Future-Proofing Your Business Strategy with GenAI

Generative AI (GenAI) is changing the way business leaders view the future of work. McKinsey predicts the technology could add between $2.6 and $4.4 trillion in economic benefits annually across industries based on use cases across 16 business functions [1]. Whether a business reaps a portion of those benefits will depend on its willingness and ability to adapt to this rapidly changing landscape. Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda says this change must start at the top.

“With many kinds of technologies, you can delegate to your CTO,” Maggioncalda says. “In my opinion, this technology is so far-reaching and so fundamentally disruptive to business models, ‘Hey, CEO, you can't delegate this one. You need to personally go hands-on, learn how to use it, and understand personally how this might impact your business model.’”

Maggioncalda quickly realized the impact the technology stood to have on Coursera’s business model in the days and weeks following ChatGPT’s November 2022 public release and focused on developing a strategic plan. He wanted to position the company to seize GenAI’s opportunities while mitigating its threats to core aspects of Coursera’s business model: written words, video, and audio.

In March 2024, Harvard Business School published a case study on Maggioncalda’s fast response to the emerging technology. This study is now being taught in business schools around the world, solidifying GenAI adaptation as a foundational part of incoming leaders’ business perspectives.

Speaking at the 2023 World Economic Forum’s Growth Summit, economist Richard Baldwin said, "AI won't take your job. It's somebody using AI that will take your job." It seems this may hold true for entry-level employees and CEOs alike.

Navigating GenAI’s business impact

Maggioncalda conceptualizes GenAI’s introduction to the business world across three phases: conversation, experimentation, and separation. The conversation phase occurred when ChatGPT was released and awareness spread. He says we’re currently in the experimentation phase as companies test using the technology and incorporating it into products. The next phase, he anticipates, will be separation, where we’ll see the results of the experimentation phase begin to show meaningful impact across industries.

“I do think that there's going to be a separation that happens, and I think it's going to be driven by the CEOs and other leaders who fundamentally empower their companies to innovate from the ground up,” Maggioncalda says.

It’s not too late for leaders to initiate their GenAI strategy. Maggioncalda developed the Navigating Generative AI for Leaders Specialization to educate leaders on GenAI and demonstrate how to use tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini to adapt their business strategies securely.

His primary advice: “Don’t start with the technology; start with the problems that you can solve. Then understand enough about the technology to understand what’s feasible.”

The payoff comes when you can leverage GenAI's capabilities to solve a long-standing problem for your customers. At Coursera, an early example of that was language translation.

What problem can I solve given the capabilities of the technology? — Jeff Maggioncalda

How Coursera is using GenAI for product advancements

Coursera’s mission is to create educational opportunities for people anywhere in the world. For years, Maggioncalda had been acutely aware of language translation’s importance in fulfilling that mission and building a global business. However, scale was an issue.

“We had done some language translations many years ago for the Abu Dhabi School of Government in the UAE. We translated about 100 courses. It cost about a million dollars, and it was about $10,000 per course to translate a course using just humans without technology,” he says.

Here, his familiarity with the tech sector played in his favor. Maggioncalda bet that AI advancements would soon be sophisticated enough to handle language translations. Rather than spend millions of dollars translating a catalog of more than 7,000 courses, he waited for the technology to catch up to the business problem. As soon as the technology was advanced and accessible enough to execute high-quality machine translation at scale, he was ready to pounce.

“We originally had a goal of, oh, gosh, it was like 400 courses translated into three languages,” Maggioncalda says. “I said to the team, ‘Look, once you figure out how to make this work, the difference between 400 courses in three languages and 4,000 courses in 20 languages is not really going to be that different, so let's swing for the fences.’”

By the end of 2023, Coursera had 4,500 courses translated into 20 languages.

Simultaneously, additional engineering teams worked on AI-powered products, including Course Builder, which makes it easier for course authors to develop custom courses; Coach, a learning assistant that interacts with learners in real-time using natural language; and academic integrity measures.

These quick successes are the result of knowledgeable leadership in collaboration with a team empowered to experiment with new technology.

Solving business problems with GenAI

In Maggioncalda’s experience, most top business leaders already have the singular skill that will fuel their GenAI approach: systems thinking.

Systems thinking is the ability to break down processes into their components and outcomes, identify relationships between the components, and use those relationships to influence the outcomes. Seasoned executives use this skill to assess strategic plays, develop business plans, and scale their businesses.

“It provides a very analytical framework for understanding the business as a system,” Maggioncalda says. “So when AI showed up, I'm like, I'm going to go back to my systems model of business, and I'm going to say, ‘How might AI change my business as a system?’”

Throughout his Navigating Generative AI for Leaders Specialization, Maggioncalda demonstrates how to modernize his long-honed business model by accounting for the opportunities and risks emerging AI technologies stand to pose—using the power of GenAI.

In the Specialization, business leaders have access to Coursera’s secure GenAI Playground, where Maggioncalda provides a series of prompts that challenge the GenAI tool to consider the impact AI stands to have on each element of his systems model of business.

“I wrote the course because I thought it was really important for leaders to understand this technology,” he says. In hands-on labs, business leaders use Maggioncalda’s prompts to develop an AI strategy unique to their business. They experience how advanced prompting techniques can streamline their use of GenAI tools and enhance their standard ideation and thought processes. They also learn to identify additional opportunities for GenAI to further business goals across strategy, efficiency, and product.

“A lot of people who understand what's feasible don't know what's valuable, and people who know what's valuable don't know what's feasible,” Maggioncalda says. “As a leader, you have to understand both so you can look at the intersection and say, ‘What problem can I solve given the capabilities of the technology?’”

Get the playbook: How to Lead through Generative AI Transformation

Preparing your teams for GenAI job role shifts

As leaders identify the growth opportunities GenAI presents for their business, they’ll also recognize a need for some shifts to their workforce. In some cases, this shift has already begun. A report from Microsoft and LinkedIn found that more than 60% of leaders only want to hire candidates with AI skills [2].

Begin preparing for that future reality now by upskilling and reskilling your employees with a GenAI learning strategy. "You want to try to create an environment where people feel ... inspired to push themselves, to grow, to take risks," Maggioncalda says.

Equip your employees with essential GenAI skills with Coursera’s Generative AI Academy, right-sized for teams and enterprise access. Here, your employees gain access to top AI courses from industry leaders like Microsoft, Google Cloud, and AWS, and leading universities including Stanford, Vanderbilt, and the University of Michigan.

Build Generative AI skills across your organization

Learn more about Coursera's new Generative AI Academy.

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