Greg Hart’s arrival at Amazon in 1997, just a day before his official start, included an unexpected Sunday meeting with Jeff Bezos. Hart, one of the few employees not personally interviewed by Bezos in the company’s early days, would go on to spend 23 years at the e-commerce giant, reporting directly to both Bezos and later, current CEO Andy Jassy. Today, as the leader of Coursera, an online learning platform valued at $1.35 billion, Hart has drawn extensively from his Amazon tenure, particularly in navigating Coursera’s recent transformation amid the surging demand for AI skill development.
Bezos’s early practice of personally interviewing nearly every one of Amazon’s approximately 200 employees set a foundational tone for the company. This commitment, Hart observed, ensured that the core tenets of passion, customer focus, high standards, and a bias for action remained integral as Amazon scaled. It was this deeply embedded culture that made Bezos’s later articulation of Amazon’s leadership principles in a shareholder letter feel like a natural extension of daily office conversations, rather than a new decree. Hart sought to instill a similar cultural alignment at Coursera, introducing a set of “leadership mindsets” tailored to the company’s specific business and history, aiming to accelerate its pace and enhance service to learners.
This strategic shift proved particularly timely as the artificial intelligence boom reshaped global workforce requirements. Coursera has seen a dramatic increase in generative AI-related courses, with over 1,100 such offerings now available, marking a 44% year-over-year rise. Generative AI has emerged as the most popular topic on the platform, attracting both individual learners and employees whose training is subsidized by their employers. To reinforce these new mindsets and ensure consistent messaging, Hart also revamped company-wide meetings, taking a page from the Amazon playbook. He replaced unfocused all-hands gatherings with sessions dedicated to a single leadership principle, a decision born from his recognition that clarity, no matter how evident to leadership, requires constant reiteration throughout an organization.
Hart implemented a system where one of his direct reports sends out a monthly video focusing on a specific leadership mindset. Similarly, each all-hands meeting highlights one principle, using concrete examples to provide context and make the concepts tangible for employees. This deliberate approach to communication addresses the challenge of ensuring that every team member, regardless of their daily schedule or attention, receives and understands critical organizational messages.
The integration of AI within Coursera itself is another area where Hart’s Amazon experience resonates. While 74% of leaders surveyed in KPMG’s 2025 U.S. CEO Outlook prioritize AI investment despite economic uncertainties, Hart, an English major by academic background, maintains a specific stance on its personal use. He views writing as a fundamental process for his own thinking, and therefore refrains from using AI for content generation, seeing it as outsourcing a crucial cognitive function. However, he actively encourages Coursera staff to experiment with AI in their roles, fostering an environment where employees can discover its utility without rigid guidelines. This open-ended exploration has led to an internal forum called ‘AI Sparks,’ where colleagues share their AI use cases and best practices. These ‘AI Sparks’ meetings have become the most well-attended and popular gatherings within the company, demonstrating a strong internal interest in practical AI applications.
A final, profound lesson from his time at Amazon has guided Hart’s strategy concerning AI adoption: the importance of not becoming overly focused on immediate, quantifiable outcomes in the nascent stages of a new technology. His perspective is that the initial goal should be to encourage widespread use across the workforce in as many ways as possible. He believes that a myopic focus on immediate impact metrics could cause Coursera to miss a far greater long-term opportunity to integrate and leverage AI effectively. This patient, expansive approach mirrors the long-term vision often attributed to Amazon’s own pioneering ventures.
