By Futurist Thomas Frey

The Constraint Nobody Sees

Here’s a number that should bother you: it takes between 49 and 267 hours to create one hour of quality training content.

Read that again. To produce a single hour of learning material that actually changes behavior and builds competency, organizations spend anywhere from a week to more than six weeks of human labor. The range itself tells you how broken the process is — we don’t even have predictability around how inefficient we are.

And here’s the kicker: only 12% of that painstakingly created content actually gets applied on the job.

This is the most expensive, least discussed bottleneck in the modern economy. We’re spending over $400 billion annually on corporate training, and 88% of it evaporates. The World Economic Forum estimates that 120 million workers need reskilling by 2030, yet we can’t train even a fraction of that number using current methods.

The problem isn’t that we lack information. The problem is that transforming information into learning experiences — the kind that stick, that change behavior, that build actual capability — remains desperately scarce and expensive.

I’ve been saying for years that by 2030, the largest company on the internet will be an education-based company we haven’t heard of yet. After looking at what Cogniate is building, I think they might be it.

Why Course Creation Is So Hard

Most people don’t understand why making a good course is difficult. They think: you’re an expert, you know your stuff, how hard can it be to explain it?

Very hard, actually.

Creating effective learning content requires at least five distinct skill sets that rarely exist in the same person:

Subject matter expertise — you need to actually know the thing you’re teaching, deeply enough to answer questions and handle edge cases.

Instructional design — you need to understand learning science, cognitive load theory, how people process and retain information, how to sequence material for maximum comprehension.

Content creation — you need to write clearly, create visuals, record video, build assessments, all at professional quality.

Technology proficiency — you need to navigate authoring tools, learning management systems, multimedia editing software, often with steep learning curves and clunky interfaces.

Time — even if you have all the above skills, you need dozens or hundreds of hours to actually build the course.

Most subject matter experts have the first skill and maybe one or two of the others. So organizations face a choice: either bottleneck all course creation through specialized instructional designers (expensive, slow, doesn’t scale), or accept that most training will be mediocre (cheap, fast, doesn’t work).

Neither option is acceptable when the skills gap is widening, technology is accelerating, and competitive advantage depends on how quickly your people can learn.

The Canva Parallel

Before Canva, design had two modes: hire a professional designer (expensive, slow, high quality) or use Microsoft Word (cheap, fast, terrible quality). There was no middle ground.

Canva solved this not by making designers obsolete, but by making design accessible to everyone who needed it but couldn’t afford or justify a professional. They democratized the creation of visual content.

That’s exactly the strategy Cogniate is pursuing for learning content. They’re not replacing instructional designers or learning and development professionals. They’re removing the bottleneck that forces all course creation to flow through a limited number of specialists.

The parallel runs deeper than marketing positioning. Canva succeeded because they understood that most people don’t want to become designers — they just want to produce design. They want the output, not the craft.

Same with course creation. The operations manager who understands supply chain optimization doesn’t want to become an instructional designer. She just wants to create a course that teaches her team how to optimize inventory levels. The sales director who knows how to close enterprise deals doesn’t want to learn learning science. He just wants to package his methodology into training that new reps can actually use.

Cogniate’s AI co-author handles the instructional design, the learning science, the pedagogical structure, the engagement techniques. The human brings the expertise and context. Together they create something neither could produce alone, at speed and quality that traditional methods can’t match.

The Technical Breakthrough

What makes this possible now — and not five years ago — is the convergence of several AI capabilities that have only recently matured.

Large language models can understand context, generate coherent explanations, and adapt tone and complexity to different audiences. Computer vision can create and manipulate images. Text-to-speech and speech synthesis can produce narration. Multimodal models can work across text, image, video, and audio simultaneously.

But the real innovation isn’t just using AI as a tool. It’s architecting a system where the AI functions as a genuine collaborator that understands learning objectives, curriculum design, assessment strategy, and engagement principles.

Traditional course authoring tools treat the human as the doer and the software as the tool. You tell the tool what to do, click through menus, wrestle with templates, manually construct every element.

Cogniate inverts this. The AI becomes the collaborator. You have a conversation. “I need a course teaching sales reps how to handle price objections.” The AI understands what that requires — it knows objection handling is a skill that needs practice, not just information. It structures the course accordingly. It suggests scenarios. It creates role-play exercises. It builds assessments that test application, not just recall.

The human still drives. The human provides the expertise, the examples, the war stories, the nuance. But the AI does the heavy lifting of transforming that expertise into a structured, engaging, pedagogically sound learning experience.

The result, according to early users: courses created 90% faster than traditional methods, with quality that rivals professionally designed content.

Why This Matters Beyond Corporate Training

The immediate market is corporate learning — $487 billion annually, with course creation as the primary constraint. That’s big enough. But the implications extend much further.

Think about what happens when course creation becomes radically easier, faster, and cheaper:

Professional knowledge gets unlocked. Every organization has tacit expertise trapped in people’s heads — the tricks that experienced operators know, the workarounds that make complex processes actually function, the judgment calls that separate good performance from great. Most of that knowledge never gets codified because the friction is too high. Lower the friction, and suddenly organizations can capture and share institutional knowledge that would otherwise be lost.

Reskilling becomes viable. The skills gap isn’t primarily a problem of people unwilling to learn. It’s a problem of insufficient training capacity. If creating quality reskilling programs becomes 10x faster and cheaper, suddenly retraining 120 million workers by 2030 stops looking impossible.

Education fragments and personalizes. When course creation was expensive and slow, we needed standardized curricula that could serve large audiences to justify the cost. When course creation becomes cheap and fast, we can create hyper-targeted learning for specific roles, industries, or even individuals. The economics shift from standardization to personalization.

A new creator economy emerges. Right now, creating and selling online courses requires significant investment in learning how to be a course creator. Most subject matter experts never make that leap. But if the barrier drops — if expertise can be transformed into courses in hours instead of months — teaching becomes a viable income stream for millions of professionals. This is Substack for education.

The university unbundling accelerates. Traditional higher education is already under pressure as alternatives proliferate. When individuals and organizations can rapidly create high-quality, targeted learning experiences, the degree’s monopoly on credentialing weakens further. We move toward a world of skills-based hiring and continuous learning rather than front-loaded education.

The Business Model and Market Position

Cogniate’s strategy is methodical. They’re not trying to boil the ocean. They’re starting with a clear beachhead: professional course creators and corporate trainers who already recognize the pain and are actively seeking better solutions.

The go-to-market approach involves three waves:

Wave 1: Direct sales to individual professionals and small teams. Build the product, validate the value proposition, create case studies and testimonials. They already have 19 letters of intent and access to 2,500+ potential customers through partnerships with professional development organizations.

Wave 2: Strategic partnerships with major platforms. They’re in discussions with publishers (Routledge), knowledge platforms (Wikipedia), learning platforms (LinkedIn Learning, Moodle). A single partnership with any of these could give them access to hundreds of thousands of users overnight.

Wave 3: Platform expansion beyond authoring. Add course marketplaces, hosting and community features, skills credentials, personalized AI tutoring. Each layer adds revenue streams while increasing stickiness and network effects.

The business model is proven: multi-tier SaaS with AI premium features. This is how Figma, Canva, and Webflow scaled. Cogniate isn’t inventing a new model — they’re applying a validated approach to a massive new market.

What particularly caught my attention is their intellectual property position. They’ve filed patents valued at $16+ million covering their AI-native approach to course co-creation. In a space where first-mover advantage matters enormously, they’ve built an 18-month head start.

The Risks Are Real

No vision this ambitious comes without execution risk.

Cogniate will need to prove they can scale from early adopters to mainstream market. They’ll face well-funded competitors as soon as they demonstrate market traction. They’ll need to continue innovating as AI capabilities evolve and user expectations rise.

The learning and development market can be conservative and slow to adopt new approaches. Selling into enterprises requires long sales cycles. Building a platform business means managing complex ecosystem dynamics.

But these are execution challenges, not fundamental flaws. The core insight — that course creation is a massive bottleneck and that AI co-authoring can remove it — appears sound. The market need is undeniable. The timing is favorable. The early traction validates the approach.

Why I Think This Could Work

Several factors align to make Cogniate’s vision plausible:

The market timing is perfect. Remote work made online learning essential. The corporate training market is actively seeking solutions to its capacity crisis. The AI capabilities required to build a true co-author have only recently become technically feasible.

The problem is acute and expensive. Organizations know they have a training problem. They’re already spending billions trying to solve it with methods that provably don’t work. The pain is real, and the willingness to pay for solutions is established.

The founding team brings the right expertise. Deep backgrounds in organizational psychology, management consulting, and customer success — exactly the combination needed to understand both the learning science and the business dynamics of corporate training.

The competitive landscape is favorable. Traditional LMS platforms are feature-rich but clunky and built for a pre-AI era. Newer AI-enabled tools typically bolt AI features onto legacy architectures. Cogniate started from scratch with an AI-first design, giving them architectural advantages competitors will struggle to replicate.

The economics make sense. Bottom-up market sizing suggests a $75 billion total addressable market for course authoring and creation tools within the larger $487 billion corporate training market. Multiple clear paths to their first $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

The Prediction

I don’t predict specific companies becoming unicorns without substantial evidence. But Cogniate checks the boxes that matter for transformative education technology: massive market with acute pain, genuinely innovative solution, strong IP protection, experienced leadership, early validation.

More fundamentally, they’re attacking the right problem. The constraint on human learning and development isn’t access to information — it’s the ability to transform information into meaningful learning experiences at scale. Remove that constraint, and you potentially unlock trillions of dollars in human potential.

The World Economic Forum estimates that inadequate training and reskilling costs the global economy $8.5 trillion in unrealized GDP. That’s not a typo. Eight and a half trillion. If Cogniate can materially improve how organizations create and deliver training, even capturing a small fraction of that value would make them one of the most important companies in education technology.

Whether they become the education giant I’ve been predicting or one of several players reshaping corporate learning, their emergence signals something important: the tools for creating learning experiences are about to undergo the same transformation that design tools experienced with Canva.

Course creation is about to become radically more accessible, faster, and better.

The companies and individuals who recognize this shift early and adapt accordingly will have significant advantages. The ones who continue assuming course creation must remain slow, expensive, and specialized will find themselves increasingly disadvantaged.

Education is finally getting its Canva moment.

And Cogniate might be the company that makes it happen.

*Related Articles:*

The Coming Collapse of Traditional Universities: Why Degrees Will Be Worthless by 2035

The Gig Economy of Education: When Everyone Becomes a Teacher

2030: The Year AI Tutors Become Better Than Human Teachers