In 1997, the day before Greg Hart joined Amazon, he was called into a meeting — on a Sunday — with the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos.
At the time, Bezos had interviewed virtually all of Amazon’s roughly 200 employees; Hart was one of the few that the tech entrepreneur hadn’t chosen personally. Over the next 23 years at the online giant, Hart reported directly to Bezos as technical advisor to the CEO and also to Amazon’s current CEO, Andy Jassy.
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The lessons Hart learned at one of the most famous companies in the world have stayed with him to this day, as he leads online learning giant Coursera, valued at US$1.35 billion.
Hart took it upon himself to lead the company through a transformation—conveniently, just in time for demand to explode as job seekers and employees rushed to add an essential AI qualification to their resumes.
Many of the changes Hart has led to Coursera — and its more than 1,000 employees — will sound familiar to former Amazon employees.
Hart said Bezos’ practice of interviewing all employees in the early days set the tone as Amazon grew. “He wanted to ensure that the passion, customer focus, high standards and fast-moving characteristics that the first group of employees had remained true as the company grew in scale.”
That’s why it made “perfect sense” when Bezos wrote his now-famous letter to shareholders outlining his leadership principles and business priorities, because they “reflected” everyday office conversations.
Hart wanted to embody a similar mindset at Coursera. “I really wanted to transform the company and move it forward at a faster pace and provide a better service to our students. I felt like one of the most critical things in doing that was making sure there was really good cultural alignment, and so we introduced a set of leadership mindsets. We looked at some of the most successful companies in the world, looked at their values or principles, and created our own, which we felt were very specific to both our business and our history as a company.”
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This speed has become crucial as the AI boom has transformed the skill set companies seek, with employees and candidates scrambling to keep up.
The platform is now home to more than 12,000 courses, 1,100 of which are based on generative AI — a 44% year-over-year increase. GenAI is by far the most popular topic on the platform, both among individual students and among employees with employer-paid subscriptions.
The CEO also made a point of doing away with unfocused company all-hands meetings and instead reclaimed the Amazon playbook of focusing each meeting on a single leadership principle: “One of the things I’ve noticed over my time leading different businesses in different industries is that no matter how clear something is in your mind or in your leadership team’s mind, you can never repeat it enough to the rest of the organization. They may not be paying attention, they may not understand, they may have been in a meeting with a customer at the time, anyway, they may have lost.”
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“Every month, one of my direct reports sends an email with a video that talks about just one of our leadership mindsets. In every general meeting, we do the same thing. We choose one and bring examples that speak to it, because this helps make the idea concrete for people and gives it more context.”
How Hart uses AI at work
A key focus for every CEO today is how to leverage AI at work, whether within the business or for personal use. KPMG’s 2025 US CEO Outlook report found that 74% of leaders said investing in AI was a top priority despite economic uncertainty, and 79% said they were confident they were ahead of the curve in adoption and use.
Previously, CEOs told Fortune they use AI for everything from recruiting and management to meeting preparation and document summaries.
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Hart, an English major, is no stranger to the efficiencies AI can offer, but said one thing he never uses the technology for is writing. “For me, writing is how I think, and so trying to outsource that would effectively give up thinking,” Hart said. “So that wouldn’t be attractive or effective for me personally.”
Coursera employees are encouraged to experiment with AI as they see fit, with currently no set goals for what they should try to achieve. The most useful result of this approach, adds Hart, is that colleagues are sharing their use cases and best practices in an internal forum called “AI Tips.”
“AI Tips is a monthly meeting where people from across the company, at any level, will share how they are using AI in their work. These are by far the most attended and popular meetings we have at the company,” said Hart.
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One final lesson from Amazon prepared Hart for the age of AI: If you get too caught up in the results in the early phases of a new technology, you miss the bigger picture.
“My perspective is that we just want to have a workforce that is using technology as much as possible, in as many different ways as possible. Over time, we will start to focus a lot more on quantifying the impact of all of this,” Hart said. “If we focus myopically on this now, I think we would miss the opportunity to have a much bigger impact down the road.”
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