As AI rewires work, engineers rethink how the world learns

Pearson touches the lives of millions of learners across the world, shaping how students prepare for exams, enter university and build careers long after graduation. From classrooms in the US and UK to test centres and workplaces in more than 160 countries, its assessments, credentials and learning platforms have become part of the global education infrastructure. And much of the technology that now underpins that reach – and increasingly defines how learning adapts to an AI-disrupted world – is being built by engineering teams in India.

For Dave Treat, Pearson’s chief technology officer and chief information officer, this is not incidental. “We’re a 182-yearold company,” Treat told us during his recent visit to the India centres. “We’ve been many things over the years, and we’re reinventing ourselves again now as an AI-based learning company.” That reinvention, he stressed, is deeply rooted in the work being done in India, where Pearson has had a presence for roughly 30 years but where its role has expanded dramatically in recent years.

Pearson’s long history includes a period, little more than a decade ago, when it operated as a sprawling holding company. “If you go back 15 or 20 years, we had the Financial Times, The Economist, Madame Tussauds, a château in France, even Baywatch,” Treat said. “We were truly a holding company.” The strategic pivot since then has been dramatic. Pearson sold off those assets to concentrate on education, first as a textbook publisher and now as a technology-led learning company focused on skills and outcomes.

Between two-thirds and three-quarters of Treat’s tech and IT organisation is based in India. “There is a part of every one of my teams that is epicentred here,” he said. Platform engineering, site reliability, data engineering and governance, cybersecurity, enterprise architecture, AI enablement and digital workplace services all have core teams in India.

The India centres are embedded in Pearson’s global engineering fabric and are directly responsible for building and running the platforms that power its products worldwide.

Pearson’s business is no longer organised around individual products but around shared platforms that serve learners at every stage of life. In schools, universities and workplaces, AI is forcing a rethink of how people learn and how skills are assessed. Treat argued that in this environment, learning itself is the skill that determines economic and professional success. “The pace of technology and the need to learn,” he said, “is the single differentiating aspect of the success of a company, a community, a country.”

The work being done by Pearson’s engineers in India is aimed squarely at that challenge. “85% of the students using our AI-enabled study tools are getting the grade they want or better,” Treat said, pointing to a 7.5% uplift in grades overall. These systems are designed to support teachers rather than replace them, giving educators insight into what students are struggling with and enabling more targeted classroom teaching.

The same platform-led approach underpins Pearson’s enterprise learning business, now its fastest-growing segment. Here, AI is embedded directly into the flow of work, helping employees build skills without stepping away from their jobs. Treat cited an AI agent built with Microsoft that sits inside Teams meetings and offers personalised feedback after calls. “Telling people to stop their day job and go sit in a learning management system, that doesn’t work,” he said. “We have to embed learning into the context of work.”

Developing and scaling such products brings its own challenges, from compute costs and privacy to enterprise customisation and trust. Treat described this as the “hardening” phase of AI product development, where demand is strong but execution must be precise. India’s engineering teams are deeply involved in that work.

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