Future Learning Is Here! These Leaders Reinvented EdTech Using AI

What’s inside?

• Top AI power leaders — The competition just gets real

• AI in action — No promotions, just impact

• Staying with the latest trends — Go with the flow

Young-Jun Jang is the CEO of Riiid, a B2B online PR and marketing platform in Korea. He also co-founded STARTWAVE. Before that, he was CCO at Tapas Media, a research assistant at UC Berkeley, and an intern at Merrill Lynch. Jang earned his degree from the Haas School of Business in Berkeley, California.

Riiid is a leading AI solutions provider delivering creative disruption to the education market through its cutting-edge technology. The company aims to empower global education players to rethink the traditional ways of learning by extending Riiid's AI competency.

Derek Haoyang Li is the Founder and Chief Education Technology Scientist at Squirrel Ai Learning, one of China’s top 20 AI unicorns. He also serves as Vice Chair of the Intelligent Education Sub-Committee of the Chinese Association of Automation and leads the IEEE Artificial Intelligence LLM-4EDU Standards Group. Forbes China featured him on its cover and interviewed him for his work.

A serial entrepreneur, Derek co-founded two companies that went public. One reached a market cap of $200 million. His latest venture, Squirrel Ai Learning, is leading AI-driven education for K-12 students. In 2024, the company launched the world’s first LAM (Large Adaptive Model) engine.

Derek has contributed to several innovations in education. These include “Concepts on Nano-Scaled Knowledge Components,” “AI-Model-Adapted Learning-Skills-Decomposition Methods,” and “Reconstructing Knowledge Space Theory (KST) with Students’ Reasons for Mistakes.” He also developed algorithms for calculating probability relevance between unrelated knowledge components.

Aaron Skonnard is a co-founder of Pluralsight and serves as its Chief Executive Officer. He has spent years creating course materials and teaching professional developers worldwide.

He has spoken at major developer conferences, including PDC, TechEd, and VSLive. For eight years, Microsoft honored him as an MVP in the "Connected Systems" developer community.

Aaron has authored many books, articles, and whitepapers. His works include Essential XML Quick Reference (Addison Wesley, 2001) and Essential XML (Addison Wesley, 2000). He also wrote popular columns for MSDN Magazine.

Omar Abbosh has spent over 30 years leading growth and transformation for top multinational companies. His career is rooted in technology and innovation, with a strong focus on navigating disruption and shaping winning strategies.

Before joining Pearson, he served as President of Microsoft Industry Solutions. There, he led sales, service, and solutions for Microsoft’s largest customers. He managed industry and technical business units, driving strategy, engineering, partnerships, and sales to influence product roadmaps and key campaigns.

Prior to Microsoft, he spent three decades at Accenture. He played a major role in the company’s digital transformation and led a highly successful business unit. His leadership included roles as Chief Strategy Officer and later, Chief Executive of Accenture’s global Communications, Technology, and Media division.

Beyond his executive roles, Omar was a non-executive board member at Zuora, Inc., a SaaS enterprise company. He holds a degree in electronic engineering and information sciences from the University of Cambridge and an MBA from INSEAD.

Aishwarya Naresh is an Applied Science Tech Lead at the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center (GenAIIC). At GenAIIC, she collaborates with organizations to identify and implement valuable generative AI solutions, streamlining their operations and boosting efficiency.

Before this role, Aishwarya worked in Amazon’s Search Science and AI Organization, leading projects focused on large-scale language, vision, and graph models. These efforts improved Amazon’s search quality, trust systems, and recommendations.

With over nine years of hands-on machine learning experience, she has authored more than 30 publications in top-tier conferences such as AAAI, ACL, CVPR, NeurIPS, and EACL. Their expertise spans areas like Large-Scale Graph Neural Networks, Machine Translation, Multimodal Summarization, Social Networks, and Artificial Social Intelligence.

Ajit Jaokar is a passionate AI leader and educator. He specializes in AI for Cyber-Physical Systems, blending research, entrepreneurship, and academia.

At the University of Oxford, he directs AI programs and serves as a Visiting Fellow in Engineering Sciences. His work explores AI’s role in Digital Twins and Cybersecurity.

His courses have reached top institutions like LSE, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, and The Future Society at Harvard Kennedy School. As an Advisory AI Engineer, he builds early-stage AI prototypes for complex challenges. His focus? Solving real-world problems through interdisciplinary AI.

Jeff Maggioncalda became Coursera’s CEO in June 2017. Under his leadership, the platform grew to 136 million learners and partnered with 7,000+ institutions. Today, it offers top-tier content from over 300 universities and industry leaders.

Before Coursera, Jeff spent 18 years as the founding CEO of Financial Engines, a company co-founded by Nobel laureate William Sharpe. There, he led rapid growth, helping millions with online investment advice for retirement.

Earlier in his career, Jeff worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company and Cornerstone Research. He also serves as a director at SVB Financial Group.

He holds an M.B.A. from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and a Bachelor's in Economics and English from Stanford University.

Outside of work, Jeff stays curious. He loves learning, enjoys music theory, and cherishes time with his wife and three daughters.

Anant Agarwal is popularly known as the Steve Jobs of online education. He is the Chief Open Education Officer at 2U/edX. He founded and led edX, the online learning platform created by Harvard and MIT. He taught the first edX course on circuits and electronics at MIT, attracting 155,000 students from 162 countries. At MIT, he has served as director of CSAIL, the university’s Computer Science and AI Lab, and is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science.

Agarwal is also a serial entrepreneur. He co-founded several companies, including Tilera Corporation, known for the Tile multicore processor, and Virtual Machine Works.

His achievements span both education and technology. He won the Maurice Wilkes Prize for computer architecture and MIT’s Smullin and Jamieson teaching awards. He even held a Guinness World Record for the largest microphone array. His textbook, Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits, is widely used.

Sal Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit dedicated to providing free, world-class education to everyone. He also started Schoolhouse.world, Khan Lab School, and Khan World School—all nonprofits focused on making personalized learning accessible.

His passion for teaching began at MIT. As a student, he built math software for kids with ADHD and tutored public school students in Boston. He holds three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard.

As of January 2025, Khan Academy’s YouTube channel has 8.74 million subscribers and over two billion views. In 2012, Time named him to its annual Time 100 list. That same year, Forbes featured him on its cover with the tagline “The $1 Trillion Opportunity.”

Dr. Andrew Ng is a global leader in AI. He founded DeepLearning.AI and co-founded Coursera, where he serves as Chairman. He also leads LandingAI, AI Fund, and is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford.

In 2011, he created Stanford's first MOOC platform. His online Machine Learning course reached over 100,000 students, laying the foundation for Coursera.

Previously, he was Baidu’s Chief Scientist, overseeing a 1,300-person AI team and driving global AI strategy. He also started the Google Brain team.

An expert in machine learning and online education, Dr. Ng has impacted countless lives. He has authored over 200 research papers in AI, robotics, and related fields. In 2023, Time named him one of the most influential AI figures. He holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and UC Berkeley.

Gen Matrix report is the first step to the future

Hearty congratulations to all the achievers who made it to the list. The ones who didn’t make it, give yourself a pat on your back. It’s just not this time, but definitely next time.

We will be observing everyone with a thousand eyes; who’s rising and who’s falling. Don’t stop trying. One day you will make it. Your contributions to the AI world won’t go unnoticed when Gen Matrix is here!

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