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You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and tim Stenoveek on Bloomberg Radio. You might remember this Carol. A few months ago, Luis van On, the founder and CEO of Duelingo, he made some comments on a podcast that got a lot of attention. He basically said, ultimately, he's not sure if there's anything computers can't really teach you, and that you know, teachers might not go away because they need to provide childcare and take care of kids in schools.
Do that.
Yeah, but that AI the way it's moving, that's going to be teaching kids. Look, take it with a grain of salt. Is kind of talking his book because he has the app dual Lingo that uses AI to teach people things. But right right, got a lot of attention, as you can imagine.
Listen, If anything we learned in COVID though, the importance of you know, kids being around other kids, around teachers and people is socializing and socialization super super important.
Here's what Hugo Sarahsen thinks about all this. He's CEO the online learning and teaching marketplace You to Me, the company says it as eighty one million learners around the world. It has had one hundred and twenty million course enrollments in the last year. The stockdown about fourteen and a half percent so far this year. It's got a market cap just north of a billion dollars. He joins us
from Miami. Hugo, Welcome to the program. You guys are in the midst of this pivot from a learning platform to what you're calling a quote AI powered skills acceleration platform.
What's the differences, It's pretty pretty profound. First of all, thank you for having me on the show. It's a pleasure to be here. You to me. In its original version ended up being the largest online platform on the B two C. On the B to B side, we have, as you said, on the learner eighty million plus, but on the enterprise side, seventeen thousand enterprise are depending on us to learn things from it to business skills, to communication to you know, how to collaborate, so pretty broad.
At the same time, there's a limitation. This is a distribution play that allows you to take learning in a synchronous way. But with AI, we have the opportunity to change the game and I think we're making a pretty big pivot to continuous learning personalized learning. Let's say now you and I take the same class. You may know actually the first you know thirty percent, but we're going
to run through the same class today. But with AI, I can learn and assess what you know and adapt the course in a way that you know focuses on the area where you need help. And then when you take the class, I can also notice what issue you're encountering and reinforce that through a lab through an AI roleplay another war. So it's a pretty fundamental pivot to the way we're going to deliver the reskilling of the workforce moving.
Forward, Hugo, what are you learning from? I believe it's about seventeen thousand enterprise customers. I was looking at a recent press release from you guys that you have what do you learn from them? Because part of what you folks say is you are learning and you're taking in data from those enterprise customers and what are you learning and then what are you building on that knowledge?
Yeah, we're spending a lot of time learning from our customer our learning platform. We love to learn. I've been in the role six months. I've met more than four hundred executive so a lot of input. But if you turn to the specific, I think right now this moment, everybody's trying to determine what's the best way to embrace AI. We have on our platform five times more classes being taken. Every minute eight people enroll in AI classes, so we're
seeing the demand for that. At the same time, we're seeing the need for adaptive skills, creative thinking, collaboration, communications. That's up forty percent. So we're seeing like this duality and I think it's very interesting to see that as much as the technical skills are important, you know, enterprises are looking for the human side and keep the human aspect of moving forward.
How are your B to B sales right now? Carol mentioned some stats right there, but I'm curious about the environment that you see and what you're hearing from these customers and potential customers.
Yeah, so's it's so we're sixty percent global, so it's a mix of North American, Ama, Asia back. You know, we are obviously continuing to grow now at the rate that we were growing during the pandemic, where you know, there was a very big discontinuity, but we're seeing some robust growth. At the same time the uncertainty and the to me, you know, there's a lot of you know,
wait and see. In some cases, people are investing in technology and then are realizing that just the technology is not enough, so there's a catch up in a rush to bring in the reskilling. So it's a bit of a you know, a mixed set of signals. But for our business, we're lucky because we have something that is
going to be required. I mean, the World Economic Forum in the next five years and ninety two million people and developed countries will need to be reskilled for AI and really well positioned for that well.
And it's interesting if I look at, you know, the FA function on the Bloomberg, which really you know, pulls up your balance sheet and just looking at revenue the mix between consumer and enterprise. You go back to twenty nineteen or twenty twenty, and it was largely consumer. But the shift has been kind of dramatic, right in terms of the percentage of revenues that is now enterprise. I think our data shows something like sixty three percent of
what you guys do. That's the growth. That's the model going forward.
It is, well, we're going to continue to be in the consumer space. I think we've been making a very profound shift towards the enterprise space. It is, you know, we've got the leading platform in the market today. In the consumer space, we do have a business that maybe in the last few years we haven't invested sufficiently, and then we're seeing some very interesting signals there too. I think right now, as you know the job markets, the
new graduates are struggling to find jobs. They may not have been prepared for what this economy is requiring, and they turn to platforms like you to me to kind of you know, a bit of a finishing school. They're they're taking on a specific class to learn and they're building their portfolio of projects. So we're seeing a bit of a shift. But what we're going to do is
we're going to try to capture that shift. Instead of vatrans actional course by course, we're now offering subscription and we're trying to be a place where you can continuously learn and evolve and set yourself career goals. And we're partnering with Indeed and other firms to facilitate that.
Hey, you go just thirty seconds on this are using AI to design the courses and actually do that content. How do you do that?
Yeah, So we internally, we have a learner team that focuses on how to use AI to personalize the experience. We have an instructor team that is finding ways to automate and streamline the process so that you can create a curriculum, you can create examples, you can generate images if that's what you need it. So we're making all of that super easy so that the instructor can spend
their time where they're applaying their critical thinking. They're finding analogies, they're finding ways to engage the students in better way.
All Right, we're going to leave it there. Hey, Hugo, thank you, really appreciate it. Have a good week again. Hugo Sarazin. He's chief executive officer of the online learning and teaching marketplace You to Me. Joining us from Miami,