Bausch + Lomb is bringing AI into the daily rhythms of a 170-year-old global eye health company, from how employees learn new skills to how teams rethink routine work.
In this episode of The Coursera Podcast, Anthony Salcito sits down with Devang Modi, COO and Chief AI Officer at Bausch + Lomb, about the company's approach to building AI fluency across its workforce.
Devang shares how the Bausch + Lomb AI Academy, launched in partnership with Coursera, is helping roughly 8,000 knowledge workers build foundational AI skills. The program is mandatory, tied to performance, and designed to move employees from basic awareness to everyday application.
The conversation gets practical fast: what Bausch + Lomb learned from early Copilot usage, how employees improved the quality of their prompts, why practice matters, and how teams are finding use cases in reporting, research, content development, reconciliation, and other work that can eat up valuable time.
Devang also explains why scaling AI is as much a change-management challenge as a technology challenge. He discusses the role of leadership, governance, verification, human judgment, and employee-led sharing in building the trust needed to use AI responsibly at scale.
We also cover:
🧠 Why AI fluency depends on repetition, role-specific examples, and real work
🏢 How Bausch + Lomb is embedding AI into a company with 170 years of history
📈 What the company is learning from 300+ employee-shared AI use cases and 40,000+ hours saved
🛡️ How guardrails, verification, and human judgment help teams move faster without losing control
🚀 Why the next leap is redesigning workflows around AI instead of layering AI onto existing tasks
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If you'd like to explore AI and digital transformation learning programs that help teams build practical AI skills, you can find them on Coursera.org.
