← ASU+GSV Summit
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Interviewer 1
Foreign.
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Interviewer 2
We are here at the ASU GSB Summit 2026 with Anthony Salcedo. He's the General Manager of Enterprise at Coursera, the world's largest online learning platform with 191 million registered learners and more than 7,000 international institutional customers.
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Interviewer 1
He joined Coursera in October 2020.
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Interviewer 2
He joined Coursera in Oct 2025 after more than two decades at Microsoft as Vice President of Worldwide Education, where he led global initiatives including Live at Edu, Partners in Learning and the Microsoft Innovative Educator Program. He also served on the board of HMH, Western Governors University and teach.org@coursera, Anthony leads the enterprise business, partnering with companies, campuses and governments worldwide to build workforce
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Interviewer 1
skills for a rapidly changing world. Anthony Slito, welcome.
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Anthony Salcedo
It's great to see you again, Anthony. It's great to see you again.
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Interviewer 1
Coursera New Chapter Coursera, you've been at Microsoft more than 20 years. You've been in edtech for a long time. Tell us about this moment in edtech history and what Coursera is doing to really take it to the next level.
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Anthony Salcedo
I think I've said it before, but it feels like an unprecedented time. There is tremendous shift in a good way with regards to technology. Technology has gone from being the star of the show to really becoming an enabler for talent. And that's where the crux of skills, which has been a through line throughout my career, always sort of the focus on the intersection between technology and learning. But what's been underpinning that is getting students really equipped for a very changing workplace. And we certainly see with the rise of Gen AI, the globalization that's shifting in the economy. It's a huge opportunity for students that bring their skills forward, use technology as an enabler for them to solve problems and bring their innovation and insight to use to help the world. But it also is a huge moment for making sure that people are meeting the skills that are needed in the workforce, not only through their education work, through micro credentials, et cetera, et cetera, but really prepared for a very different landscape and that includes reskilling as well. For people in the workplace, but certainly in the education system, it remains as important as ever to really have students bringing their, their, their ideas, their energy, their passion forward with new skills. And I'm excited about it.
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Interviewer 1
It is incredibly exciting. And as technology and AI continue to change what work looks like, it makes the need for upskilling and reskilling more important than ever. And it makes the ability for ed tech companies to deliver that skilling more interesting than ever. What is Coursera doing to make that reskilling work. And I know you put out a recent job skills report all about the skills that are needed.
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Anthony Salcedo
Yeah, the job skills report is something that we produce annually to sort of reflect what our enterprise customers, which represent businesses, government as well as schools and universities are using, what content are they seeking to, et cetera. And you see certainly a massive need for genes. I think year over year is about a 234% enrollment increase, but it's much larger in some places where the demand for AI skilling is huge. We're seeing it mature as well from AI fundamentals and sort of just sort of getting the basics right to getting much more focused on things like agentic flow as well as prompt engineering and visualization, all the sort of the second level components of AI. What we also see, which I think underlines a lot of this, is a huge surge in human skills like critical thinking as well as leadership, you know, entrepreneurial mindset, where we have triple digit growth in all of those areas as well. Which I think is not always the perception that hey, with this massive technology paradigm, there is sort of a declining need for our humanity that often is feared. We see the opposite happening where companies are now making investments in AI foundations. They're trying to become AI first and are starting to realize, wait a minute, I forgot the most important part and that is optimizing my human talent to take advantage of these new technologies to think differently as well. I need to be able to solve problems with a new capacity and capabilities. I need to be able to bring much more autonomy and agency to the work that I do. That's where that skills gap is. So like you saw in the pandemic where, you know, learning left the classroom and went virtually the demand for humanity rose where teachers recognized that that human direct connection with learners was critically important. Parents valued their teachers more because they saw what was going on in their kitchen table. The same thing is happening with AI in businesses and universities. As that technology foundation is in place, there's a huge need for human skills and connection to make this work.
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Interviewer 1
It's one of the great ironies I think of the AI moment is that technology is becoming more embedded in our lives, more embedded in our work. But because AI can do a lot of the really technical pieces, a lot of the coding, a lot of the analysis, the need for leadership, critical thinking, entrepreneurial mindset and other human skills and strategic thinking goes up enormously.
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Anthony Salcedo
And AI can do a lot of the coding for sure, but there's still going to be a lot more coding, that happens. So you need more human intervention to support new apps, new creations, new technologies. You've made it much more universal inside organization. So the skilling needs and the need for devs doesn't decrease. We're just going to create more things. The same thing happened maybe a decade or two ago when the rise of things like email and text messaging happened. The first thing that people feared was, wait a minute now learners, young learners are going to really not know how to construct a sentence or they're going to sort of fall into traps where we use these shortcuts, whether it's emojis or, you know, acronyms, et cetera, to communicate. What was missed in a lot of that conversation is that the amount of human creation exponentially increased. So would you rather kids write far less or communicate in various mediums, whether it's video, text, email, as well as writing to a much larger degree? The same thing is going to happen with coding. There's just going to be a lot more people thinking about app design and app development. Use vibe coding to craft something out. You know, that's the thing that I think is super exciting and it's often missed. There's going to be a far larger pool of people leaning in and that wall, that was sort of challenging. And I have ideas, but I can't invent without a talented dev team. I can get a large part of the way there with AI, which is, I think is exciting. So I look at it that way. I still. There's going to be a lot of need for roles throughout the continuum. It's just going to shift what we can do together.
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Interviewer 1
Yeah, you've mentioned that skills have been a through line of your career in many different places. We are in obviously this real skills revolution moment and just building on exactly your question just now. You know, there was a long time where, you know, development was a skill set and then product manager was a skill set and the design was a skill set. And things are really beginning to blur now. And of Coursera has a whole skills track world. I'm curious how you see the skills world changing as people can do more with technology across disciplines.
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Anthony Salcedo
Yeah, it's a. It's certainly needed as. And one of the things that the job skills report does and we've tried to build career pathways and Coursera because with the vast catalog of options that we have from university partners as well as industry partners like Microsoft and Google and IBM, et cetera, there's about 375 content providers as well as Coursera providing our own content, there's a lot of options for learners, so we've had to craft pathways to say, here's the career I aspire to or I need to get reskilled for. And it builds a curriculum for you until you go. But there are a lot of individuals that will see the needs and complementary skills, which is super important. And that's actually happening where you're seeing Executives take an AI's fundamentals class and then take an AI coding class quickly. Like they're sort of. I can skill myself up in a different way. It's interesting to see and I think it's going to. Obviously, we have a very dynamic career pathway, so we can inform that as we go, but that's happening. Skills Tracks is really an opportunity for us to really pull the things that we see most commonly together. So you can get a Gen AI catalog or a data science catalog, et cetera, to make that career path happen. But it does include all the other components that are there. Things like cybersecurity is not going to go away. And as our computing usage expands, that's going to be a fundamental. So there will be things that I think are evergreen as part of the continuum as the technologies around it often change.
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Interviewer 1
Yeah. Coursera announced a really interesting partnership with OpenAI a few months ago where, you know, within ChatGPT you can actually access Coursera content. You're trying to learn something Coursera is sort of is embedded in and can come up. That's. That was a very interesting announcement. I'm curious to hear how it's been going since.
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Anthony Salcedo
Yeah, well, certainly we, we certainly love the partnership with OpenAI. We actually announced a partnership with Microsoft to integrate into Copilot just a couple of weeks ago.
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Interviewer 1
That's fantastic.
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Anthony Salcedo
Yeah. So it's essentially what the phrase that we often from the businesses and institutions that we support is learning in the flow of work 100%. So there is certainly a recognition that the more seamless and tools like AI, whether it's Claude or Copilot or OpenAI, ChatGPT are trying to embed themselves into workflow, normally something that every part of the organization just relies on instinctually.
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Interviewer 1
Yes.
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Anthony Salcedo
And so one of the sort of the instinctual needs is, hey, I need to learn more about something. And so having the ability to start a dialogue in ChatGPT and then launch into either a micro dose of a course or then get into a longer form, it's a nice seamless piece, but also you want to have the full robust catalog. The learning progression Tracking all the things that we can do at Coursera but have that entry point be super seamless for learners. That's the best of both worlds because one of the things that institutions recognize is it's great to have a partner like Coursera with rich content available to learners. But I need to engage my learners. I need to make sure that they're actively using and pursuing this sort of formal learning to get credentials, to get verified skills, et cetera. And that entry point into an LLM just makes it super easy for organizations.
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Interviewer 2
Makes a ton of sense.
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Interviewer 1
And then, you know, one thing that people have always been curious about in the Coursera world is the sort of passive versus active learning. I remember way back in the day I was at Coursera a long time ago, it was mostly video content, it was mostly passively consumed. And now Coursera has evolved a lot. It has all sorts of hands on labs and of course and projects. And tell us about the sort of hands on active learning and the role playing that's starting to be inside Coursera,
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Anthony Salcedo
what it means, it certainly, well, we have, obviously we look at the learning science and see how do we engage and motivate learners. Now one core motivation is I need a verified skill that's going to help me differentiate myself in the workplace. That's, that's a fundamental piece. But how about making learning more engaging? So hands on dialogue, role plays embedded into courses is amazing.
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Interviewer 2
Yes.
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Anthony Salcedo
And one, one of the things that we do is we have something called course builder and this is a tool that an organization can use to say, I want to have my CEO give a 15 minute overview. I'm going to customize role plays within my environment for the work that my learners inside that organization is doing, but also incorporate courses from Google and Yale University into the mix.
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Interviewer 1
Amazing.
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Anthony Salcedo
So I can assemble a course or even a learning pathway that's custom to my environment. So it's not just about that interaction but also bringing that context together, which is certainly engaging. It helps motivate learners. Things like AI coach, which is sort of your learning partner throughout your journey. All of these things are certainly improving the experience for learners, driving up utilization. But also what I think is the exciting piece, it actually creates a larger appetite for, for a learner that they're, they're, hey, I've got a required set of two or three courses that I need from my organization. But because of the experience being so engaging, I'm going to take 10, 15 courses and I think that's exciting.
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Interviewer 1
Yeah. And because of the skills tracks and the Builder. I need the idea that you can sort of explore. You start with something that's an immediate need.
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Anthony Salcedo
Exactly.
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Interviewer 1
And then explore everything adjacent and go deep into the catalog.
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Anthony Salcedo
Exactly. And certainly that's, that's the benefit that we can provide. And certainly because we're looking at the user engagement, we're obviously making it better and better over time. And I'm excited about the future.
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Interviewer 1
No, it's really exciting. Coursera has been on this enormous journey and I feel like it's been. It's now bursting into the next cutting edge generation of edtech all over again.
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Anthony Salcedo
I always like to focus on things that the world needs. I do think that we're in a moment where stealing is important, whether it's Corsair or other providers, businesses. I think this is something that I've long known, working with schools and universities because the technology is important but not critical as it relates to. The critical piece is the learner, the education relationship, whether it's virtual in person, et cetera, and technology supporting that to the best of environment, we're seeing that recognized quickly. As workplace displacement becomes real. Reskilling is a necessity for most corporations. I think there's a recognition like 90% or so of the world's workforce needs to be reskilled by 2030. This comes from the World Economic Forum. So there's this sort of, this mass reskilling moment that's going on in the world. This is something we're starting to see embedded within high school curriculum. You're certainly thinking about workforce readiness. More and more in universities who dreaded words like employability just a few years ago are starting to recognize it's a necessity because the workplace is changing so fast. And that will continue to be the case, unfortunately. I mean, there's going to be, I think, this notion that you graduate school and you have your four years covering you through 40 years of work. That's archaic at this point. You've got to get that foundation, certainly still value the university degree. But the best thing you can do leaving universities outside of getting the diploma, is getting a recognition of a need for lifelong learning. And whether it's advanced university degrees, micro credential skilling certifications, that's got to be part of everyone's learning journey as they go through work, as they go through life in this new world.
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Interviewer 1
Yeah. And Coursera is perfectly positioned to be a lifelong partner in learning.
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Anthony Salcedo
And because we partner with universities, we have sensitivity. It's not about displacing traditional education, traditional value in classroom, et cetera. It's about recognizing the enhancement and the obvious need for reskilling along the way
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Interviewer 1
and bringing content both from traditional higher education and corporate training, which is in one place.
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Anthony Salcedo
And I mentioned Course builder. Lots of our universities are using course builder they love and faculty members love the ability to take their in person course embed modules from Microsoft or Google in in a virtual way. And you have sort of the best of both worlds. So I've got this traditional content that students would have with real world industry content of the moment that combines with that and that's a great blend. Lots of faculty members who've been using traditional curriculum not left have been out of the world of work for for some time. They feel like they've been re energized because they've got the latest content that they can embed in. And it's a good parallel to say not only is the learning modality different whether it's traditional and virtual, but I have this sort of traditional instructional method on things like ethical use of AI that it can parry with industry content and how students reflect on both. So these are blends that I think we're starting to see which is super exciting.
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Interviewer 1
It's very, very exciting. Anthony Salcedo is a general manager of enterprise at course. Thank you so much for being here with us.
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Anthony Salcedo
It's my pleasure. Thank you.