Introducing Project Helix: An agentic AI skills platform for enterprise

Introducing Project Helix: A skills platform for the AI era

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

By Patrick Supanc, Chief Product Officer 

AI is changing how work gets done – and creating an urgent new challenge for organizations: how do you help people build the skills to use AI effectively, apply those skills to their role, and prove they can deliver results? 

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.

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 research on AI transformation makes the same point: the majority of the work is people and process, not algorithms. Our customers need to close the gap between ‘knowing’ and ‘doing’, so employees can develop and apply skills that track to business priorities.

Introducing Project Helix

Project Helix answers a 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: Leaders and learners describe a business goal in plain language. Project Helix will then generate adaptive learning paths mapped to actual skills, functions, roles, and data of your organization. Those paths keep adapting as learners progress and as goals change.
• Accelerating application with personalization: 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.
• Bringing learning into one skills stack and embedding it in everyday work: Project Helix will put learning, credentials, and skills intelligence directly into the tools employees already use, complementing the systems you’ve invested in, but will work just as well on its own.
• Proving skills growth and workforce readiness: Completions are easy to report; validated skills are not. Project Helix combines graded hands-on, graded assessments and recognized credentials, then flows that earned proof into a portable skills record — an interoperable portfolio that tracks skill freshness and informs talent decisions. 

Project Helix is being rolled out in phases. Over the coming months, we’ll be working closely with a select group of partners and customers to shape the product experience, verified capability model, and enterprise workflows, while also equipping instructors with new modalities and expanded reach.

Broad enterprise availability is expected in the first half of 2027. 

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.
  
• 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. 

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, from September 17.

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.