So much has changed in the past year—across industries, across geographies, across job titles.
I’ve joined more than 100 roadmap sessions and talked with learning leaders in 28 cities.
No matter where I go, the same themes keep coming up: CEOs want to future-proof the business, COOs want automation, and CFOs are demanding bottom-line contributions.
People are moving faster than ever—and yet the pressure builds.
The Workforce Transformation Imperative
Five years ago, the World Economic Forum estimated 50% of the workforce would need to be upskilled by 2030. Fast forward five years, throw in a little bit of Gen AI magic, and now that number is closer to 60%.
I’m no data scientist, but even I can tell that’s more skills to build and half the time to do it.
Learning teams around the globe are working tirelessly. Why? A company today can’t just hire the skills it needs. The talent isn’t out there. That company has to build it. And business leaders are scared. They know that the people that they have—and the skills that they have—are not those that they require for success in the future.
It’s why many learning leaders have AI enablement as the highest CEO priority. And they should.
Companies today need people who understand new technologies and people who understand core of business fundamentals. They don’t just need people who know AI. They need people who know the business and how to apply AI within it.
This is the moment for which Degreed exists. We make learning anything accessible. We make corporate learning enjoyable. We make a system that builds engagement and helps an organization deliver a culture of curiosity.
What a profound shame it would be if, at this moment of dynamic change, we couldn’t figure out how to use that system to help our colleagues succeed in this dynamic world.
AI and Its Immense Potential
At Degreed, we wake up every day focused on helping organizations:
- Pinpoint needs
- Personalize development
- Measure change
We know we need to make it easier for companies to align what their employees love to do with the outcomes that will make them relevant in the future.
Imagine if learning teams could deliver incredible, business-relevant content free of cost. Imagine if they could take that content and personalize it. Not for a job or a role or a function, but for an individual employee.
Imagine if a learning organization could rebuild L&D from the ground up the way learning leaders think it should be.
A learning management system (LMS) is good for compliance. A talent marketplace only helps 5% to 10% of employees.
Forward-thinking organizations need more. This is what Degreed is working on, and it’s where we continue to head.
Aligning People to Needs
In the past 12 years at Degreed, we’ve indexed nearly 40 million content objects. We’ve mapped over 250,000 skills.
We’ve supported more than 10 million Degreed users. And we’re seeing that impact in the real world. At State Street, over 70% of employees learn with Degreed every month. At Volkswagen, a skills-first strategy with Degreed has already saved €2 million.
And now, we’re embedding AI directly into the flow of learning. We recently made three big product announcements:
Degreed Maestro Studio
This powerful tool enables your business to create and deploy customized and AI-native learning experiences easily designed to fit your needs. Maestro is already being used to democratize leadership coaching, scale simulations for sales enablement, and personalize skill development and evaluation. With Degreed Maestro Studio, you can further tailor each AI interaction to your organization’s needs.
Degreed Open Library
This vast resource is now available to every Degreed customer at no additional cost, featuring 500 deeply curated pathways on the most in-demand learning topics. Using AI and in-house expertise, we’ll continuously refine to ensure your organization always has access to high-quality and relevant learning content.
Degreed Maestro Services
This suite of services helps your organization maximize AI’s impact on learning while reducing costs. These include AI-assisted pathway development that leverages Degreed expertise and AI to create structured, high-impact learning journeys. These also include a custom AI experience deployment service for designing, building, and implementing AI-powered coaches and simulations tailored to your organization’s unique priorities.
This is where we’re going:
- More speed. Develop people faster than ever using Maestro, Open Library, and more.
- Less cost. Save budget with hundreds of Open Library pathways and AI-powered deployments.
- Bigger impact. Link learning to business outcomes. Track skills. Prove ROI.
And While We’re Talking About Content
It bears repeating: AI is going to transform the content experience.
Great content pulls at the heartstrings. It understands people’s rhythms. It keeps employees coming back for more.
Organizations are probably going to have more of this high quality content in their libraries moving forward.
Why? Because they’re going to have the budget for it. What’s going away is the mediocre content in the middle.
Companies are no longer going to have to buy an enterprise-wide library that gets 5% adoption just as an insurance policy, in case someone asks for executive presence training in a language that isn’t supported. This change will drive savings. And learning teams will be able to use those resources to invest in new, AI-native experiences. Things that are more engaging and more impactful.
Employees will progress through learning content, and then when they have a question, they can grapple with that concept. They can engage with an AI mentor. They can test their skills and have much more impactful development experiences.
A Final Thought
Fifteen years ago, I asked a simple question: What will Fifth Avenue in New York City look like in the future?
Retail didn’t disappear. It evolved.
Like retail, work isn’t disappearing. It’s transforming. And that means people must transform too.
Find out more.
Check out our seven-part Degreed in Action webinar series to go even deeper on our innovations in AI and more.
