Coursera CEO Greg Hart on the Udemy Deal, the Skills Economy and the Future of Online Education

On this episode of After Earnings, Coursera, the digital education platform, navigating a world of learning that's being reshaped by ai. I'm joined by CEO Greg Hart to talk about where online education is headed, how Coursera is positioned within a rapidly changing skills economy and what the company's upcoming combination with Udemy means for learners, enterprises and creators. We also explore how Coursera is using generative AI inside its products and the company's approach to scaling and monetization. Let's get into it. Greg, I'm really excited to chat you for lots of different reasons. You've just had a terrific quarter, but I wanted to set the stage for folks to have you paint a picture for us what is going on in the world of digitized education, whereas is Coursera positioned within it. And I want to talk to you about the fact that stock prices have just been punished over the last year or more with worries that AI is going to displace so much digital content, which I'm sure is a frustrating experience for you and your team. And I wanted to really sort of dig into your strategy to figure out how it is you can try to win in this kind of environment. But starting with Coursera, talk to us about where it is that you are positioned in the digital education space.

First of all, thank you, Anne for hosting me here is fantastic to be with you. So we think of Coursera as being part of the far broader overall education space. We happen to do that in online, but we compete with everything from physical education to vocational schools to potentially LLMs YouTube, TikTok, et cetera. And so a very broad space that we operate in. Our particular point of differentiation stems from our founding. And so our co-founders, Andrew Ing and Daphne Kohler were professors at Stanford. And in 2012 they had the idea of what if we took a course that we created and made it available to everybody around the world. And so thus the MOOC movement was born and out of that grew Coursera. And over time we've augmented content from the best universities and colleges around the world with fantastic content from industry partners, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, meta, IBM, Adobe, et cetera. And what we offer to our learners, whether they're consumer learners or enterprise learners is a catalog of now over 13,500 different courses that's grown 45 plus percent year over year in a huge range of different domains. We certainly have a lot of interest from learners around the world in technology courses. So AI specifically, we've seen a massive increase in interest in AI courses. Not surprisingly, over the course of 2025, we averaged 15 enrollments per minute in AI related courses on Coursera. So a massive demand on Coursera that's reflecting what's happening in the broader world.

And you are in the thick of a deal. It was made public of course, that you are at Coursera uniting with Udemy, which has a different origin story than you do and has had a different focus. Udemy has been more focused on some external creators coming together with more of a B2C environment at Coursera, you've focused on the halo of institutions that are very well recognized. How do you think about bringing those two together, Greg?

Well, Udemy has a really interesting approach that we've long admired, and so I think there's some really unique aspects to that that we're excited about as we combine with Udemy. So they have 85,000 plus content creators from around the world. They're subject matter experts in their given fields, and they create content at a really rapid pace. And we have 375 different institutions, whether they're universities or companies that are creating content on Coursera. And so there are benefits to each of those approaches. The combination of the two offers a far broader array of content to learners around the world. And so we believe that the combination will really provide more value to every single constituent in our value chain. From a learner perspective, you get access to not just the 13,500 courses that we have on Coursera, but also the hundreds of thousands of courses that Udemy offers from their SME network globally.

(04:22)
Often those courses are also being created natively in a far broader array of languages than we tend to have on Coursera. So a much broader array of catalog of content that you can access as a learner. And increasingly both companies have really focused on skill delivery and how do you learn not just for the sake of learning, but because you want to grow your career? 86% of the learners who come to Coursera come to advance their career. And what we find, our learner outcomes report that we just published for 2025 shows that 46% of the people who enroll in a course on Coursera see a salary increase following enrollment in that course and engaging in that content. And so we're very focused, and Udemy is also similarly focused on delivering skills that help people advance and grow their careers.

And so when we think about who your customer base is, you've obviously got the end user, Greg, the kind of individual, you talked about seeing this uplift as a result of the education they're having on your platform, but who's footing the bill? How much is it individuals who are paying for the benefit of Coursera's content versus its enterprises coming to you and enrolling essentially in a human capital management program with you?

Well, that's a great question. It's actually really interesting when you think about the combination with Udemy. So for Coursera, two thirds of our business is individual consumers, and a third of our business is enterprise. For Udemy, it's the inverse. Two thirds of their business is enterprise and one third is consumer. So when we bring the two companies together, we'll have, if you look at 2025 revenue for the two companies, 1.5 billion in revenue across the two companies, they're roughly the same size and it will be 50% consumer, 50% enterprise. So a much more balanced approach to the business. And one of the things that we're excited about is right now both companies are investing in many of the same things, and by bringing them together, we'll be able to actually make much faster progress and innovate far faster on behalf of our learners, on behalf of our enterprise customers and on behalf of our content creators as well.

Do you see a big difference, Greg, in terms of the velocity with which your content creators are able to provide content that keeps up with the pace of change? You've talked a lot and we should talk about it, about leaning into providing skills training in a world of ai, fewer users, and there's a perception that perhaps academic institutions, it just takes a long time sometimes for their review processes or their brand protection review processes to take place. Are you finding that your partners are keeping up fast enough with the change that we're seeing in the real world?

Well, I think that's one of the things that we're honestly most excited about with the combination with Udemy is that our partners historically bring a couple things that are really valuable, but speed of content creation isn't necessarily their core skillset. And so our university professor partners, whether they come from Stanford or Penn or Michigan or Yale, university of Virginia, Vanderbilt, et cetera, create phenomenal content with deep pedagogical rigor that is fantastic at delivering learning with real meat behind it and really helps people master those skills. But those courses tend to be longer form. Oftentimes, they would resemble something that might be taught physically at those institutions. That's one of the reasons that we have continued to augment our university offering with content from our industry partners, whether that's Google or Deep Learning or Microsoft or Meta, Amazon, et cetera. And we find that those courses tend to be on topics that are more of the moment.

(08:07)
Typically technology topics, whether it's AI related or cloud computing related, crypto networking, data, cybersecurity, et cetera, those courses tend to be more technically current and they also tend to be created at a faster clip. With Udemy, you can sort of take that to the next level because their network of global subject matter experts, oftentimes this is their core profession. They are content creators, they're deeply knowledgeable in their fields and this is their livelihood. And so they are creating courses at a really rapid clip. So for example, Claude Opus 4.6 just came out undoubtedly, there are courses already available on Udemy that are covering that and what is the on that? How do you use it most effectively? And so the combination of the two brings a mix of longer form courses and shorter form courses and also courses that I think blend really deep pedagogical academic standards with of the moment updates on things that you really need to stay current on.

And how much Greg will your content partners, particularly from the enterprise side, like the Googles, like the Metas, we should talk about philanthropic. At what point do they become possibly competitors to you? Some of the names that you mentioned seem to be leaning into a strategy of either hiring or training their own employees to become content creators in order to educate potential users on how to use Claw, for example, and they seem to be picking up traction on platforms like Twitter, so X formerly known as Twitter, for example, to reach these audiences directly. What do you think about that in terms of their strategy versus yours?

We work with Anthropic, we work with Open ai, we work with Microsoft, we work with Google, and so we're certainly no stranger to having relationships with companies that have a multifaceted approach. I think in all of their cases, they are recognizing and seeing in their data that learning is one of the most popular use cases that people come to their LLM to accomplish. I also think that they want to make sure that people know how to use the tools that they're creating as effectively as possible. So I would anticipate that all of them will continue to create courses and to create training that helps people use their technology tools. All of them are also generally creating courses that are available on Coursera to do the same. We have courses from Microsoft, we have courses from Google, we have courses from Anthropic and with OpenAI. We have courses that we've helped co-develop with them for OpenAI and their partnership with Walmart to enable Walmart employees to benefit from training on AI and then also for educators.

(11:01)
And so we help them develop those courses and those courses are also available on Coursera itself in addition to being available through OpenAI. So we anticipate that that will continue to be the case, and we think that we have a lot to offer to every one of those partners because of the fact that we grew out of higher education. We bring an approach to learning that is really focused on not just surface level understanding, but deep mastery of a given subject matter and assessment and verification of that skill, which is the direction very much that we're traveling in.

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Well, we've evolved over the course of the past year since I joined as CEO last February. We've evolved in a couple important ways to provide more access to learners around the world and to make our offering more affordable to them. So one of the things that we did is in August we rolled out adjustments to our pricing internationally. Historically, coursera's pricing had been a straight FX translation of our US dollar price into whatever the local currency was. The challenge is obviously that in many countries, purchasing power is not at all equivalent, and so it made Coursera really inaccessible to a large portion of learners in those countries, and so in August in 60 countries around the world, we adjusted that price to make it much more in line with local purchasing power. We also continue to focus on enabling Coursera to be purchased through more local currency methods as well and payment instruments.

(13:55)
So that's a big focus for us and that's been a positive for our business and obviously for learners in those countries. The other thing that we did is we moved to sort of a first module of a course free approach, and we believe that provides a much better chance for people to understand the value that a given course can provide to them and then decide if they want to pay for it. Multiple years ago, we started investing in and really growing Coursera Plus, which is our subscription product that's available both monthly and annually, and we now see that more than 50% of our consumer revenue comes from our Coursera subscription offering. We'll continue to grow that, that we believe provides the best value to learners because of the breadth of content that's available in it and therefore enables them to get the most out of that subscription.

(14:46)
When you think about advertising, obviously the ad model is a valuable one in many different types of industries. Previously, one of the roles I had in my past was leading Amazon's prime video business on a global basis, and so very familiar with content consumption globally and also ad models in support of that. It's something that I think we'll look at. It may be the right thing for certain pieces of our content in certain countries. It's not something that is on the near term horizon for us, but as we combine with Udemy, that'll certainly be one of the things that we think about for the longer term. Does it make sense to do that? If so, where and what that might that look like from a learner experience and also from a content creator perspective as well.

I have a slightly cheeky question for you, Greg, but I'm going to ask it anyway. I'm looking at your financials and in terms of your cashflow generation for fiscal year 2025, over $78 million. That profile obviously will change for 26 with the combination with Udemy, your adjusted EBITDA is a standalone company just under 64 million, and I'm looking at the market cap right now with Chegg, which is $87 million. Is there a world in which we see you taking some of your free cash flow and doing more acquisitions because you are in a space where we're seeing some assets trading almost at distress levels or highly stressed levels right now? Is there an opportunity for you to go out and consolidate the sector and be the last man standing?

Well, I think there's an opportunity for us to certainly use our cashflow both the existing cash on the balance sheet, but also the cash generation capabilities of Coursera as a standalone company. And Udemy obviously the first acquisition, the first combination is getting that over the line. We announced it in December and we're awaiting regulatory approvals and then shareholder approvals before we can close that acquisition, and then we'll be very focused on integration. However, we do believe there is absolutely an opportunity to use cash as a means to drive growth, whether those are other companies in our existing space or companies in adjacent spaces that we think could add real value to our offering in particular value to our enterprise customers, we see a real opportunity to use our cash for that. And we will have, the combined companies would have a revenue profile of 1.5 billion for 2025, free cashflow generation of roughly 10% for 2025 across the two and a margin profile from an EBITDA margin perspective of roughly 10% free synergies. And so we believe that as we recognize, we communicated $115 million of synergies that we expect to achieve within the first two years, and we expect to achieve a majority of that within the first year post-close. So the EBITDA margin profile is going to continue to improve and that'll generate good cashflow as well. And so that gives us a real opportunity to think about how we can use inorganic means to keep growing the company and increasing our revenue growth rate.

I've just heard it's worth me asking these cheeky questions, Greg, because you're being a good sport about leaning into respond to them. Can we talk a little bit too about just Coursera's performance as a stock, and just to put that in context, again, this was a strong set of earnings you just released, but your share price is down over 20% over the last 12 months or so. You're not alone in this, and we're seeing a lot of digitally native companies, frankly, getting market reactions that must be frustrating in the seat of an operator like you who's working hard or delivering the results you set out and communicate you're going to achieve. But if share price isn't getting rewarded, what do you say to the market? What do you say to your investors in terms of trying to crowd out perhaps sector or sentiment anxiety versus honing in on your own specific performance and deliverables?

Well, you can only control what you can control, first of all, and so we are focused very much on improving our performance. Jeff Bezos at Amazon was very fond of saying to Amazon employees, in quoting Benjamin Graham in the short term, the stock market is a voting machine in the long term, it's a weighing machine, and so you want to focus on delivering value over the long run. That's been a big focus since I joined Coursera of how do we improve the fundamentals of this business. I think you've seen that reflected in three consecutive quarters of 10% year over year revenue growth, q2, Q3, and q4. And also the fact that when we started a year ago on my first call with investors in April of 2025, our forecast at that time was revenue for the full year of 720 to 730 million, which represented growth at the midpoint of 4%.

(19:42)
We ended up delivering $757 million of revenue for the full year. So we ended up delivering 9% revenue growth year over year. And on the margin side, our initial forecast was to go from 6% adjusted EBITDA margin for full year 2025 to 7%, so a hundred basis points of year over year improvement versus 2024. We ended up increasing our guide to 8% in our Q3 call, and then we ended up delivering 8.4% for full year. So we expanded margin by 240 basis points a year over year, while also increasing growth rate in the back three quarters of the year. And so we are very focused on executing in a very disciplined way on how do we improve the fundamentals of the business and how do we drive higher revenue growth while also continuing to deliver operating leverage? That's what you might've heard me talk about on yesterday's call.

(20:34)
That's what we were focused on. If we are able to do that consistently and demonstrate that to investors, I'm very confident that our stock over time will be valued very differently. There's an overhang over the entire sector right now. There's an overhang over many tech companies right now. I think it's a little reductive to think that only three or four companies will literally build everything of value on the world down the road, which is I think something that's impacting a lot of stocks right now. And I think there, there's room to have success in a lot of different sectors that leverage gen AI to do that, but they aren't reduced to just going through the front door of an LLM.

Can you give us some really specific examples, Greg, of how gen AI specifically will be used in the content creation piece of your business? We sort of understand on the productivity side and the overhead side, but specifically do you have as a company a philosophical view for example, on using only real humans in front of the camera to teach versus gen AI videos? Do you have a North star on this? Just talk to us about that specifically, if you don't mind.

Sure. One of the things that Coursera much to its credit did very quickly after chat GPT first launched back in November of 2022, was really invest in a number of different gen AI driven features that are front and center within the product experience today. So Coursera coach is an AI driven tutor that rides alongside the learner in pretty much every course on Coursera. And so we are already leveraging Gen AI to help learners as they go through courses today. Those courses are obviously being taught by university professors or our industry partners, but Gen AI is a part of that learning experience, and we believe that gen AI is a fantastic way to improve the learning experience for learners. If you think about prior to 2022 what the best possible learning experience would've been, I think most people would've described the learning experience that is probably an amazing engaging professor in a very small classroom where they're engaging not just in a lecture style, but in a very interactive style with the students in that classroom.

(22:48)
With Gen ai, you can now recreate that type of dynamic in a fully online space. And so one of the things that we are spending a lot of time investing in is what is the future of the learning experience in a world where gen AI makes things that didn't used to be possible, not just possible, but actually really enriching and engaging from a course creation perspective. Another feature that the company rolled out shortly after the launch of chat GBT in 2022 was Course Builder, which is a gen AI driven course creation capability that can take existing material that whether it's a university professor or an industry professor or leader or one of our enterprise partners can leverage to create fantastic content. And one of the things that our enterprises often do is they will blend content that they have within their organization with different modules from different courses available on to create custom learning paths for their employees as they look to upskill or reskill them. So we are very bullish on the impact that genai can have across Coursera to improve outcomes for learners and to deliver a better outcome as well for our content creator partners and for our enterprise customers.

Lemme phrase the question, Greg, with a little bit more specificity in terms of a parallel. iHeart Media, which is the publicly traded company, has a lot of the radio stations in the US has implemented something that's called a guaranteed human policy, which literally bans AI generated music. That's a sound we hear synthetic voices and AI driven personalities across its radio stations and podcasts. It'll not let its listeners hear an AI voice, a non-human voice come through the radio, but that kind of specificity. Do you at Coursera have a perspective as to a ban on AI generated videos or voices coming through to your students?

No, absolutely. We don't. We use AI right now as a great example. We have both machine language translation of text that's obviously leveraging AI to do that, but then we also have AI dubbing. And so one of the ways that we use AI today is to take content that was created by an instructor in a given language and use AI dubbing to translate that natively. And so we have fantastic examples of Andrew Ang, one of our co-founders, his courses, he teaches all of them in English, but we have now translated those via AI dubbing into French, Spanish, Portuguese, and multiple different languages, and we want to keep doing that. And we also augment with Coach, we augment the learning experience with Coach, and so the learner is engaging back and forth with coach, and they're doing that sometimes via text. They can do that via video and via audio as well.

(25:46)
We also have role play and dialogue. And so dialogue is something where the instructor can recognize that they want to insert into their course something that basically leverages Socratic teaching principles, but the instructor isn't personally online with that learner with all the learners. And so they leverage AI to do that through dialogue. And so the AI effectively takes over using the parameters of the course that the instructor has created. Role play does the same thing. It can be learner initiated, it can be instructor initiated, but it's a chance for a learner to say, I want to get more practice on this thing, so I want to engage in role play back and forth. And so you can envision yourself in an interviewing type scenario or a sales type scenario where the AI is giving you feedback after you've gone through the actual interview or role-play session on how you performed. And so we believe that AI can absolutely be used to enhance all of the learning that has been created time by all of our human instructors.

That switch gears a little bit, Greg. I mean that's fascinating to actually hear those specific anecdotes of how this brings into life. Let's switch gears though and talk about Coursera as a public benefit corporation and a B Corp, because there's a lot of conversation around whether businesses with that kind of structure ultimately perform differently over time. So just give us the highlights, if you don't mind, on what it means to be a B Corp.

Sure. So what it means to be a B Corp is that in addition to obviously taking the interest of our shareholders into account, we also have to consider a number of other different constituents, so our employees, the community, our learners, our institutional partners. And so it's a more holistic way of thinking about the purpose of the company and the benefit we provide. There are not many examples of public B Corps out there, and so we're somewhat unique in that respect. There are some others, but there aren't that many. Most B Corps tend to be private companies rather than public companies. And so we are, and not quite of one, but of a small number. I think it's too small a data sample set to understand if there actually is a fundamental difference over time in the performance of those companies versus more traditional corporate structures.

(28:08)
We grew out of higher education came out of Stanford and Andrew and Daphne's course, and so it's a natural evolution of that educational mission that they had. I think the fact that Coursera has a mission of improving outcomes for learners around the world is beneficial for us as a company. It fuels people with a bit of passion. My personal perspective is that the degree to which our mission succeeds is inextricably linked to the degree to which our business succeeds. Our ability to grow our business directly enables us to impact more learners around the world and have a larger impact from a mission perspective. So to me, those things are inextricably linked, and as we grow our business, we have greater impact. We cannot have greater impact without improving the performance of our business. And so I don't think of them as separate things. I think of them absolutely as coming from one shared impulse to drive better business results and by doing so to have greater impact around the world.

(29:13)
And one of the things that we have really tried to do since I joined is the vision statement for Coursera had been where anyone anywhere around the world can transform their life through access to world-class education and learning. I wanted to put a finer point around that because of the data that we're seeing about why people were coming to Coursera, which was to grow their careers. And so we added a north star for our internal teams, which is where the world's master the right skills to grow their careers. Because I think given the pace of technological change and the fact that that's only accelerating, people need to be lifelong learners. They need to be constantly re-skilling and up-skilling themselves to stay current. And so it's really important that we as a company recognize that and are doing everything we can to serve that need as best as we can.

And as a B-Corp where you explicitly call out your employees as a key constituent in the decision making, Greg, have you seen employees come to you and say, we are concerned about being displaced by AI and asked Coursera to have some kind of policy that proactively upskills them or provide some protection or insulation for employees against AI perhaps replacing some of the jobs that you have currently?

We're really leaning into AI in a couple of different ways. First of all, every employee at Coursera has the ability to take any class at Coursera, so that is a benefit that they get, and many of them actually have gone on and received complete degrees through Coursera. One of the pieces of our consumer offering is the ability to actually go get an entire degree, whether that's a undergraduate degree or even a graduate degree. And so we have some phenomenal partners at University of Illinois, urban Ban of Champagne and a number of others that provide that capability, and many of our employees have taken advantage of it. The other thing that we are very much doing is really leaning into educating. So our employees have access to a range of different LLMs that they can use within their work. And one of the things that we started doing last summer was we have a regular, what we call AI Sparks Day, and the opportunity in the AI Sparks Day is for all of the company to come together and to share ways that they're using AI in their job.

(31:33)
Because basically what we're seeing, I think, not just within our company but in many companies, is that people are using AI to augment themselves. So philanthropic just noted that 50% of jobs are using AI for roughly 25% or more of the tasks in those jobs. They just mentioned that earlier, I guess last month in January. We are certainly seeing that play out within Coursera as well. People are able to leverage AI to take things that would've taken them a long time and been a multi-step process, and AI can now perform that for them, sometimes in the background where it's running in the background with things like Notebook, LM or other things, and sometimes directly in the flow of their work. We also have a team inside Coursera that is regularly focused on looking at all the workflows we have across the company and partnering with teams to understand how could we make this easier and faster and better so that actually you as a person are able to spend more of your time on something that's more engaging, more rewarding, and requires your unique human skills, and isn't just you linking together different processes that are very mundane that now technology can do via ai.

Greg Hart, CE of Coursera, thank you very much for joining us today. There's a ton going on, and 2026 is a huge, huge year for you and the team and the company. So please come back later in the year. We'd love to know how that integration is going. We'd love to get some more perspective on how some of the new offerings are performing. So again, thanks for your time. We'd love to have you come back in.

Thank you, Anne. We'd love to do that. It's been a real pleasure.

I'm Anne Berry. Thank you for tuning into After earnings, the show that brings you up close and personal with the executives behind the world's most interesting publicly traded companies. If you learn something today, don't forget to like, subscribe, and share with your friends. Upcoming episodes will feature CEOs from Unity, DITA Global Pure Storage, and many more. We'll see you back here.