Coursera, Inc. Investor update

Hello everyone, and welcome to FWD 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, Gecko, 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.