Pearson boss Omar Abbosh has reassuring words for the hundreds of thousands of teachers around the world who rely on the company’s text books, exams and qualifications: AI will not take your jobs.
Abbosh is clear that the technology will become more prevalent in education, but the self-described “techno-optimist” is confident it will enhance how people learn – whether in the classroom, home schooling or workplace training – and help rather than replace human teachers.
Enthusiasm for technological transformation is hardly surprising. When Abbosh took the helm at Pearson at the beginning of 2024, it was at the crest of a transformation that zeroed in on technology in education. In a three-year tenure, his predecessor Andy Bird helped turn a struggling conglomerate, plagued by profit warnings and a loss-making textbook business, into one of the FTSE’s best performers.
Abbosh is now tasked with sustaining that momentum, as AI advances and online courses and virtual lessons are upending expectations of what, and how, people learn. A rebrand doubled down on Pearson’s identity as a “lifelong learning company” and last year adjusted operating profit rose 10 per cent.
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Its share price continued a five-year upward trend, though after a dip this year, it is now roughly the same as 15 years ago, and a few pounds less than a decade back.
Abbosh seems exasperated that people still compare Pearson to its more distant past – a shape-shifting 181-year history in which it owned businesses as diverse as the Financial Times and Château Latour. “Pearson now is a very different company,” he says.
Joining from a career in tech and consulting, which included senior roles in technological transformation at Microsoft and Accenture, he is bringing his own lessons to how Pearson operates. As a leader, he has tried to develop a greater focus on the customer and driving product development and sales, adopting the “execution focused” mindset learned during his many years in tech and management consultant roles.
He says when he arrived at Pearson the company culture sometimes reflected the markets it served: “Thoughtful, academic, collaborative, kind ... but not necessarily the most intense commercially.” His job now is often “to remind people that if you’re not working on building better products and services for our customers, or selling and servicing our products and services with those customers, then what are we doing?”
Many of those products are tests and certifications for students, such as GCSEs and A-levels, workforce reskilling, professional qualifications and clinical assessments.
Abbosh wants to position Pearson to tackle inefficiencies in career pathways that its research suggests costs the US economy alone an estimated $1.1 trillion (€956 billion) annually.
Under his watch the company has grown vocational parts of the business, inking enterprise partnerships with individual companies such as technology consultancy Cognizant to drive its early and mid-career development tools. It is also working with Salesforce on certification for professionals using its platform, and a strategic alliance with Deloitte.
The focus on AI and tech-focused learning platforms for people at different stages of their lives now means Pearson faces competition from a wide array of new rivals, such as start-ups like Euan Blair’s Multiverse and large tech groups like Google, as well as more traditional education-focused companies such as McGraw Hill.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman has even backed a community college in the US, and the company has signed an agreement with the California State University system to offer an educational version of its platform to more than 460,000 students.
Abbosh is not too worried about large tech groups seeking to move into Pearson’s market, however. “I know these companies from the inside. They’re trying to build tools that have a billion human level scale. They’re not trying to be educators.”
He points out many of the wave of “ed tech” start-ups that emerged during the pandemic have lost “80, 90 per cent” of their value as “most people don’t learn from getting data on screen ... they can’t muster the motivation and focus to do that”.
Barriers to entry in a sector where established institutions hold substantial influence and customers value human connection is also high, he says. You have to “convince millions of educators that they want to adopt your approach. It comes from a learning rather than a tech disruption mindset.”
Even so, Abbosh argues teachers and students stand to benefit hugely from the kinds of assistance AI can provide.
“In today’s educational systems around the world, I would say that the majority of kids are not supported sufficiently,” Abbosh says. “There are lots of reasons for that, but one of them is that sometimes a kid might be stuck on some subjects and neither she nor the teachers know why. If we give kids the right AI tools, they’ll learn more and learn better.”
He gives the example of language learning – specialised English-language learning constituted more than 10 per cent of Pearson’s sales last year. “If you’ve got a classroom of 20 or 30 or 40 kids, there’s no time for everyone to practice a phrase ... AI can give you feedback on your pronunciation, on your accuracy.”
The same principles can be applied across education. “Where AI is very powerful is you can take the hundreds of learning objectives and turn them into thousands of little learning objectives and rapidly use AI to assess which ones you know, and figure out what you missed.”
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Still, Abbosh says it would be wrong to see AI as a teacher replacement even as new agentic models perform sophisticated tasks.
“Agents are very good for doing specific, narrow tasks accurately. They’re very poor at doing a job,” he says. “Teachers have a pastoral role. They understand confidence issues that impede learning. They understand self-esteem and things that you’re not going to give to an agent.”
One driver of recent growth has been an even further extension of digitally enhanced learning: virtual schools.
“You’re literally running an entire school but it’s all delivered virtually,” Abbosh says. “We hire the teachers, we do the marketing, we bring the kids on board.”
He believes the concept “probably will spread to other countries”, but in the US has been helped by a Trump “administration [that is] very keen on pro choice” and a system that gives states freedom to approve and set requirements for virtual education.
Pearson’s place in the education sector means it is exposed to shifts in US society, including a political backlash against so-called woke subjects and push towards conservative values.
“Pearson has worked for red, blue and purple states forever,” Abbosh says. “Sometimes people take issue with a specific example that might be given, and so then you might tone down an example or edit it a little bit, but ultimately, are you teaching maths? That’s what I’m focused on.”
Some of the company’s growth also reflects changes in educational needs in areas such as neurodiversity and mental health. Psychometric assessments and tools to monitor learning disorders is a growing market. “All the neurodiverse symptoms and conditions that you can see out there – ADHD, autism, cognitive learning disabilities – we measure all of that and have a suite of products that clinical psychologists and school psychologists use.”
In the workplace, Pearson sees very different demands from companies. Highly skilled and highly regulated jobs – such as surgeons – require guarantees of tight security and engagement, especially when assessments are remote. “People want to know that you can’t log into some proxy server via VPN, have someone else do the exam for you,” says Abbosh. “They’re high stakes ... leading on high security products is a very big deal.”
Tech also offers opportunities for more sophisticated training, which employers hope could improve performance and productivity. “We can apply it to soft skills, like communication skills [or] domain-specific skills,” says Abbosh. Employees in offices, call centres or technical roles might receive on-the-job performance assessments or recommendations for improvements, creating a positive feedback loop.
Having gone through a number of reinventions in its close to two centuries, Abbosh now wants to keep Pearson at the vanguard of technological change. “The only thing I worry about is that we’re slow, and that we don’t adopt the new innovations and new technology,” he says. “Because losing time is something I can’t get back.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
