our product teams. They are what we have set out to solve.
I am excited to share our vision for what this solution looks like in action. This is Project Helix, a new adaptive platform designed to transform how skills are built and verified in the AI era.
Leaders are navigating a moment that asks more of them than ever before. As AI reshapes how we work, organizations will need to upskill and reskill at an unprecedented scale and adapt to meet every employee where they're at on their skill development journey. It's easy to track AI spend, tool usage, course completions. But those numbers don't answer the question that matters: can these new skills be demonstrated, and do they drive results? Project Helix answers that question. Coming in 2027 from Coursera and Udemy, Helix is an AI-native platform that turns a business goal into the skills people need and proof they can put those skills to work. Together, we bring 300 million learners and billions of learning sessions to the table, a scale and expertise no one else has; to build an outcome-focused, personalized skills platform for every learner. Here's a first look at how.
Meet Melissa, a General Manager. Her team's spending on AI tools has tripled, but she can't tell if they're building skills that will make them more effective. Melissa shares a specific business goal with Helix: increase AI fluency across the product team so they can cut time to launch by 20%. Helix draws on her company's existing Coursera and Udemy data, plus her own context, so it's not starting from scratch. Helix identifies who needs to be able to do what to reach the goal, suggests role and task-specific paths, then builds personalized skills plans. One of the people on Melissa's team is Omar, a Product Manager. Helix doesn't automatically send him to lesson one. First, it reviews his existing progress on Coursera and Udemy and engages with him to see where he's at. Then Omar gets a path built just for him.
He learns from trusted experts and brands across Coursera and Udemy and practices role-play scenarios to make decisions based on challenges he faces on the job, and his path keeps evolving. It's fully personalized and adapts as he learns and is accessible in the tools he uses for work every day. Once Omar knows a topic, he moves on. If he doesn't, he gets more personalized practice and assessments until he does. Most learning platforms stop when Omar finishes the course. Helix doesn't. It verifies the skills through hands-on assessments. Omar has to show he can do the work by applying what he's learned in an interactive real-world task. Once he does, those skills become part of his shareable skills record, and Helix adapts, recommending the next skill for him to focus on.
For Omar, that's presentation skills, so he can share a stronger vision for product strategy in key meetings. Back with our leader, Melissa, the loop closes. She no longer sees only learning activity. She sees capability and skills intelligence. Who has the verified skills and where the gaps are. Now she can see whether better skills are translating into better results for her team. That's the shift. A business goal becomes a skills plan. The plan adapts to each person. Learning becomes practice. Practice becomes proof of capability. And proof gives leaders a clearer view of whether their workforce is ready to deliver. Build the skills. Prove the capability. See the difference it makes for your business. Project Helix from Coursera and Udemy. Where trusted learning meets what's next.
The reality is that solving the problems you face and delivering the type of experience we just shared requires more than the larger content catalog brought together by Coursera and Udemy. That foundation needs to apply data and AI in three novel ways, working as a system that compounds value continuously. I want to take a moment to share how Project Helix works behind the scenes. It first begins with the intelligence layer, which knows what skills matter for today's roles and goals and where they exist in your organization. It's powered by a combination of a dynamic skills graph that draws on millions of industries and platform data points to understand which skills are critical to build. Agentic AI connectors that understand your organization's context by seamlessly integrating with your HRIS, LMS, and LXP infrastructure.
Conversational AI that makes it easy for frontline managers to share their business objectives in natural language and have the AI do the heavy lifting of translation into capabilities, skills, and learning programs. Imagine taking your leaders' most critical objectives, like launching a new product to market, strengthening the employability of your students, or modernizing the skills of a public workforce and translating them directly into a data-driven skills development plan for their team in minutes, not months. Next, the personalization layer. Historically, programs, learning plans, and courses have been highly structured and static. Project Helix applied agentic AI to orchestrate learning experiences tailored to the unique needs of each learner. It can deliver full programs to individual skill exercises, all drawn from the world's best human-led expertise on Coursera and Udemy.
Our objective is for every learner in your organization to feel like Project Helix was built for them, understands their goals, and acts both as career guide and attentive tutor as they progress. Finally, the action layer enables you and your leaders to act based on verified capabilities. It answers the ultimate question: Is my team ready? Project Helix measures what truly matters, real-world application, allowing you to verify new skills through practical assessments. Here again, we leverage the power of AI to scale and customize skill assessment to reflect both rigorous learning science and the unique context of your industry and organization. This gives managers at all levels insight into how closely team capabilities are aligned to their strategy and objectives, and ultimately better outcomes in ROI.
In all three phases, skills intelligence, learning personalization, and skill verification, we are leveraging agentic AI to orchestrate a continuous skill acquisition cycle that is more targeted, more efficient, and ultimately more impactful for your organization. It's not about the technology; it's about better results. Let's break down the results you should expect from Project Helix. First, we're enabling deeper personalization and customization at scale. This platform is grounded in your organization's actual skills, functions, roles, goals, and data, not a guess from a tool that doesn't understand your context. It translates your most critical objectives directly into flexible development plans and learning experiences tailored to each individual, which continuously adapt to the learner based on their performance and as their goals shift. Next, learning will continue to be powered by trusted expertise.
Our promise is to deliver not just exceptional breadth, but the right high-quality content experience for the right need. This platform is built on two complementary strengths, Coursera's industry-recognized credentials and academic rigor, paired with Udemy's practitioner speed and real-world relevance. These world-class partners are working with us to design Project Helix from the beginning. This leads to my next point. All of this fits within your ecosystem. Learning shouldn't be a separate destination that requires switching context or painful migration. The new platform is designed to deliver learning, practice, and skills intelligence directly into the tools you and your people already use, meeting them exactly where they are. While the Helix platform can be configured for your unique ecosystem, it's also designed to work just as well as a standalone skills development system. This gives organizations the flexibility to choose the approach that best fits their needs.
Finally, Project Helix will deliver a trusted record of capability. This is about moving beyond tracking completions, because completing a course doesn't prove someone can do the work. The platform uses hands-on graded assessments to provide a trusted signal they are truly capable. It doesn't stop there, and this is key. The platform brings all those individual signals together into a single actionable view of your entire organization's readiness. This means you no longer have to dig through a dashboard to get an answer. You can see exactly where capability is growing and make quicker, more informed decisions that move your organization forward. This is the future we're building from the ground up, a truly adaptive skills platform for your organization. At its heart is a simple, continuous cycle.
You set the goal, you build skills, you prove they're real, and you connect that proof directly to the outcomes you care about. It finally allows you to draw that clear line. You've already made the investment in technology. Human capability is what decides how quickly that investment pays back. Transformation starts with the people carrying the change. The rest follows. We're excited and committed to being your partner on that journey. With that, I'll hand it back to Greg.
Thank you, Patrick. Project Helix offers an incredibly exciting view of where we're going. While our teams are hard at work building that future, we're continuing to make meaningful advances across both platforms today in a wide range of areas that are critical to you. One of those areas is helping learning leaders understand what's working, demonstrate the impact of their programs, and determine what to do next. On Coursera, we've introduced a new Admin AI experience that turns complex learning data into clear, actionable insights. Administrators can ask a question in plain language and instantly get a complete answer, surfacing important trends and identifying potential next steps. It doesn't stop at insight. Admin AI can also help you move into action by launching targeted interventions that can help improve engagement and drive skill development.
On Udemy, the new Skills Insights Hub brings engagement, skills growth, and learning outcomes into one AI-powered view. Measure your organization's progress and skill development, benchmark against top trending topics, assessment completion, and more. Then turn those insights into meaningful action so enterprise admins can spend time strategically leading their programs rather than just managing tools. Another area I'm especially excited about is how we're turning practice into proof. Role play on both Udemy and Coursera gives learners a powerful, realistic way to practice real-world skills through conversations with an AI persona. As AI takes on more routine work, human capabilities like critical thinking, stakeholder communication, and judgment are becoming even more valuable. But these skills have traditionally been difficult to measure. How do you know whether someone can actually apply them? That's why we're introducing graded role-plays on Udemy.
It assesses and scores performance against a clear, consistent rubric so every learner is measured against the same standard. Today, I'm excited to share that we're also introducing graded role-play on Coursera. Across both platforms, leaders can now go beyond seeing who completed a course. You can understand whether the learner can actually demonstrate competency. This is a meaningful step forward from participation to proof and from learning activity to real workforce capability. Beyond human skills, learners also need opportunities to put technical skills into practice. On Coursera, hands-on labs let them do exactly that, working with real-world programming languages and software tools. Now, we've taken that a step further with graded labs, which transforms that practice space into a formal high-integrity assessment. Similar to graded role-play, every evaluation is objective and authentic and is graded against author-defined rubrics.
Again, this moves beyond completion to formally validate that learners have mastered critical technical skills. I'm excited that graded labs will soon be coming to the Udemy platform as well. Academic integrity is top of mind for learning leaders when it comes to use of AI during learning. On Coursera, our new AI browser deterrence tool detects AI-driven shortcuts by automatically flagging suspicious bot-like submissions. This ML-powered behavioral detection system is designed to protect the integrity of credentials on Coursera from unwanted shortcuts and to preserve the impact of your learning programs. We've talked about how we're using AI to transform the learning experience, from bringing learning into the flow of work to helping people practice, prove, and protect the integrity of their skills. But innovation only matters when it creates meaningful outcomes for people and organizations.
That's ultimately what all of this is designed to enable, workforce transformation at scale. We're seeing organizations across businesses, government, and higher education embrace that opportunity. Before I share a few examples, I'm excited to welcome several new organizations to our growing community of customers. In business, we're welcoming companies like Verizon, Red Hat, and Mozilla, where we're working together to support their educational and skill-building initiatives across communities in the U.S. In government, we've welcomed new customers MyDIGITAL, an agency within the Ministry of Digital Malaysia, and the cluster of IT at Nuevo León, Mexico, where we're partnering to equip their citizens with the skills needed for employment. Across higher education, we're welcoming the Southern University in Agriculture and Mechanical College in Baton Rouge and Shri Lal Bahadur Shastri National Sanskrit University in India, who are looking for a partner that can deliver trusted and relevant micro-credentials to enhance their existing curriculum.
These customers span sectors and regions that share one goal, equipping people with the skills needed to navigate change. They're the real heroes. Now, let me show you what workforce transformation looks like in action. Let's look at TEKsystems, a global technology and workforce solutions company that helps organizations navigate digital transformation. Their consultants need the right technical skills to solve client problems from the day they join the company, along with the ability to keep learning as technology evolves. TEKsystems partnered with Udemy to embed structured role-relevant learning directly into consultant orientation and paired that with open access to the platform so consultants could keep learning whenever they needed to. This has led to meaningful outcomes. Consultants can hit the ground running much faster, and it's made learning a part of how they work with sustained engagement on Udemy for 18 months.
A big part of that is because Udemy helps consultants prepare for certification exams and build emerging technical skills. Now, TEKsystems can build a workforce that adapts as quickly as skills and client needs change. The need to keep skills current is one nearly every organization faces. Bausch + Lomb is one of the world's leading eye health companies. They wanted to ensure employees not only understand AI but also develop the skills to apply it in ways that could transform the business. They launched an AI academy powered by Coursera that made two foundational AI courses mandatory for employees. Completion is tied to bonus eligibility, making AI literacy a core part of every job. Then they put learning into practice with the Vision AI Challenge and asked employees for practical ideas on how AI could improve the way the company operates.
Within 90 days, they had nearly 200 ideas across the business from supply chain to R&D. Importantly, these ideas came from the people closest to the work. It's changed how creative teams develop commercial storytelling and how teams plan production to maximize manufacturing capacity. In total, these AI improvements are now saving Bausch + Lomb more than 32,000 hours every year. Next, I want to focus on FPT University in Vietnam, which helps thousands of students prepare for the workforce. FPT University had ambitious goals to improve student employability and double enrollment every two years, but they needed to do that without putting even more burden on their faculty. To solve that, FPT partnered with Coursera to integrate more than 80 credit-bearing micro-credentials directly into their curriculum.
Students got access to high-quality, job-relevant learning, including programs from leading companies and universities around the world, which helped the university fill curriculum gaps and enabled faculty to focus on using their time more effectively. FPT saw a 44% increase in their student population within just one year. Today, 30,000 students each semester are learning through Coursera, and roughly 20% of all academic credits on FPT are earned through the platform. This has been a game-changing partnership for FPT to keep its curriculum current and enable FPT to attract and serve many more students. Now let's look at Karmayogi Bharat in India, where the scale of the challenge is remarkable. India has set a clear vision to become a developed nation by 2047, and delivering on that vision requires a civil service equipped for a digital future.
Mission Karmayogi, the world's largest civil services capacity-building initiative, was created to help build those capabilities in public servants across India. Mission Karmayogi integrated Coursera into their iGOT marketplace, an online learning platform that helps government employees in India learn new skills. It gave millions of civil servant access to world-class learning in areas like AI, data, risk analysis, and more. Learning is mapped to specific competencies and roles, helping shift government training from rule-based to role-based learning. We saw immediate impact with 100,000 enrollments in the first 100 days, and 82% of the skills the civil servants learned were directly tied to the capabilities the government needs most. Ultimately, this is about giving those civil servants the skills to use technology more effectively, make better decisions, and deliver better services to citizens. That's what makes this program so exciting.
It shows what becomes possible when you bring high-quality learning to populations at scale. We began today with an ambition to unleash human and AI potential at global scale. The examples we've just seen from businesses, universities, and governments show what becomes possible when learning is connected to real strategic priorities and meaningful outcomes. AI will continue to move quickly, but its full potential will only be realized if people everywhere have the skills and confidence to move forward with it. We now have an extraordinary opportunity to shape that future, but none of us can do it alone. You're on the forefront of this transformation, and we're incredibly excited to partner with you. Together, we can help every learner, employee, and citizen build the skills they need for the AI era. Thank you for everything you do and for building what comes next with us.
Thank you, Greg, Patrick, and Andrew, for laying out a clear foundation for where learning and work are headed. Now, I'm excited to shift our focus to execution and how these strategies come to life inside leading organizations. In this next session, you'll hear directly from leaders and about how they're thinking about deploying AI, increasing platform engagement, and delivering, well, most important, clear results for their organizations. Their experience are certainly amazing, but they offer practical blueprints on any organization as they're thinking about these challenges and preparing for what comes next. Stay with us. We're going to be back right in a moment for our customer panel