Announced on December 11, IBM and Pearson are forming a worldwide partnership to build personalized, AI-powered learning products for businesses, public organizations, and educational institutions. The effort responds directly to Pearson research that links inefficient career transitions and skills mismatches in the US to an estimated $1.1 trillion in lost earnings each year, framing skills as both an economic and operational risk.
The joint tools will run on IBM’s watsonx Orchestrate and watsonx Governance, combining workflow automation and AI lifecycle control with Pearson’s learning content and assessment assets. IBM will also help Pearson develop a custom AI-powered learning platform, modeled on IBM Consulting Advantage, that blends human expertise with AI assistants, agents, and reusable assets to support new products and more data-driven internal operations.
Workforce Transformation
As IBM’s primary strategic partner for customer upskilling and workforce transformation, Pearson will provide learning solutions for IBM’s global customer base and its 270,000 employees. Those solutions include Credly for digital credentialing, Faethm for strategic workforce planning, and Pearson Professional Assessments, which delivers IBM professional certification exams worldwide.
Beyond human learning, IBM and Pearson plan to explore tools that validate the capabilities of AI agents so organizations can deploy them more confidently. This direction combines IBM’s focus on responsible, governed AI with Pearson’s experience in skills measurement and recognized credentials, pointing toward a unified approach to verifying both human and machine contributors in the enterprise.
Strategic Positioning
For Pearson, the partnership advances a strategy of building deep, 360-degree relationships with a small set of partners to strengthen customer outcomes, enable joint go-to-market motions, and support shared growth. Embedding AI into Pearson’s own operations is also expected to improve internal workflows, productivity, and decision-making around products and services.
IBM, meanwhile, positions the alliance as a way to bring AI-powered education to a broader set of organizations, from graduates entering the workforce to leaders running complex enterprises. The companies frame the collaboration as a response to rapid technology change, arguing that skills must be built inside the flow of work to keep pace with AI-driven shifts in jobs and productivity expectations.
What This Means for ERP Insiders
AI-driven learning will impact enterprise transformation. As large vendors align with specialist learning providers, ERP programs are more likely to embed skills development, role-based learning paths, and certification frameworks directly into transformation roadmaps rather than treating training as a secondary step. This may affect how product teams design enablement, how partners support adoption, and how program owners measure success beyond go-live.
Skills intelligence is turning into a strategic data asset. Platforms like Credly, Faethm, and other professional assessments illustrate how structured skills, credential, and workforce-planning data can inform decisions about architecture, automation, and operating models in ERP landscapes. For enterprise architects and systems integrators (SIs), this raises the bar for integrating learning and workforce insights into planning exercises, not just technical design.
AI governance and verification are expanding into learning ecosystems. The focus on watsonx Governance and tools to validate AI agents’ capabilities means that responsible AI will extend beyond models and APIs into how people are trained to work alongside AI. ERP leaders, vendors, and SIs will need to consider not only how AI features are embedded into platforms, but also how users and AI assistants are certified, monitored, and evolved across continuous transformation cycles.
