Cornerstone Launches Its Reinvention, Helping to Redefine Corporate Learning

by joshbersin · Published May 20, 2026 · Updated May 20, 2026

This week Cornerstone, the largest provider of corporate learning technology (around $1 Billion in revenue, roughly four times the size of Docebo), launched its reinvention into the deep and complex world of AI. Let me detail what’s going on and give you my perspectives, as we prepare to launch HR 2030.

Cornerstone Today

Today the company has more than 7,000 enterprise customers, including many of the world’s largest brands, and serves around 140 million users. Most of their revenue comes from LMS and LXP (learning management) software, but a significant also comes from the company’s talent management platform.

Founded as an e-learning platform company 27 years ago, the company pioneered the “talent-driven learning platform” market and has successfully outpaced or acquired nearly every standalone LMS company founded in the last 25 years. I estimate that the total market is around $30 billion but much is taken by Workday, Oracle, SAP, and many other human capital management players. So Cornerstone, which has superior functionality to almost everyone, is dominant.

Since the company went private in 2021 for $5.5 billion (roughly 5x revenues today), and since then has acquired EdCast (LXP), Skyhive (skills and labor market data), Tailspin (VR), and a few other small content players. So while the company is very profitable, its market valuation has not increased much because the market they’re in has been collapsing (more below).

Cornerstone is quite aware of the issues so the company has been growing its channels, selling more complete solutions, and expanding its feature set. But in some sense its brand is dated and many of its customers shop around when renewals come up.

This is not unusual or bad, by the way, since we all get tired of our “legacy” systems when fancy new ones come along, but now the market is shifting fast. Cornerstone is very well run (Himanshu Palsule, Michael Pawlyszyn, Vincent Belliveau, and other leaders are experienced, execution-oriented leaders).

Enter the AI Disruption

Up until now Cornerstone has been able to grow slowly by taking good care of customers and winning new deals to replace those that leave. But those days are coming to an end, so a pivot is badly needed. Let me explain.

In Fall of 2022 when ChatGPT came out the end of the “e-learning” or “published training content” market began… and today, four years later, this big $400 billion market is being reinvented at light speed by AI.

Here’s what’s going on, and you can read about it in our research. For 30 years companies have authored, published, and licensed content for training. That content (courses, videos, assessments, simulations, etc.) was painstakingly developed by instructional designers, graphics artists, and subject matter experts. And every domain (IT, sales, leadership, etc.) has hundreds of “publishers” or content providers offering solutions.

Building a “course” is like writing a book. You design it, source content, target it to an audience, and then you spend months building it. Once it’s built you have to translate it into languages, test it, and “publish it” into the LMS. It’s all built on the 35 year old SCORM tracking standard, which tracks how far a learner progressed and whether or not they passed or completed.

That process, which has attracted millions of high-powered learning professionals, is basically becoming defunct. It’s slow, inflexible (hard to edit), and costs a fortune. Many of the courses authored by LinkedIn or others cost $50,000 or more per course to build. So the “publishers” (or internal L&D teams) are always constrained by time and money and are regularly asked “what was the ROI of that monstrosity you worked on for 9 months?”

I’m not criticizing the industry at all, but this process is just slow and complex by nature. And the religious debates between instructional designers about “what to build” are endless. Most of us now know that we can learn a lot from YouTube videos, but they are not tracked in an LMS and they’re not corporate protected. Anyway there’s a $50+ billion market of content waiting to be totally replaced by AI.

AI Changes Everything

Now you could argue that an AI-authored course would be junky, just like we complain about AI authored essays. But that’s not the point: AI-authored courses are extremely good and they’re getting better, and the time it takes to build it and edit the course is days or hours instead of months. So even if your AI-generated course is 70% perfect, you have plenty of time to tweak it.

But there’s much more. Not only does AI generate content fast and effectively (try NotebookLM), it lets the user “ask questions” rather than page through boring chapters. So this AI-generated “Course” is a living, almost breathing expert! That means every employee gets a custom version of anything they need to learn (a problem never solved by SCORM published material).

And even better, each AI-powered course (or book in the metaphor above) is connected to every other course in the system. So if you’re trying to learn about fire safety in a refinery and you want to quickly find what to do about sulfur dioxide (highly poisonous), you don’t have to look for the “sulfur dioxide safety” course. You just ask the system your question and it answers!

If you then want to dig in and learn more you can, but most of the time “corporate learning” is not learning, it’s “enablement.” In other words, we can “learn stuff” when we have time, but 90% of our day we’re just working and we need help, information, tips, advice, or knowledge to perform. So the AI-native learning experience is enormously different than using AI to “build SCORM courses.”

We call it the Revolution in L&D, but it’s actually a Revolution in Business! Not only does L&D trim down it’s size in a massive way, but it now becomes an “enablement” operation and much of the staff goes out into the business. And I would argue that the reinvented “L&D” department doesn’t even belong in HR any more, it’s a direct business enabler (except for compliance).

(Here’s our maturity model, which is based on surveys to 700+ companies.)

Our research shows that the few companies operating at level 4 are 74% more innovative and timely with their skills development, and they are beloved by the business because they generate content as fast as problems arise.

What This Does To Cornerstone and The Market

Ok now what about Cornerstone?

Well new players like Sana, Docebo, Absorb, Uplimit, Arist, and many others are delivering AI-native learning today. And OpenAI has started to publish/integrate content from Coursera and Anthropic is running around with engineers helping companies do this too!

Ultimately we will soon be in a world (you can experience this with Galileo now) where every employee can ask a question and find the document, course, or subject matter needed to address an issue. And in AI-native learning all the data about a person and his or her work, skills, experiences, and career goals can be included.

Think about this for a minute: as we describe in HR 2030, every employee in your company will soon have an AI agent of their own (MS Copilot or whatever) that knows what you do, reads your emails, stores your meetings, and indexes every document, artifact, or other digital exhaust you create at work. This AI then knows your skills, experiences, and both strengths and weaknesses quite well. And if you add peer feedback and performance ratings, it’s even better.

Once that “People Graph,” as Cornerstone calls it, is built out (this is part of this week’s announcement) and your company has an AI-native learning platform, the agent can give anyone a nudge, onboarding plan, or management coach as needed. No more fancy assessments, external coaches, or any other slow traditional learning interventions.

I know many of you are L&D gurus and you don’t believe me, but please do – this is serious stuff. AI is extremely good at skills and behavioral inference (Galileo does it exceptionally well) and you can tag the skills and experiences in your own taxonomy or just ask the AI “what is Josh Bersin good at?”

Two things are happening now. First, the L&D spending is quickly shifting away from traditional tools to the new ones, which could impact Cornerstone’s revenues. But second, and more importantly, L&D leaders are losing their budgets, seniority, and role. In other words, if you’re a training leader and you don’t jump into AI-native solutions soon, someone is going to say “Why is Joe spending so much time on content nobody uses?”

Cornerstone Workforce AI

Now what is Cornerstone announcing. Well they have done something amazing, and while it’s very young it’s a reinvention move for sure. The new AI team, led by Guna Jayaraman, has built an entirely new platform to reinvent the company. The offering is not fully complete yet, but it brings together the features of skills and capability inference, an open “People Graph” that can import data from any system (HRMS, LMS, project management system, employee engagement surveys, etc.), and a set of data services which include labor market data (from Skyhive) and a series of out of the box “Readiness Agents” to solve problems immediately.

Some of the functionality (the middle layer above) is still coming from Cornerstone Galaxy, the incumbent learning platform. But you can get all the new capabilities from scratch or by “upgrading” what you own to a new license tier that turns on all these features.

I talked with some happy customers today (one is a wealth management company and another is a large media company) and I’ve also talked extensively with Cisco about it. In each case they have big, important skills or development transformations and they’re using Workforce AI to integrate their own company specific information to dramatically improve their skills, mobility, or redesign, or risk mitigation.

For example:

The wealth management firm is using Workforce AI to pinpoint and develop high performing wealth managers by looking at talent and job history signals never available before. They expect to see massive improvements in their portfolio performance and revenue.
The media company is going through a big merger and wants to redesign the organization, find tacit skills pools, and quickly find high skills teams who are at risk of leaving to build retention and reskilling programs quickly.
Cisco is using its long-standing skills effort to apply skills intelligence to the company’s enormous project-based work system, so people can be staffed and assigned effectively throughout their career in a rapid changing telco market.
A large healthcare company expects to save $30-40 million almost immediately by applying Cornerstone’s AI-powered “Embark Navigator Agent” which delivers highly personalized development plans for critical roles in healthcare and pharmacy.

Today this platform is not a full “AI-Native” platform like Sana (yet), but it’s close. Cornerstone launched an AI content development tool a few months ago and also has agents to help with LMS administration and analysis. So the AI-native content features are appearing in both the existing and new environment.

The packaged Agents available now (below) are not “open” for your tweaking yet, but they leverage all the data and intelligence in Workforce AI.

Where Is All This Going

I’ve been working with Cornerstone since the company was founded and this new platform strategy is enormous. The management team is still nervous about abandoning any existing customers but as I told them, this is their chance to help shape the market.

Money spent on traditional training solutions is going to plummet over time and the AI budgets are here and waiting to be allocated. So while there are some amazing vendors already here (Sana from Workday, Docebo, and others), Cornerstone has a big opportunity.

For those of you who are ready to join this revolution (I really do see it this way), I think you have to check this out. The offering is new and still needs more solutions, but the powerful AI platform gives you the opportunity to really think big. Wouldn’t you like every employee in your company to feel “enabled to succeed” in their own personal way?