Coursera CEO Seeks to Transform Chatbot into Personal Tutor

Jeff Maggioncalda, the CEO of Coursera Inc., aims to provide individuals with an AI-generated personal tutor.

The online learning platform has recently released the Coach chatbot tool that integrates with ChatGPT. It answers questions by sifting through Coursera’s entire curriculum and summarizing it.

Maggioncalda offers a quick demo to start our interview. “Can you explain in terms that a 10-year-old would understand what a convolutional neural network is,” he asks.

And the artificial intelligence coach responds almost immediately by text message. “Imagine you have an image of a car and you want to figure out where the car is in the image. One way to do this is to look at small parts of the image one at a time and see if any of those parts look like a car. This is called a sliding window. A convolutional, neural sliding window is a way to this more efficiently with a computer. Instead of looking at each small part of the image, the computer looks at groups of small parts at once.”

Coursera is investing in this kind of generative AI because it is transforming teaching both in-person and remotely in schools and universities, says Maggioncalda. In 2017, McKinsey estimated that artificial intelligence based on existing technology will affect 15% of the work of educators, teachers and professors. The arrival of generative artificial intelligence has increased the forecast to 54 percent.

Work Shift spoke to Maggioncalda about distance learning post-Covid, hot skills to learn, how and why he won’t be moving to a four-day week anytime soon. (Answers have been edited and condensed.)

Many people enrolled in online courses during Covid. What does distance learning look like now?

It’s more of a hybrid. Online learning is now part of almost all education systems and governments’ workforce development activities. Then there is generative artificial intelligence. The faster things change, the more new skills are needed. The pandemic was a huge step forward in how quickly things changed. Customers no longer walk into stores and remote working increased the demand for digital skills. Now, generative AI is another accelerator.

What other ways do you use AI besides a chatbot?

We help customers create their own courses on any subject using artificial intelligence. And AI is also good at translations. We will translate 2,500 courses into seven different languages by the end of the year. This means that people from all over the world, including non-English speakers, can access all of these courses originally created in English.

What do the top courses tell about the job market?

Artificial intelligence courses are very successful. I don’t know how many AI builders we’re actually going to have, a lot more people are using AI tools. We also see that the biggest driver of our consumer segment is people taking courses to move into digital professions such as information science, software engineering, IT support and digital marketing.

For example, in Great Britain we have three million learners (individuals and companies). That’s about 20 percent more than a year ago. The top courses in the UK are Data Basics, Project Management Basics, Wellbeing Science, User Experience Basics and Technical Support. People really think I want to make more money, I want more flexibility. These digital jobs are in high demand, but you need to be skilled in them.

Are companies cutting training for fear of a recession?

If we look at the UK, the proportion of businesses planning to increase investment in training and development over the next year has dropped to just 38% of businesses in 2022, down from 53% in 2021. This is a recession, right? The UK economy has apparently been in quite a bit of trouble. Budgets need to be cut, and one of the first places people cut is education.

In addition to the macro effects, which take longer to emerge, we know that on average a UK employer invests half of what an EU employer invests in skills training. UK employers would need to invest an extra £6.5 billion to spend at the EU average. The number of training days in Great Britain is also at an all-time low.

What do you think about the four-day week and does it suit your company?

That would be nice, but it just doesn’t seem practical. We have competitors who work five or six days a week. We wouldn’t have been able to build Coursera Coach if we only worked four days a week. It would have taken 20% longer. I don’t think we have the luxury of only working four days a week when the world is changing so quickly.