An AI-focused vision in an AI-driven future

1. Greg, please tell us a bit about yourself. What’s been your pathway to Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Pearson VUE today?

I've been in tech for about 30 years. Early on, I was part of tech startups focused on salesforce automation for consumer-packaged goods. Then, I moved to IBM, where I drove innovation in retail point-of-sale systems. This is where my passion for business transformation really took shape. After that, I spent 20 years in media and telecom, leading end-to-end product and technology transformations to modernize, innovate, and future-proof businesses.

Looking back, despite all the technological advances and innovations, the common thread throughout my career—and now at Pearson VUE—is transformation. Each transformation agenda spawns the next, but there are some common themes: accelerating customer value, fueling growth, enhancing customer experience, and generating efficiencies by turning ideas into reality faster.

It's exciting to be in a leadership position at Pearson VUE during such a dynamic period of growth, especially with AI revolutionizing everything we touch. I'm eager to explore how we evolve and expand with this technology, delivering more personalized and authentic assessments of skills and competencies — while increasing the fidelity of exam security. AI will drive progress in our industry with the potential to democratize opportunities globally, so everyone has a chance to reach their full potential. 

2. What does a typical day look like?

A typical pre-work routine for me starts early in the US. I like to kick off my day by checking out trends and key developments around the world and across our industry. This helps me keep a daily perspective on key themes or significant changes that could influence our business and underlying strategies.

My days are dynamic — a constant balancing act of strategy, delivery, innovation, and operational efficiency. We have our daily leadership and team alignment sessions, and the rest of the day is all about ensuring the successful delivery of products and services to meet client demands, drive business growth, optimize our processes, and innovate for the future.

Given the scale at which we operate and our geo-diversity, we have lots of small, focused meetings. These cover strategy development and refinement, key program and project rapid-fire, business operations, product planning, design reviews and demos, managing escalations, coaching and mentoring, and, of course, getting honest feedback from our clients and candidates. Since we’re a services company powered by technology and products, I’m always thinking about how we can improve our capabilities and performance with technology—whether that’s in design, development, testing, delivery, or operations. Plus, I always like to drop in a few ad hoc discussions throughout the day. We must continue to challenge ourselves, so we don’t get too stuck in our routines! 

3. Where do you see candidates benefiting the most from our advancements with AI over the next five years? And what will our clients gain from these developments?

Wow, so five years is a long time in tech, right? Especially with how the pace of change with AI has already moved so fast in just the last year.  In the near term for Pearson VUE, we have some exciting AI advancements emerging.  We just launched our Pearson Virtual Assistant, a groundbreaking Generative AI tool that will enable candidates to ask questions and get answers in real time throughout their testing journey.  AI is also at the center of improving candidate experience — removing stress and friction from the check-in and greet processes allowing candidates to focus their time and energy on their test.  

While I don’t have a crystal ball, I predict advancements over this period will enable Pearson VUE to deliver highly personalized and contextual experiences to candidates. We’ll start to see in-demand, concierge type experiences that are more intuitive — helping candidates better prepare for their exams. AI will assist them with scheduling, booking and payment, submitting accommodation requests, and getting the right support. I think we’ll soon reach a point where these AI tools can remember the individual and contextualize candidate interactions based on where the person is in their “learn, prep, certify” journey.  

Eventually, we’ll see more immersive, experiential learning and assessment methods involving augmented reality, virtual reality, and even mixed reality (AR, VR, and MR). All of our AI implementations will continue to include a human-in-the-loop, helping ensure exam results are trustworthy.  

We’re currently scaling AI for high-stakes test item development and launching our second-generation AI sensors (these are systems that detect information during an exam and process data), facilitating continual advancements in AI-assisted proctoring and record and review. I believe AI can play a key role in elevating the security and fidelity of online-proctored and test-center modalities to optimal levels. 

4. How is Pearson VUE preparing workers for AI-powered industries? 

Education is of course key to building people’s confidence with using AI — guiding people around how to use these tools effectively, responsibly, and ethically. We have our Pearson GenAI Foundations certification — a great initiative to build critical career skills — for both our customers and our own employees (many of whom will have the opportunity to take this credential within the next year). It’s so important to upskill all types of professionals in how to use AI effectively and responsibly. Increasing the number of people who understand AI can improve its adoption — ensuring that it’s being used in the right way. As the global assessments leader, we take our role as an educator with new technologies very seriously. In addition to our training initiatives such as the Pearson Skilling Suite to address the technology skills gap, we continue to build and invest in our core technology — while introducing AI into more of our products and services — at scale — and in an extremely responsible way.

5. Can you provide examples of successful AI implementation across the business? 

AI plays a significant role across Pearson VUE. For example, in the test fraud analysis space, it’s being used to create analytical fraud models that increase our forensic capabilities, so that we can determine whether an action (or combination of disparate actions) is potentially fraudulent. It’s used for ID verification to validate that candidate identification methods provided are valid, government-issued IDs. And for facial recognition to ensure the person taking the exam is the person who registered and checked in. We also use AI for speech analysis to validate voice consistency throughout the exam.

I would say it's easy today for companies to just build and deliver some kind of AI. But it's not easy to do it repeatedly, securely, at scale, and in compliance with local legislation including privacy laws, data protection rules, discrimination concerns, and accountability requirements.

AI implementation across Pearson VUE has been principled — it’s been about firmly establishing our foundation, and that foundation is education. Establishing guardrails around where we should and where we shouldn’t use AI — how to protect the interests of our clients, testing candidates, and the public in general. And then educating our employees on the responsible use of AI, which is so fundamental in our new AI-driven era.

7. How do you personally use AI as part of your role as CTO?  

AI tools are great at summarizing technical reports, emails, documents, and analyzing spreadsheets to speed the process of forming a perspective and then making informed decisions. I use AI to carry out research and then organize and aggregate vast amounts of information into useful summaries that are easily digestible. I also use it to simplify and streamline internal communications, create images that help visually prototype or convey a message, and explore patterns or anomalies in sets of data. It’s my go-to tool for admin tasks such as summarizing meetings, suggesting responses to and drafting emails, and helping me quickly locate information. Simply put, I personally use AI tools to help me amplify my productivity and impact every day.