How quickly is generative AI bringing new learners to Coursera, the Silicon Valley-based online learning platform?
In 2025, 22 million new users joined Coursera, and learners enrolled in GenAI courses at a rate of 14 enrollments per minute. The platform recorded 5.4 million course GenAI enrollments over the year — nearly doubling the prior year’s numbers.
And at the end of 2025, Coursera announced its intention to acquire Udemy, which is another move that will further expand Coursera’s global footprint. The agreement, which is scheduled to close in the second half of this year, will increase Coursera’s value to $2.5 billion.
“We see this combination as accelerating our AI journey and our ability to innovate,” says Patrick Supanc, Chief Product Officer at Coursera. “I think both companies have been very innovative in their own ways with AI. We are very excited about what the combination will do to help us deliver more value to more customers around the world.”
Supanc joined the company last June after spending nearly a decade at Amazon, where he oversaw the Prime subscription offering, along with major events like Prime Day and Black Friday. We spoke with him about his role at Coursera; the pace of change in AI; and two recently launched products, Role Play and Course Builder.
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You’ve been the CPO at Coursera for seven months, and the focus of your job is to incorporate Generative AI into Coursera’s learning platform. When you started your job, how did you approach this task?
My priority was to step back and focus on the long-term product strategy…
I spent a lot of time listening. I met with learners, customers, and partners across regions to understand where learning friction exists today, where relevance matters most, and where AI could responsibly remove barriers and unlock new capability. Those conversations helped shape our point of view on where AI can make learning more personalized, more practical, and more effective.
…Our approach has been to be thoughtful, learner-first, and impact-driven — building a foundation that helps every learner prove their skills, and every institution scale its impact.
Can you tell me more about the learning friction that you mentioned?
Everyone is trying to adapt to the tremendous pace of change, especially AI-driven change. Making sure that either as a learner or as an organization trying to reskill or upskill you are connecting to the best learning opportunities about AI, so you can adapt to that change and apply AI in your work. That can be a daunting and confusing process. How do I find the right content for me, given what I want to do or what my goal is? When I talk to customers and others, everyone is facing that challenge.
So, anything that Coursera can do to make it easier to find the right learning opportunity to help support that learning process around AI, to make it easier to demonstrate over time the mastery of those AI skills, removes friction for them and enables them to be more successful in their current role — or the role that they are aspiring to.
The expectations of learners, customers, and partners are evolving quickly in a world being reshaped by AI — and that raises the bar for relevance, personalization, and outcomes.
What were the challenges when you started as the CPO at Coursera?
One of the biggest challenges when I stepped into the role was the pace of change. The expectations of learners, customers, and partners are evolving quickly in a world being reshaped by AI — and that raises the bar for relevance, personalization, and outcomes.
We know that 85 percent of learners come to Coursera to transform their careers. They’re looking for learning that’s directly connected to the job they have — or the job they want. They want opportunities to practice skills in real-world scenarios, to build mastery through application, and to have an experience that feels tailored to them.
As the world’s leading learning platform, it’s on us to meet those expectations. That means not just delivering content, but building a connected system of capabilities like Role Play, Course Builder, Skills Tracks, and Career Graph that support skill development over time and at scale.
This made the goal clear: move fast, stay grounded in learner outcomes, and build a platform that’s ready for the future of learning.
How are you becoming AI content experts in your own right?
… We live by the creed that we should also be leveraging these same tools both for our own internal learning and our own content creation [as our customers and partners use.] We have created a number of Coursera original titles on Coursera, and we use those same tools that we offer to our partners ourselves to create that same content. So we are seeing what works, we are seeing what is not working and what needs to be improved. We use Coursera for our own internal learning opportunities ourselves, so all of my fellow Courserians are also learners on Coursera — and believe me they are giving me and my team feedback suggestions on what could be improved…
Since you’ve been at Coursera, there have been several new features launched. Two of these are Role Play, an AI driven simulations tool that allows students to practice soft and technical skills in real-world scenarios, and Course Builder, which accelerates content creation and customization.
Can you explain how these features were created?
Role Play was developed as part of Coursera’s broader GenAI roadmap to move learning beyond content consumption and toward applied practice. It enables learners to rehearse realistic workplace scenarios, such as difficult conversations with managers, interviews, or collaborative problem-solving, through dynamic interactions with AI personas. These simulations are customizable and provide learners with immediate, actionable feedback to build confidence in their careers.
Course Builder was created to address a different but related challenge: the speed at which skills requirements are changing. Launched in 2023, Course Builder is our GenAI-powered authoring platform designed to help organizations and institutions design and update courses at scale. Since its launch, it has helped enterprise customers create more than 4,000 courses and reduce the median course-creation time by 87 percent.
What were the challenges to create them?
The core challenge was balancing speed with quality, trust, and credibility…
And how are you measuring the results?
For Course Builder, impact is tracked by adoption and satisfaction. …Early data show 88 percent author satisfaction, and 95 percent learner satisfaction in pilot programs. Coursera also measures reductions in development time and ongoing use by both education and enterprise customers…
For Role Play, metrics include learner engagement, completion rates, and learner feedback on confidence and real-world readiness following practice scenarios. Coursera is also interested in how simulation practice correlates with the application of real skills in work and with measurable learner outcomes.
…Things are changing so rapidly because of AI that there has to be a corresponding effort on our part to be learning and adapting as quickly as possible.
What does the Udemy acquisition mean for Coursera’s AI journey?
…As AI continues to reshape roles across industries, together we can deliver a broader catalog of high-quality content and AI-powered learning experiences.
This builds on Coursera’s existing AI strategy. We have been focused on using AI to improve applied learning, speed, and quality. The combination reinforces this approach by broadening reach and impact…
What have you learned in this role so far?
I’ve learned that things are changing so rapidly because of AI that there has to be a corresponding effort on our part to be learning and adapting as quickly as possible. We have to be on the cutting edge of being curious, acting on that curiosity, listening closely to our customers as they are going through this journey, and acting quickly…
Featured image by Coolcaesar – Own work, CC BY 4.0
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