It was only last month, that Coursera stock prices took a nose dive, as panicked investors worried about the effect of generative AI on the business models of ed tech companies. While investors baulked at the immediate consequences of generative AI, that students were using learning instead of online courses, Coursera COO, Shravan Goli believes that AI is an opportunity to leverage new market opportunities. Goli told businessline in an interview that Coursera will be launching a new chatbot featuring generative AI, “Coursera Coach,” in the next few months world wide. 

Coursera Coach, that Goli demonstrated to businessline uses generative AI for learning assistance. Soon, Coursera students can clear doubts, summarise courses and create customisable quizzes using this feature. 

As the Silicon Valley makes its tech budgets leaner in the current macro environment, Goli also emphasised that the ed tech giant is being more circumspect in the new technologies that it invests in. 

“As the interest rates come up, consumer spending is back, enterprise spending is coming down, and everyone is looking at profitability, you have to reset your expectations about where you want to invest in business in order to be profitable,” Goli explained. Even at this time, AI is hard to miss. 

Goli had the following to say about the impact of GPT like AI on chatbots, “We have had bots since forever-, but they have not been as intelligent as smart as contextual, as on the fly as they are now. It can take different forms – it can be a tutor, it can be a assistant, it can be a career guide, it can be a learning  coach. We are starting to talk internally as company about  where can we look at processes, will they be serving customer, or they be serving our internal interlinking across the functions.”

Coursera is not the only ed tech placing a bet on AI, and trying to develop it’s in-house chatbot. Coursera’s biggest competitor Chegg has also recently announced its plans to develop a GPT-based chatbot after it revealed last month that ChatGPT was affecting its subscriber growth. India’s largest ed-tech Byjus, also launched its iteration of a chatbot yesterday called TeacherGPT; which functions as an AI-powered assistant, providing personalized guidance to learners and also grading their responses.

Byjus also launched Badri, the predictive AI model, which assesses the student’s learning capacity and MathGPT is another specialised model capable of resolving any math problems while guiding students using understandable analogies and visual aids.

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