Also introducing new AI-powered capabilities across Coursera and Udemy that help organizations integrate learning into everyday workflows, validate skills with confidence, and turn workforce data into action
Today, at Coursera and Udemy’s first global FWD customer event as a combined company, we previewed Project Helix, our new AI-native skills platform. Built from the ground up, Project Helix (code name) will help organizations identify critical skills, personalize learning for every employee, verify their ability to apply what they’ve learned, and link workforce progress to measurable business outcomes — all in one connected experience.
See Project Helix in action
AI is creating extraordinary opportunities for organizations, but capturing that value will depend on people. Companies are investing heavily in AI tools and infrastructure, but many are still working through how to help their teams build the skills, confidence, and practical capability to use AI effectively in real workflows.
BCG’s 70-20-10 rule reinforces this shift toward upskilling today’s workforce: 70% of your company’s strategic focus should be on people and process, 20% on technology, and 10% on algorithms. Our customers need to rapidly reduce the lag between ‘knowing’ and ‘doing,’ ensuring their employees can actively develop and apply skills aligned to changing business priorities.
That is the problem Project Helix is designed to solve.
Introducing Project Helix
Project Helix is our answer to a fundamental question we hear from leaders every day: “How do I build skills that actually drive my business?” It’s our vision for an adaptive skills platform that moves beyond a content library and delivers on this promise in four key ways:
- Building skills aligned to business priorities: Most of our customers have an AI strategy, so when it comes to skills development, they don’t want a generic, one-size-fits-all tool that guesses what employees need to deliver on those objectives. What is needed is a platform that is grounded in your organization’s real-world context and easy to customize. With Project Helix, leaders and learners will be able to articulate business and career development goals in natural language to instantly generate adaptive learning paths that map to the actual skills, functions, roles, and data of your organization. These paths then continuously adapt based on learner growth and performance and as your goals shift.
- Accelerating application with personalization: Our busy customers don’t just want access to the world’s best learning content — they want a relevant, efficient pathway through that content that feels like it was built just for them. Informed by the latest labor market signals and your organization’s own data and skill definitions, Project Helix will suggest tailored learning experiences for each learner across a variety of learning modalities, drawn from the expertise of top universities, industry-leading institutions, and real-world practitioners across our combined content ecosystem. Continuous, personalized feedback and adaptive practice engage and progress learners more rapidly from basic comprehension to mastery.
- Bringing learning into one, integrated skills stack and embedding it in everyday work: Today’s learning platforms are often separate from where the work gets done, whereas your teams and employees want learning in the flow of work. Our agentic platform is designed to integrate seamlessly, bringing learning, credentials, and skills intelligence directly into the tools your employees use every day. Project Helix complements and elevates the systems you’ve already invested in — or works just as well on its own.
- Proving skills growth and workforce readiness: Completion and learning hours are easy to report. Validated skills are not. Project Helix combines hands-on, graded assessments, practical observation, and recognized credentials, providing a trusted signal that a skill is real. Our goal is to help ensure that earned proof flows into a portable skills record — a trusted, interoperable portfolio of capabilities that tracks skills freshness, informs talent decisions, and draws a direct line from employees’ skills to your business outcomes.
We’re taking a phased, customer-centric approach, working closely from the earliest stage with a select group of participating partners and customers to help shape the product experience, verified capability model, and enterprise workflows, while also equipping instructors with new modalities and expanded reach. Project Helix is expected to be broadly available to enterprise customers in the first half of 2027.
To view Project Helix in action and how it’s applied to solve customer problems, click here.
Continuing platform innovation across Coursera and Udemy
Project Helix complements the innovation already underway across Coursera and Udemy. As we build toward a new, unified experience for our global customers, we’re continuing to introduce new capabilities on both platforms that better integrate learning into the flow of work, validate skills through real-world application, and turn static data into decisive action.
Available now:
- Create Role Plays with AI Connectors (Udemy) — Your AI tools can help you identify skill gaps, but turning those insights into targeted development can require significant time and effort. Udemy connects with the tools your teams already use, including Claude, Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Gong, to translate insights into practice. For example, when Gong identifies that a sales representative needs more coaching, it can send that insight to Udemy to automatically create a ready-to-use Role Play with the scenario, goals, and setup already configured. This helps you move quickly from identifying a skill gap to fixing it. These capabilities are available to Udemy customers with our AI Connectors and Role Play add-on.
- Graded Role Play (Coursera and Udemy) — Human skills, like communication and strategic thinking, are critical to your workforce, yet they can be difficult to assess at scale. Graded Role Play immerses learners in realistic, on-the-job scenarios, like a tough negotiation, with an AI persona. Each learner is evaluated against goals set by the author, such as navigating resistance or leading with empathy, and verifies whether the standard has been met. You gain a clearer view of whether your programs are building the skills needed, and employees are moving beyond completion to evidence of skill. Graded Role Play is available for Udemy customers with the AI Role Play Enhanced add-on. The Coursera offering is coming to enterprise customers later this month.
- Conversational Analytics with Admin AI (Coursera) — Your learning data may contain valuable insights, but finding the most important trends and determining what to do next can be time-consuming. Admin AI allows you to ask questions in plain language and instantly receive clear answers that surface key trends and recommended next steps. Improve engagement with targeted interventions and drive skill development. Learn how this works here.
- AI Browser Deterrence (Coursera) — As learners gain access to increasingly capable AI tools, you need greater visibility into potential misuse during graded assessments. This behavioral detection system uses machine learning to spot suspicious patterns such as impossible completion times or bot-like typing. A simple, evidence-based flag is added to the Enterprise Gradebook, helping protect the integrity and value of credentials earned on Coursera.
Coming soon:
- Graded Labs (Coursera and Udemy) — Course completion data alone cannot tell you whether a learner can apply technical skills in a real-world environment. Graded Labs turn hands-on exercises into high-integrity assessments that evaluate how learners complete tasks in a live, sandboxed environment, such as a developer proving they can deploy a web application. Their work is then evaluated against a rubric defined by the author, reviewing correctness, approach, and execution. The result is a win-win for both: your learners get personalized, constructive feedback, and you gain credible, scalable evidence of their applied technical skills. Graded Labs will be available for both Coursera and Udemy customers, included as part of the Udemy Business Pro add-on, later this month.
- Enhanced LLM Integrations (Coursera) — Employees increasingly turn to AI tools for answers in the flow of work, but generic responses may not connect them with trusted learning resources or opportunities to practice. Building on Coursera’s launch as the first learning partner with an app in ChatGPT, enhanced integrations turn ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot into a true coaching and practice workspace. When a learner asks @coursera a question through these tools, the LLM recognizes it as a learning moment and recommends a relevant course, video, or even an AI-guided Dialogue or Role Play, grounded in trusted, world-class content. This enhanced Coursera experience will be available later this month to all customers with our MCP connectors and active ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot enterprise licenses. Learn how this works here.
- Skills Insights Hub (Udemy) — Customers tell us they need a clearer way to understand whether their learning programs are building the skills their organizations require, but the data needed to answer that question is often fragmented across engagement, skills growth, and learning outcomes. Skills Insights Hub brings these signals together into one AI-powered view to answer the question: ‘Are we building the skills we need?’ You can measure your organization’s progress, benchmark learning against top trending topics, track assessment completion, and more. But it doesn’t just show data, it provides AI-generated recommendations that help identify opportunities to increase participation, strengthen skill development, and improve learning programs. Udemy’s Skills Insights Hub will be available in October.
Looking ahead
The future of workforce development won’t be defined by access to more content alone. It will be defined by helping people identify the right skills, build them through personalized learning, demonstrate evidence of proficiency, and connect that progress to meaningful workforce and business outcomes.
Project Helix and several innovations that we announced today represent an important step toward that future. It brings together the unique strengths of Coursera and Udemy — and the extraordinary expertise of our combined ecosystem — to help create a new model for building measurable skills in the AI era.
View the FWD Virtual on-demand experience on the Coursera and Udemy resource hubs beginning September 17.
Click here to learn more about our content announcements.
This blog post contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including statements regarding the development, capabilities and expected availability of Project Helix and the anticipated benefits of the Coursera-Udemy combination. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially, including risks relating to the development, timely launch and market adoption of Project Helix; the integration of Coursera and Udemy and realization of anticipated benefits and synergies; and the other risks described in Coursera’s most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Coursera undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements except as required by law.
