When people think of Pearson, they tend to think of thick English textbooks and test papers. But over the past few years, Pearson says it has been reinventing itself as an AI-first learning company. A company that insists it’s doing something quite different from just slapping an AI chatbot onto a curriculum, according to them.
Brenden Mielke leads the product organisation for Pearson’s English Language Learning Business Unit. I caught up with him on his recent India visit, which was partly to learn about the market. Mielke explained how he and his team are thinking about the intersection of AI and language learning at Pearson. His insights may help anyone who’s thinking of learning a language, English or any other, especially as a company that exists in the realm of teaching how to learn languages.
I sat down with him for a conversation that covered everything from enterprise English skilling to whether competitors like Duolingo have anything to worry about. Check out the edited excerpt from our conversation below.
Q. For someone who hasn’t heard of Pearson, what exactly does the company do?
Brenden: Pearson is the world’s leading learning company, and that’s across a number of different market segments. That could be in formal education from K-12 to higher education, where we provide courseware and assessments to help people learn a variety of subjects. We also help assess and certify skills to help people demonstrate that they’ve got proficiency in those areas. That might be as part of completing a programme, going for a licence, or looking to move or study abroad.
And we are also now increasingly focusing on early careers, helping people transition from formal education to the first roles in the workforce. That’s a very important transition to get right for people. And then, of course, enterprise skilling, which is where a lot of the focus is right now, especially around developing the skills needed to adopt AI within organisations and economies.
Q. A lot of people treat AI as a buzzword or just a marketing term. Where does Pearson actually stand on that?
Brenden: There’s certainly a lot of excitement around AI in the market, and Pearson is extremely excited about it as well. It brings a lot of opportunities for teachers and learners to better achieve their dreams through better learning outcomes.
But it’s not AI on its own, it’s always AI embedded with pedagogy and learning science at its core. So we don’t just launch a chatbot. We make sure we’ve deeply understood the subject matter and the way learners need to engage with it. Think of when you were learning to speak another language — getting the confidence to say the first few words. AI can help you practise that more consistently and give you real feedback. Then you practise with partners, with teachers. It’s part of a broader ecosystem, not a replacement for it.
Q. English proficiency and AI adoption are both growing fast right now. Are they complementary, or is one driving the other?
Brenden: I think they complement each other very well. Being able to communicate in English, or any language, is really about clarity. And that’s the same skill you need when you’re working with AI. The way you prompt, the way you give context to an AI to support your work, demands the same precision. English works together with AI, and the two reinforce each other.
Q. Would you say that English is kind of the interface for AI?
Brenden: It’s one of the interfaces for AI, not the only one. Language, more broadly, is the interface for AI. English is important, and we’ve seen how it creates opportunities in economies, in education, and in careers. That’s what my product lines are built around: How do you help children learn English? How do you help adults learn it?
If you take our Communication Coach, which we launched last year in partnership with Microsoft, every conversation you have on Microsoft Teams gives you feedback about how well you communicated, whether that’s language proficiency or just how clearly your message landed. Powered by AI, it delivers personalised feedback and learning interventions based on real usage.
Q. In a country like India, where a large population still lacks strong English skills, does that become a barrier to using AI tools?
Brenden: The most important thing when using AI tools is being able to communicate clearly, and whether that’s in English or another language, that clarity matters. A lot of the major AI tools are built on the bigger languages of the world, so English does help, but so do other languages. It’s less about English specifically and more about developing the ability to articulate your intent well.
Q. Pearson published a study showing that a single interaction with your AI tool made students 23% more likely to be classified as active readers. What’s actually happening in those interactions?
Brenden: The simple way to think about it is this: a textbook has the information on the page. But what if you wanted to know more? What if you didn’t fully understand how something was written, or you wanted to approach the topic slightly differently?
AI gives you a personalised way to interact with information in a new way, making sure you’re really embedding it in your own learning. That’s where you see the power of content and teaching coming together with AI to actually help you achieve the learning objective.
Q. A Wharton study argued that AI tools can harm long-term learning for students. How do you prevent that outcome?
Brenden: By always deploying AI with teaching and learning science built at its core, not as an add-on. Our AI engineers and product managers work very closely with our learning scientists to make sure what we’re building is helping people achieve learning objectives, not having any shortcuts in them. We’re designing with intention. The goal is the objective, not just the output.
Q. For a regular person, how is Pearson different from something like Duolingo?
Brenden: There are several apps in the market that sit in the personal learning and B2C space, and consumer apps can absolutely play a role in the wider ecosystem. But Pearson’s range is quite different; we operate across formal institutional settings, higher education, the workforce, and self-directed learning.
And our propositions are always backed by pedagogy and decades of learning science. We’re also quite multimodal – books, digital platforms, apps, assessments. We’re really aligned around the specific needs of each customer segment rather than a single consumer experience.
Q. Say I’m a company, and I come to Pearson saying my employees need better English. What does that process actually look like?
Brenden: Our framework starts with a diagnostic intervention. We have assessments that can measure single skills or all four — reading, writing, speaking, and listening — all online. From that, we work with customers to understand what learning interventions are needed, whether for a group or for individual employees.
Going back to the communication coach example, it’s not just giving feedback on communication; it’s also giving exercises to practise clarity or pronunciation. Then, over time, we run another diagnostic to track progress. Tools like the Communication Coach give an ongoing, indicative view of how proficiency is moving, mapped to the Global Scale of English. We continue those learning loops all the way through.
Q. There’s a growing argument that AI translation tools will reduce the professional value of being fluent in English. Do you buy that?
Brenden: We’ve asked this question ourselves, and what we see is that the market for language learning continues to be genuinely exciting. There are benefits to speaking another language that translation tools simply cannot replace. Speaking another language helps you cognitively; you become sharper, and you maintain your mental faculties. It builds deeper human relationships; there’s less friction and a stronger emotional connection.
Will there be a place for AI translation tools? Absolutely. But it doesn’t lower people’s desire to learn languages, because at the end of the day, people want to communicate human to human at a real depth.
Q. What does Pearson look like in five to ten years, once AI has really done its work?
Brenden: Like every organisation, we’re going to continue to evolve. We’ll use AI to better understand customer needs, to build better products and services, and to get closer to our customers. Most importantly, we’ll use it to help achieve better learning outcomes. I can’t say what that means for the size of the company, but it does mean it’s going to be a very exciting journey over the next five years.
In a landscape where AI is being layered onto everything from customer service to code, Pearson’s pitch slightly differs from others. They say that learning is different, that teaching matters, and that a chatbot is not a teacher.
Whether that theory translates into real outcomes at scale is something the market will decide. But with a Microsoft partnership, a growing enterprise skilling business, and genuine traction in markets like India, Pearson seems less interested in being the loudest voice in the AI conversation and more focused on being a useful one.
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