Cornerstone is entering a new phase of its galactic journey by incorporating digital agents into its marketing blitz designed to make next-generation learning management software relevant, effective and affordable for thousands of its customers.
At its recent Spark user conference in Las Vegas, Cornerstone CEO Himanshu Palsule upped the ante by introducing bundles of its HCM offerings segmenting them into learn, performance management and skills for strategic workforce planning.
Without providing details, Cornerstone said the bundles will be attractively priced to entice its installed base of over 7,400 customers to upgrade to Cornerstone Galaxy, its all-encompassing HCM suite introduced in 2024 for learning, performance, and skill intelligence supported by AI agents and guardrails reinforced by human involvement.
The future of Cornerstone Galaxy will cover a range of tasks such as recording data, monitoring alerts and dispensing medicine in a healthcare setting using agents mapping to the skills required to handle those tasks with or without human input or supervision, all of which need to be preset according to industry and institutional requirements.
At least 800 customers running different versions of Cornerstone, Edcast, Saba and Sumtotal are considered ripe targets for an immediate upgrade that could help the vendor drive double-digit increases in annual recurring revenues over the next year or two.
Palsule said another growth lever is its partnerships with Salesforce and Microsoft by expanding the power of Agentforce, the Generative AI proxy of the former, and Copilot, the digital assistant for the latter. In the case of Agentforce, Cornerstone will help with the training, testing and certifying of agents and agent actions with compliance in mind. For Microsoft, Cornerstone aims to deliver shortcuts for users by recommending courses while accessing Copilot Chat and Office 365.
Judging from the reactions from some of the more than 1,200 attendees of Spark, the upside is that customers reckon the intrinsic value of running Cornerstone to navigate a maze of thorny training, compliance and employee development issues, not to mention the skills gap that is expected to widen with baby boomers retiring in droves and being replaced by a new generation of young and inexperienced workers.
One attendee in the aerospace industry spoke of the need to beef up learning in order to avoid downtime after running up against a host of irregularities and non-compliance issues because of staffers receiving inadequate training. She found the integration between Microsoft Copilot and Cornerstone particularly appealing as her company is standardizing on Teams for collaboration, even though it might be difficult to budget for an immediate Galaxy upgrade because of the current economic environment.
Another attendee recalled overruling some of the employees for balking at retaking required courses after plant managers turned to Cornerstone validating their test results and credentials.
Then Michael Wynn of Bank of America Academy in charge of the banking giant’s Innovation and Design programs including the launch of virtual-reality tools and conversation simulators for better and more consistent customer service training for tens of thousands of its employees, addressed the much-needed courage and will to implement modern technology and spark innovation in order to embrace and shape the future of work.
Another spark that could ignite the enthusiasm of its customers is Cornerstone’s growing ecosystem made up of close to 1,000 integration and content alliances including Amazon Web Services, Deloitte as well as partners such as Grupo Tress Internacional in Mexico, Maestra Consultoria in Brazil, and NIIT in India, all of which are committed to upgrading their legacy customers to take advantage of the latest training and learning capabilities to help them address shifting labor requirements around the world.
With more than $1.1 billion in annual recurring revenues, Cornerstone is among the top 10 HCM applications vendors in the world, while continuing its dominance as the No. 1 provider of learning and development applications, as shown in the below exhibit.
Table 1: Top 10 Learning and Development Software Vendors, Market Size 2024
| Rank | Vendor | 2022 L&D Revenues, $M | 2023 L&D Revenues, $M | 2024 L&D Revenues, $M | YoY Growth | 2024 L&D Market Share, % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cornerstone | 553 | 611 | 648 | 6.00% | 12.00% |
| 2 | Microsoft | 414 | 464 | 509 | 9.70% | 9.40% |
| 3 | Udemy | 314 | 364 | 393 | 8.00% | 7.30% |
| 5 | Coursera | 261 | 318 | 347 | 9.10% | 6.40% |
| 4 | Anthology | 221 | 246 | 261 | 6.20% | 4.80% |
| 6 | Skillsoft | 200 | 221 | 228 | 3.20% | 4.20% |
| 9 | Instructure | 200 | 226 | 227 | 0.50% | 4.20% |
| 7 | Docebo | 107 | 169 | 203 | 20.00% | 3.70% |
| 8 | Desire2Learn | 100 | 113 | 162 | 43.70% | 3.00% |
| 10 | Degreed | 131 | 144 | 153 | 6.00% | 2.80% |
| Subtotal | 2500 | 2876 | 3131 | 8.90% | 57.80% | |
| Other | 1885 | 2001 | 2284 | 14.20% | 42.20% | |
| Total | 4385 | 4877 | 5415 | 11.00% | 100.00% |
Source: Apps Run The World, June 2025
Compared with last year’s Cornerstone Connect Live, Spark’s sales pitch was evident in 2025 underscoring a different operating environment for any software company amid the economic and geopolitical chaos. For example, government agencies such as USAID have been defunded by the current administration, having been a long-time user of Cornerstone for learning management and other HR training and workplace initiatives for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
Cornerstone’s bundling announcement also comes on the heels of similar pricing tweaks from Salesforce on Agentforce in May, suggesting evolving user demands for adaptive and flexible licensing metrics. Karthik Suri, chief product officer of Cornerstone, emphasized that the bundles represent a significant upgrade opportunity as customers will be able to access a full range of products and services including Galaxy AI agents and the Skills library from its recent acquisition of Skyhive for a fraction of the price if they are bought separately.
Suri said another value add will become more pronounced as its customers can leverage the collective insights from its 140+ million users chalking up more than 30 million learning hours every month. The scaling out of a talent intelligence platform will usher in Cornerstone’s upcoming Strategic Workforce Planning analytics engine that could spit out at a moment’s notice best practices and recommendations, aligning one’s learning management strategies with what is available or needs to be backfilled in any organization’s skills repository.
