Prime Venture Partners Podcast
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Prime Venture Partners Podcast
How is AI changing Coursera and education? In conversation with Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda
In this exciting new episode, Shripati Acharya spoke to Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Coursera. @coursera is the world's leading online education company with 148 million registered learners globally, 7000+ courses from the top 325+ universities and companies.
Jeff Maggioncalda joined Coursera as CEO in June 2017, he previously served for 18 years as the founding CEO at Financial Engines Inc., a company co-founded by economist and Nobel Prize winner William Sharpe. Financial Engines grew rapidly under Jeff's leadership, providing high-quality online investment advice that has helped millions of people save and prepare for retirement.
Jeff has also worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company and Cornerstone Research, and serves as a director of SVB Financial Group. He holds an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a Bachelor's degree in Economics and English from Stanford University.
In this conversation, Jeff addresses three primary topics:
1) How GenAI and Coursera will transform education?
2) Future of Work and Education
3) The India Opportunity
Listen/watch the podcast to learn more about:
0:00 - AI Integration in Coursera Education
11:32 - Changing Role of Universities in Education
20:22 - Industry Micro-Credentials in Education
24:13 - Future Skills for Workforce and Education
34:53 - Future Business With Generative AI
42:46 - India is the Future Workforce of the World!
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Hello and welcome to Prime Podcast. My guest today is Jeff Maggioncalda. Jeff is the CEO of Coursera since 2017. He's the leading online education platform in the world. Jeff himself had a modest upbringing in Pacifica, which is a small town close to San Francisco and very foggy most of the time. He attended Stanford University, both for undergrad and later did his business school. At the Stanford School of Business, he started financial engines as a founding CEO, took the company public in 2010. And in 2017, after a lot of traveling with his wife and family, he joined Coursera. Thank you, jeff, for taking the time. I'm super excited to have you with us.
Jeff Maggioncalda:It's great to be here. I'm looking forward to our conversation
Shripati Acharya:we're going to talk about today is how is AI changing Coursera and education, which is a topic which is really top of mind for us, for a lot of our listeners. So let me start out with just asking, Jeff how is AI integrated into the Coursera's platform, I guess over the last year or two years, whatever duration you would like to pick- Well, I was just in Boston a couple of months ago.
Jeff Maggioncalda:The Harvard Business School just wrote a case on Coursera. It's called Coursera's Foray into Generative AI and you know how HBS cases go. You would know well it's sort of the behind the scenes what we did and how it happened in terms of understanding and then integrating AI into Coursera. But there's a wide range of ways that we are looking at this AI trend and how we can adapt to it, and I think if we don't adapt properly, it will be more likely a threat. If we do adapt well, it'll be more likely an opportunity. But there's a couple of different ways that we think about it. One is impact on jobs, and so a major thing obviously is to make sure that we have content for generative AI. So a major thing obviously is to make sure that we have content for generative AI and, unlike traditional AI, where the people most interested in the content were the builders of the models, and there are thousands of builders or millions of builders, but there aren't that many people building AI models compared to the number of people that will be using generative AI number of people that will be using generative AI. So generative AI is a much wider catalog of content and needs in order to help skill people up. So one major piece is what we call the generative AI academy for upskilling people in AI. Well, I'm sure we could talk more about that. We have the career academy, which we had prior to the launch of ChatGPT, but basically these are professional certificates to reskill people who want to switch careers or who want to start careers, and we do think many jobs in the coming year, two years, three years will likely be heavily automated, and so people might be looking for other jobs to get themselves into. So this is sort of reskilling. On the technology side, there's a number of things we did we to get themselves into, so this is sort of re-skilling.
Jeff Maggioncalda:On the technology side, there's a number of things we did. We jumped on language translation, so we've now translated about 5,000 courses into 22 languages. We could talk a little bit about that, but that's been amazing. The day after National Hindi Day, we announced Hindi as one of the languages that we translated. We did that a few months ago.
Jeff Maggioncalda:We have integrated something called Coach, which is a virtual tutor who helps you through the courses. It's integrated into every course and it's really amazing because in the course you can ask the little coach bot any question about the course and it actually grounds the answers in content from the course. So you really are getting answers that are grounded in the authority of the original instructor. So that's called Coach. We just did a big program today in Delhi on a product we call Course Builder. So this is generative AI to build courses. We could talk a lot about that. But not only will the way that people learn change, but the way that people teach will change as well, and we're working on, and we'll be announcing shortly, some big things on what we call academic integrity. So methods using generative AI to prevent people from cheating using chat. Gpt and universities are very interested in this. So those are some of the ways we've integrated, but we have many, many, many many features and I can talk in detail about them if you're interested.
Shripati Acharya:Let me ask you that's super interesting, especially the last part, because that seems like a really interesting product about academic integrity. Because the line between what is the original contribution, original work, artwork versus what has been actually created by GPT which is also original, I guess, but not by humans is going to blur very quickly. But let me ask you, jeff, what has been sort of the traction of some of these initiatives? Could you share with us?
Jeff Maggioncalda:of these initiatives could you share with us? Yeah, I'd say sort of in order. We have. On the Gen of AI Academy and the Gen of AI content we have four people every minute are enrolling in a Gen of AI course on Coursera and in India, someone every minute in India is enrolling in a Gen of AI course on Coursera. So clearly there is an incredible amount of interest in learning generative AI and, frankly, there's so much noise out there that I do think we're seeing a little bit of a flight to quality, which is, hey, I don't know who to really trust on this stuff. Let me go to people like Stanford or Google or Microsoft to get courses on this. So that's been wonderful. I'd say the hottest content on Coursera is Genovia content right now. On the translations, we are seeing millions of people taking the translated courses. I think 80% of the learners on Coursera come from countries where the primary language is not English. I mean, most of the world does not speak English, so this really opens up Coursera to a much, much wider audience of people who, frankly, didn't have access to the kinds of instruction that is available on Coursera. So that's been fantastic.
Jeff Maggioncalda:On the coach, we started programming it in January of 2023. We launched a pilot of it in May 2023. We have now rolled it out to almost everybody in the world in all channels. We're still pilot testing in Coursera for campus and we still might have a segment of our consumer base. We still might have a segment of our consumer base, but what we're finding with Coach is that people initially they don't understand what it does. They think of it as like a help bot or something, and many people have never used ChatGPT. But once they start using it, they use it for many things to summarize transcripts, to explain concepts.
Jeff Maggioncalda:You can practice your quiz items. Before you take the quiz, you could practice. There's a really cool thing where you can say how is this going to be relevant to my job? It'll personalize what you're learning to your job to tell you how the things you're learning could be applied to your job. So that has been really fantastic.
Jeff Maggioncalda:And then Course Builder and really fantastic. And then Course Builder. We just launched a couple months ago and we have hundreds of courses now are built using Course Builder. And we had actually a quote from one of our Coursera for Campus customers in India. This was on a webinar a few weeks ago that I was hosting and he said traditionally, crafting hyper-caliber courses necessitates approximately six months of work alongside a team possessing both educational and technological prowess. However, with CourseBuilder, I accomplished nearly 80% of it within a single week. It's a game changer. So this was a professor at one of the top universities in India, but what we're seeing is a world where professors are realizing the way they teach needs to change. More of it can be online. Those experiences can be far more interactive and Course Builder helps to facilitate that.
Shripati Acharya:That's fascinating. What I can foresee happening is that that barrier to creating courses is just going to keep coming down, and you'll probably have a plethora of courses coming up when that happens, Jeff. So a couple of things come to mind, which is that one of the challenges with online courses has been that the motivation of the student to complete the course is not there, which a live teacher is able to do. So how has the coach and the engineering AI in general helped in that particular aspect? Have you actually seen that needle moving?
Jeff Maggioncalda:Yeah, we have not seen the overall needle move yet with respect to course progression. That's on the broad numbers, when we talk to people who've used coach more than 100 times. So these are people who are like they figured it out and they really like it. They say that you know. Qualitatively, they say all the time like I would not have been able to finish the course if I didn't have that coach to speak to. So I'm quite confident that even if the technology stayed where it was today or where it is today and we're powering the coach right now with Azure OpenAI Services 3.5 Turbo. So you know it's a decent model, it's fast, we have very high capacity, it's low cost. But as these models get better and better, their ability to answer questions is going to approximate the ability of a human tutor to do it, and so a lot of our strategy with Course Builder and with language translation and definitely with Coach, is to build the experiences on top of Coursera, on Coursera that really don't, that are able to be kind of automatically updated when the foundation models improve. So we don't do a lot of fine tuning. We really have not yet done a lot of fine tuning. We are finding that the amount of value that we can deliver just by using retrieval, augmented generation, just kind of prompt engineering and loading up. The context in the prompt is amazing, and every time a new model comes out, the capabilities and the value delivery to the learner are higher and higher.
Jeff Maggioncalda:Now to your question about persistence. Interestingly perhaps, but not surprising when you think about it, the highest persistence are students taking Coursera courses when they get credit towards their college degree. In these cases, it's like 90% of students finish the course because they are committed to learning, they want to get their degree, and the things they're learning on Coursera will give them a certificate and the skills that are going to be a little bit more job relevant. So a lot of what the completion rate is about is the motivation of the learner, and so when you have the lowest rates are when you have an individual who's not paying. They're just kind of watching some videos probably not unlike YouTube, and they don't necessarily finish when they pay. The completion rates go way up. When they're a student taking it for credit towards their campus, it goes way, way up, and so that's a use case that we're seeing is very positive.
Shripati Acharya:So is there? I understand that Coursera has a number of partnerships with educational institutions some of the top names out there so is that something which is going to be a big thrust in terms of collaborating with them so that these courses become part of that curriculum in some way, shape or form?
Jeff Maggioncalda:Yeah, in the early days, coursera in 2012 was founded by two professors from Stanford, and when Coursera launched, there were a number of founding universities who all put content onto Coursera. At launch, it was Stanford, yale, duke, michigan and, I think, penn, who are all early founding partners, and in the early days, it was just universities putting courses on. That then expanded to now we have about 200 universities, including some of the best universities in India. We have IIM, ahmedabad, iit Guwahati, bits, palani, iit, rurki, iam, calcutta so lots of the best ITs and IAMs, and they're putting a lot of courses on.
Jeff Maggioncalda:What we're seeing, though, is in the early days of Coursera. Many years ago, the universities were suppliers of content, and now universities are becoming both suppliers and consumers of content. And now universities are becoming both suppliers and consumers of content, and what's interesting is, sometimes a university will license content that might be from Stanford, or maybe from Google or some other university, but increasingly, with the online learning becoming more popular for the students and the faculty, using tools like Course Builder, professors are using Coursera to both take content that's on Coursera to build a course for their students, but also mixing it with their own content that they've created, so it's almost like inviting guest lectures into their courses and they use Coursera content and Coursera generative ad capabilities with the course builder to build custom online courses that they tailor for their student populations.
Shripati Acharya:That's fascinating. So I can totally see that, because I can imagine when I was in college I could have these slides and maybe some audio visual occasionally, have these slides and maybe some audio visual occasionally, but the quality of that can be so much more and so much more customized to that particular course using Gen AI. What do you going forward? Then? We just compelled to ask what is the role of the teacher, in the sense that if I am a student and I'm going to chat, gpt or equivalent for some questions, I'm going to Coursera because there's not so much high quality content and what you're saying? The quality of content is going to just increase and the quantity is going to increase. I Google, you know, I search for GenAI, just that word. There are 726 courses in Coursera and over 400 of them are also available in Hindi, so there's a lot of content out there. So what do you think is going to be the course is going to be the role of the teacher and the role of the universities in this thing, in this milieu.
Jeff Maggioncalda:Well, I think the expansion of your question is spot on, because it is both the teacher and the university, the institution, that obviously have to be thinking about how their roles might change. When we think about what we deliver to learners around the world, we think, yeah, part of it's content, but the real benefit we're trying to provide is career advancement, the ability for people to learn things, to get better economic opportunity, and when you think about the stack of value in the value chain, clearly there's content that's like the teaching material. On top of that is what we call the learning experience, and that might be quizzes and videos and readings, and now we are integrating coach in there. So coach is helping to teach you like a TA would. We have labs, hands-on labs, where you write code and you can run simulations, and we have this new lab that we now have many projects that you can build, which is actually a generative AI lab where you can write prompts and do context grounding and things like that, with multiple models. So that's the learning experience. And then, on top of the learning experience, you're really trying to help people build competencies and skills, and so that's a big part of what we're trying to do.
Jeff Maggioncalda:And then, on top of the skills, there are credentials, and credentials are generally when you assess someone's skill. When an institution assesses someone's skill says they have demonstrated this skill to my satisfaction, you get a credential. It could be a college degree, it could be a university certificate, it could be an industry certification, and then usually it's the credential that signals that you have certain skills that helps you in your job. You'll use that. You'll use a college to get a job. You'll get a CFA if you want to be an investment manager. You'll get an AWS certification if you want to be a cloud architect. And so the thing about credentials is kind of credentials are a way of signaling sort of employable skills and a lot of what the institution I'll start with the institution.
Jeff Maggioncalda:A lot of what the academic institution is about is not just producing content but also creating a learning experience, and especially on campus, that learning experience is really an experience. It's often a residential experience and a lot of the role that the professor provides is partly a guide to help guide you through the kind of material that might be right for you. Also a supporter, someone who can give you support and help, sometimes a mentor, someone who is inspirational, that you develop a relationship with. But I do think that more and more, the professor will not be about the source and origin of expertise. There'll be some of that. It'll be much more about creating an experience with a group of expertise.
Jeff Maggioncalda:There'll be some of that. It'll be much more about creating an experience with a group of people and providing support and personalization and also, I think partly, it will be an experience it's kind of like if you go to a music show or if you do anything else where there's a live experience that you're experiencing. So I think that'll be a lot of it. It won't be so much what some people call the sage on the stage. It's going to be someone who creates an experience for you to help you learn the things you need to. So I'd say that the professor will be more about creating experiences and the institution will certainly create a space for the experience, but largely will be about creating structured learning programs that deliver credentials, valid, valuable, recognized employment signals to help you with your career.
Shripati Acharya:So I think that makes sense. I love your analogy with the live concert versus recorded music. Actually, that does send a message home. When you talk about the experience, and I feel that, just taking that further, the universities and colleges have to focus on that experience. Then it cannot be delivering, as you say, from a podium and then you know a whole bunch of students taking notes and then taking an exam and off you go. So it also would then imply that the competition between the universities should all should potentially become higher, because the online universities, which can actually do the credentialing, as you're talking about, offline universities which can provide a better experience, and then, of course, we have a gradation of the elite universities and then the lower ones. Any thoughts on how you expect that to change or shake out?
Jeff Maggioncalda:Yeah, you know, especially in India, where I have spent quite a bit of time. If we think about the college degree as sort of a bundle of sources of value or layers of value in a value chain, I see, more in India than any place else, an unbundling where you certainly can go to a single university, take courses only on campus, All the courses come from that one university and you get a degree from the university. That's the more traditional vertically integrated model. I think what's going to happen, though it's not going to go all unbundled, but we definitely see, first of all, many universities saying hey, there's a lot of topics that my students need to be learning and I don't have the faculty to teach them, Whether that's Bitcoin or whether that's cybersecurity or now, especially, generative AI, neuromodels. I mean, there's just so many topics that are coming so quickly and industry pays a lot of money for this expertise, so it's very expensive to build a faculty team in data science, AI, computer science, et cetera. So many schools will integrate emerging topics and technologies from other universities. But another thing that we're seeing is what people are calling industry micro-credentials, where not only might a university say I want to bring an online course in from Duke. We have a course that's called Machine Learning for Product Managers. Not many universities can offer a course called machine learning for product managers, let alone machine learning, and so in many cases the university will bring in an online course from a university, but in many cases they'll bring in courses from industry. So we have a number of micro-credentials. We have about 40 of them, which are job training programs from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, others. This is like a 50-hour training program to be a front-end software developer for Meta. Or Google has a great program called the Google Data Analyst Certificate. Microsoft has a certificate program to become a Microsoft Power BI data analyst and we have let's see Google has one on UX design and Meta has one on social media marketing. So these are what we call career electives, the online courses, and they're actually professional certificate programs that are typically five to 10 courses. They get put right into the university curriculum for credit so that, essentially, students can almost take an internship while they're studying and get instruction from industry around the skills to do a particular job, and so we're seeing this really neat blend of on-campus and online, and the online is coming from both universities and industry players. So that's the online piece. The other thing I think you're going to see a lot more of is even on the experiential side. You'll see certain universities or like.
Jeff Maggioncalda:There's a company called Scalar, which some people might be familiar with, who listen to the podcast. We have an online degree with IIT Guwahati. It's a bachelor's with honors in data science and AI. It's fully online. The degree comes from IIT Guwahati. Scalar teaches that degree online in a residential program Taught by industry practitioners. So your program is like a set of dorms but it's not a university. The instructors are industry practitioners. So your program is like a set of dorms but it's not a university. The instructors are industry practitioners, but the online components all come from IIT Guwahati and the degree comes from IIT Guwahati. So it's a really interesting layering of it's a residential experience. The degree is online and you're getting instructed from industry practitioners who are brought to you by Scalar.
Shripati Acharya:It's fascinating. I'm actually reminded when you went to Stanford as well, and so Stanford had this way back in the 90s, the Stanford SITN, if you remember that, I do Stanford Instructional Television Network.
Shripati Acharya:Absolutely. And one of the things which actually was a study on SITN I'm just reminded of it where they took students who had taken live courses and they took students who had just listened to a recorded course, and a third group was students who were being played an SIT and tape. At that time, these were VHS tapes which you'd go in time, these are VHS tapes which would go in, and there was actually a person in the industry and in a small room where, using the tape, the person and then pausing at the right moments and engaging and asking questions, and they found that the outcomes were the highest in the third group, even more so than the live group, and I feel that what you're saying is actually spot on. So you can actually see that the content creation, content delivery, just gets completely disaggregated and then now you can have the best folks who are actually doing the content delivery and for the students as well, because they are doing it where they are versus actually having done it.
Jeff Maggioncalda:Absolutely yeah, and it is both the conceptual learning which is often more durable, but then the application of that with hands-on tools. Whether you're writing SQL or whether you're using Photoshop, the idea is you can learn the concepts and you comply them, apply them all on the Coursera platform, and now, with Coach, you can even have interactive. Anytime you want. You can stop, pause the video, you can ask coach a question about what you're seeing, and we also have something where you can take the coach conversation and copy it right to notes, which are a permanent record. So as you're going through a course, you're watching the video. You could be rewinding it. You can get summaries, you can get explanations, you can copy those explanations to notes and then we could do flashcards, which quizzes you on the notes that you took before the quizzes you could do pre-practice.
Jeff Maggioncalda:I mean, it is all. And this is not like in the future. This is right now you watch, like last week the OpenAI spring update came out and I've been playing around. Not playing around, I've been using a chat, gpt plus with a GPT4.0, the voice mode when I'm driving.
Jeff Maggioncalda:And I'll tell you what I spend my time in the car talking to GPT-4.0 about my day, about what I'm planning to do, about things I'm thinking about. It's amazing. And what you can also do that people don't realize is you can take a document and you could paste it in as text to the beginning of the conversation thread. That grounds it says now it has information that is not on in the LLM and you can ask about it. So the other day I was driving and I had a. I had a workshop I was going to be facilitating and I had the agenda.
Jeff Maggioncalda:I pasted the agenda into GPT-4 before I started driving. I loaded it, then I started talking to GPT-4 about my agenda. I said what do you think of this agenda? Here are my objectives. Where do you think I should structure my time differently? And it was incredibly valuable talking as I'm driving. And then at the end I had a written transcript of the whole thing, because the actual conversation thread gets stored as a textual thread. So it's really wild and this is all going to be migrating into the Coursera platform in a matter of weeks and months.
Shripati Acharya:The role of voice as an interaction medium, I think is just going to skyrocket because it's such a more natural and more efficient way of interacting with computers.
Shripati Acharya:One of the other things which you mentioned, I feel which has been a gap for educational institutions, is just connecting with the vocational industry, of course, with what the industry relevance is and, from what you're saying, the ability for teachers to create this content can make it so relevant, because the industry is changing, the course is not changing at the same speed and it just tends to lag, and being able to connect that with what's happening in industries is so powerful. So let me ask you, jeff, that what skills, so obviously the education, the delivery, the education institutions themselves are going to get? You know it's going to change, you're going to get disrupted or change. But what do you think is going to happen now to the workforce? Because what skills do you believe will be critical for the workforce of the future? Because if you are graduating today from college, what should you be focusing on getting into college, what should you be focusing on?
Jeff Maggioncalda:Well, I think there's another factor. I mean skills is part of it, which we'll talk about in just a sec. There's another part, which is cost of skills. So what does an employer have to pay for a certain bundle of skills? So one of the things I will say is that the types of skills that are most in demand will be shifting, just as with machines, repetitive mechanical tasks became not very valuable because robots started doing them. The more predictable cognitive tasks, especially those using media, language, sound, audio, video, like a lot of what Coursera does, you really are going to see, like with call centers and things like that, we're already seeing big displacement of jobs because if you're working purely in spoken language, these models are incredibly good at that. You know.
Jeff Maggioncalda:On the software engineering side, I've been hearing more and more some people estimate that Copilot can produce a 25-ish percent productivity gain among reasonably good programmers as the models get better. That will change If you train the models on your own code repository. Apparently it gets better. I was talking to the head of Microsoft Copilot a couple of weeks ago, but right now the value of being able to really think conceptually as a software engineer and McKinsey suggests this as well says that the demand for software engineers will continue to go up, even as bundles of tasks that a software engineer performs will be automated. But this gets me to a broader point, which is cost of labor. Once COVID happened, companies learned how to work remotely, and now many companies are trying to get people to come back to the office, with varying levels of success. But what we're seeing is a globalization of talent. Number one companies are more used to having employees working in different time zones all over the world, often remotely. Number two with generative AI, the ability to especially up-level people who have less experience is pretty considerable. Business School and BCG has shown that those knowledge workers who benefit the most are typically knowledge workers with lower levels of experience. So if you look at the Indian this is where I get to now what's going to happen with global labor. I think that there's going to be a huge transfer of jobs from developed countries, especially entry-level jobs, the jobs that don't require as advanced thinking or experience with systems architecture. I think those jobs are going to start really migrating more towards places like India, because it won't be fully automated, but well-trained people, even if they don't have a lot of experience using these tools, will be able to provide value for a much lower price than what you'd have to pay for, say, an entry-level software engineer in the US. So I think there'll be a shift in labor markets. It'll benefit India, I believe, and other regions like India.
Jeff Maggioncalda:And the kinds of skills to your question now, the kinds of skills to be learning, I would say for sure, everybody needs to be doing critical thinking with generative AI. I'm a little bit biased because I wrote a course called you know using generative AI as your thought partner, and it describes how to do this. But a lot of people think that generative AI is only for, like, writing an email. But I use it as a thought partner. I literally run my point of view against the model and I ask questions. Where are my blind spots? What might be the counter argument? How might I better support this point? Here's my audience and I'm planning to say this. What might not be very clear about what I'm saying? So the ability to shape ideas, challenge ideas, articulate ideas, integrate ideas, summarize ideas, it's a thinking tool. It's not just an email writer, certainly not just a search engine. So I think everybody will need to learn that kind of critical thinking using generative AI tools People who work with language, media, et cetera.
Jeff Maggioncalda:They're going to have to do their jobs very differently, so there'll be a lot of tooling that they're going to need. More broadly, human skills will be important. Working with teams, influencing people, leading and managing will never be the same, because the rate of change is so fast. I think leadership and management will be really important. Communication and teamwork, collaboration really important. Persistence, focus, time management, self-discipline will be really important. Frankly, I think maintaining one's physical and mental health will be important, just so you could be a highly productive, highly effective employee at work. And then, of course, technical fluency will also still be fairly important.
Shripati Acharya:I love that articulation. So you need to know how to use Gen AI as your superpower, because for your and actually it's not Even people who are experienced are only experienced in one area. You're always good in one area and less experienced in a lot of other areas, and so generative AI just provides this boost in all these disciplines and the soft skills which you're talking about teamwork, leadership, motivation, inspiring folks, working with them, understanding, listening I guess those things will continue to be very relevant and in fashion from what you're saying.
Jeff Maggioncalda:Absolutely. As a CEO, I often say that my job to build a culture is to really create a company that can learn, change and grow. It's sort of this iterative, almost experimental-based way of growing, and for an individual, it's the same thing To a large degree. Companies will need to be continually changing because the technology and the landscape and the competition and the customers are changing. So building a company for agility is critical. That means learn, change, grow the kinds of people who can learn, change and grow. It's not just learning. Some people say, oh, we want to just hire learners. It's not just about learning. There's a capacity to learn, a capacity to change and a capability to drive results, like that's what companies are really looking for. It's all three of those things Learn and change and grow as an individual, so you can do the same for the institution.
Shripati Acharya:Let me segue from there to India. That's how significant India is for Coursera.
Jeff Maggioncalda:Well, it's extremely important. We have about 25 million people who have registered on Coursera, who are learners in India. More than all of Europe are about. Tied, it's about the same and it's growing faster. So there's no question that in the very near term, india will be a bigger representation than almost than any other country than the United States and it's going to be catching on the United States as well than almost than any other country than the United States and it's gonna be catching on the United States as well. So that's really key. As I was saying too, just the number of people and the culture of education and the relatively high incidence of English speaking and the lower cost of labor is gonna make India a really, really valuable source of human capital for the world. And I think what's going to be fascinating and we'll see if this turns out. But I've run this by a few people and so far I was like oh, that's a pretty interesting way to look at it. I think about the evolution of businesses and industries with Gen AI and I kind of put it in a number of different phases. Phase one I call conversation Everyone's talking about ChatGPT. Phase two experimentation Everyone's playing with ChatGPT and CEOs start feeling oh, I'm in good shape because we're experimenting with it. Stage three I call separation. Suddenly, certain companies who have really embraced it effectively start pulling away from their competitors, and not because they're cutting their costs more. It's going to be more because they're creating experiences and value for customers that is far superior to what their competitors are doing. Then the other companies are like oh my gosh, we're in trouble, and that's what I call delegation. They'll start delegating the training, they'll delegate a lot of the strategy work to the big consultancies.
Jeff Maggioncalda:I think the big consultancies are in really a great position and then the final phase for many companies is going to be what I call capitulation, where their human talent say in Germany, say in France, where, if you have a population of workers who does not change very quickly, partly because maybe there's not an incentive to change or there's just frictions in the labor markets I think what those companies are going to start doing is they're going to be outsourcing entire functions to places like India, but I don't think it's going to be a total gig economy.
Jeff Maggioncalda:I think the big consultancies will be doing structured Gen of AI training programs for millions of people and they're going to be always up on the latest tools, the latest Gen of AI, the latest efficient processes, and then companies around the world will rent talent pools that are cutting edge, lower cost and effectively using generative AI, and I think they'll do it through the consultancy. So we'll see if that's the way it turns out, but that's how I can kind of see this going is that fortune will favor the fast, and many companies will realize the frictions that they're facing in terms of talent. Agilities are too high, and so they'll look for managed talent pools in places like India.
Shripati Acharya:That's fascinating actually. So what you're saying is that, if I may paraphrase that, not only when you're using consulting, I would say you also think that the services companies right would actually because that's technical consulting in some sense right would probably do very well, and one of the reasons is that the underlying rate of change of tech is going to continue to be high and to keep pace with it just becomes so difficult. Did I get that?
Jeff Maggioncalda:right, absolutely. And I think the big consultancies, the professional services firms, they are already pretty well built for change. They have very good global recruitment. They have great training programs. They know how to get someone client ready, deploy them, keep them up. They're our best customers. I mean, most of the big consultancies use Coursera to train all their professional service people, so I can see this happening. They're ahead of the other companies and to your point, I think that they might gain so much efficiency and effectiveness by the way they can train and harness low-cost labor to be very effective at using these Genovii tools that that will be a very attractive source for human capital for industries around the world.
Shripati Acharya:And perhaps one more thing, just in extrapolating from that, would be that even industries the old world industries has perhaps not used consultants and technical help from outside might now be in a situation where they can go ahead and do that.
Jeff Maggioncalda:What I've seen in my career I've been a CEO for almost 30 years and I will tell you that in 2008, 2007, we had a team in Noida who was doing some software coding for us. But you know all they were. First of all, they were not full-time employees of the company that's called Financial Engines at the time, and they were just writing test regression scripts. That's all they did. They were very, very specified test regression scripts just to make sure our software code didn't have regressions in it. When we launched new code, that was all they did At Coursera.
Jeff Maggioncalda:Fast forward today with Coursera we have probably over 400 people in India and this is not just in software. It's in software sales, customer service, finance, legal strategy, ux, design, product management, every function. In our company we have large groups of people in India. They're a fully integrated part of our whole workforce and it's extremely effective. And to your point, these big professional services firms, they're not going to have to just outsource the really mechanical, repeatable things anymore. I really think that the value add of the kinds of services that will be provided by these consulting firms, of course there'll be the strategy consulting, but the business processing outsourcing will be not just like very routine, automatable processes. They're going to be knowledge workers, like big groups of knowledge workers, who can be using these generative AI tools to just be far more effective in the way that they work.
Shripati Acharya:Wonderful. So, coming towards the end of the conversation here, Jeff, I'd love to continue going on and on. I mean, it has been absolutely fascinating having this discussion. Tell me that Financial Times called you a nomadic CEO. So I want to know are you still traveling? Is Coursera still mostly remote work? What is it like?
Jeff Maggioncalda:Yeah, so we work from anywhere. So we do have offices. We have an office in Gurgaon. It was interesting, though I was in Bangalore recently and we have I don't know 30 to 50 people in Bangalore and we don't have an office. And I was meeting with folks.
Jeff Maggioncalda:Everybody in Coursera gets a WeWork pass or an otherwise flexible office space pass so they can work where. If they don't want to work at home, they can work someplace else. And I asked them. I said hey, wow, we have enough people, we should probably get an office. And they said don't get an office. Don't get an office. They said because no matter where the office is, someone's going to have to drive two hours. Even if they live in Bangalore, they're going to have to drive two hours just to get to the office because the traffic can be so difficult.
Jeff Maggioncalda:So we are a remote work company. We do offer the ability for people to get together. We have meetups, we have hubs, we do have an office in Gurgaon, but for the most part we're remote. And for me, you know I travel around a ton doing a number of things. I meet with customers, I help do sales, I meet with our local teams, I do PR and press, meet with our partners. I mean I've met with most of the big universities in India Not most because there's a lot, but I you know 10, 20 who are our partners and so you know, when I travel I really get to experience businesses and governments and campuses and learners, the press and prospects as well. So it's fun and I'm still traveling a ton.
Shripati Acharya:Wonderful. So, in closing, what excites you most about Coursera's mission?
Jeff Maggioncalda:You know, I'll tell you it's a little thrilling. And if you look at our stock price, I mean clearly there are folks thinking, as with almost all of edtech now, that Gen of AI is going to reduce the overall value of edtech players. What I think is kind of thrilling is the possibility that that could happen, but the possibility that the opposite could happen. What I can say for sure, independent of our value, what I can say for sure we are right now delivering learning experiences and creating content that I thought would never have happened in my lifetime the capabilities to serve learners, to translate things, to offer interactive programming and interactive tutoring and quiz preparation, all these kinds of things. I'll even give you one other example. We are just now testing a feature which is an oral exam After you submit an assignment on Coursera. We're doing this for our university customers who are like, hey, people might be cheating with ChatGPT. We said well, first, yeah, grade the assignment that got turned in, but then interview them and ask about their thought process. How did you?
Shripati Acharya:create that assignment? How did you?
Jeff Maggioncalda:determine your thesis and the coach reads their submission and then starts quizzing them like you're defending your dissertation. It's a Viva exam and so it actually quizzes you about your submission. So it checks not only the output but the thought process. These are the kinds of things that are happening right now. As the models get better, the value that we could deliver is going to be just better and better and better and better. What's kind of fun to me is we could do this directly for individuals, but with Coursera for Campus. Coursera can bring a platform to any college university in the world and suddenly they can harness all the power of generative AI for not only teaching but also for their students to be learning, and not only the pedagogy but also all the generative AI content to teach those students the skills. So we see ourselves as a real transformation partner for higher education.
Shripati Acharya:I think increasing access and letting people advance in their careers and really achieve their potential. I think that's probably one of the most satisfying things to be working on, and so I can totally see and understand your enthusiasm and excitement to be leading that change. So thank you, Jeff, for sharing your insights on how AI is transforming education and Coursera's seminal role in making it possible across the globe for all the learners. It was terrific chatting with you.
Jeff Maggioncalda:Thank you. Thank you so much for having me and I really enjoyed the conversation. These are exciting times.