Greg Hart: Coursera CEO on the lessons he learned from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy

Many of the changes Hart brought to Coursera — and its 1,000-plus employees — will be familiar to Amazon alumni. Bezos’ practice of interviewing every employee in the early days set the direction as Amazon grew, Hart said, explaining: “He wanted to make sure that passion, customer focus, high standards and moving quickly were traits that the first group of employees stayed true to as the company grew in size.”

So it made “complete sense” when Bezos wrote his now-famous letter to shareholders outlining leadership principles and company priorities, because it “mirror” everyday conversations in the office.

Hart wanted to embed a similar mindset into Coursera. “I really wanted to transform the company and make it move at a faster rate and do a better job of serving our learners,” he said. “I felt like one of the most important things in doing that was ensuring there was a really good cultural fit, so we brought in a set of leadership mindsets. We looked at some of the most successful companies in the world, and we looked at either their values ​​or their principles…and we created our own values ​​that we felt were very specific to both our business and our principles. History as a company.”

This speed became crucial as the boom in artificial intelligence transformed the skill set that companies wanted, with employees and job seekers racing to keep up. The platform is now home to more than 12,000 courses, 1,100 of which are based on generative AI – an increase of 44% year-on-year. GenAI is the most popular topic on the platform, both from individual learners and from employees with an employer-paid subscription.

The CEO was also keen to ditch the unfocused company, instead dusting off Amazon’s playbook of focusing each of its meetings on a single leadership principle: “One of the things I’ve just realized over my time leading different companies in different industries is that no matter how clear something is in your mind, or in the mind of your leadership team, you can’t repeat it frequently enough to the rest of the organization. Maybe they’re not paying attention, maybe they don’t understand it, maybe they were in a customer meeting at the time, whatever it was, they might have missed it.”

“Every month, one of my direct reports sends an email with a video talking about just one of our leadership mindsets. We do the same thing with all hands. We’ll pick one, and have examples that talk about it, because it helps make it real for people and helps them get better context around it.”

How Hart uses AI at work

The main focus of every CEO nowadays is how to leverage AI at work, both within their business and for their personal use. KPMG’s 2025 US CEO Outlook found that 74% of leaders said investing in AI is a top priority despite economic uncertainty, with 79% saying they are confident they are ahead of the adoption and usage curve.

Previously, CEOs said luck They use AI for everything from recruiting to management to meeting preparation and document summaries.

Hart, an English major, is well aware of the efficiencies AI can provide, but said the one thing he doesn’t use the technology for is writing. “For me, writing is how I think, so to try to outsource it would be to give up thinking,” Hart said. “So that wouldn’t be attractive or effective for me personally.”

Employees across Coursera are encouraged to experiment with AI as they see fit, currently without any specific goals for what they should try to achieve. The most beneficial outcome of this approach, Hart adds, is that colleagues share their use cases and best practices in an internal forum called “AI Sparks.”

“AI Sparks is a monthly meeting where people from across the company, at any level, come to share how they use AI in their jobs. These are by far the most well-attended and popular meetings we hold at the company,” Hart said.

The final lesson Amazon learned prepared Hart for the age of artificial intelligence: If you’re too preoccupied with results in the early stages of a new technology, you miss the bigger picture.

“My view is we just want to have a workforce that uses it as much as possible in as many ways as possible. Over time, we’ll start to focus more on measuring the impact of all of that,” Hart said. “If we focus on this now, I think we will miss the opportunity to make a much greater impact in the future.”