On November 12, 2025, DataCamp, an edtech platform with 18 million learners, acquired Optima, an AI-native learning platform to build a new, hyper-personalized learning experience. Jonathan Cornelissen, CEO of DataCamp, welcomed Optima founder Yusuf Saber as DataCamp’s Chief AI Officer.
The acquisition brings Optima’s new AI-guided personal tutor to DataCamp’s catalog. It’s a video-less experience that is highly adaptive and customized; you, the learner, are the basis of every lesson.
DataCamp’s courses will remain expert-built (human), but they will be AI-native and will redefine the way you take data, engineering, AI, and development courses.
But what is an AI-native experience, and how is it different from other platforms that teach with AI?
What Does an AI-Native Experience Feel Like?
“Instead of consuming static content, pre-created content, an AI-native learning approach is where the content is created dynamically in a way that’s completely adapted to the learner”, Yusuf told Class Central.
His vision, like Jonathan’s, was to help people build careers in data and AI with customized, world-class education. The AI-native technology helps mold education to the learner’s story, making it easier to relate to the content and engage with it.
“There’s going to be hundreds of thousands, and millions of versions of how a course gets delivered that are completely tailored to the individual and over time also tailored to the organization.” – Jonathan Cornelissen, DataCamp CEO
The experience has three distinct qualities. It’s:
Adaptive and Tailored to Your Profession
On the DataCamp platform, the AI tutor asks initial questions to make your learner profile, which it accesses to create a lesson in real time.
“We provide the AI tutor with data sets,” said Yusuf. “With that, it creates a profile for you which has key pieces of information such as role, industry, the intent of taking the course, the problems you are trying to solve, the roles you are looking at, and more.”
This key information, paired with your pace, questions, and performance, helps the tutor to build lessons as you go. Unlike other online courses, you don’t receive blocks of text to read or a stack of videos to watch. The lessons are created bit by bit to adapt to you. Even the examples and exercises are relevant to your profession.
“For instance, the AI engineering course that we are developing teaches you how to build one aspect of an AI application. After that, you get to build your mini project,” said Yusuf. “On the explanation side, the examples are all taken from your experience.”
The tutor also remembers this information, whether you take a break from the course or start a new course, months later. It will confirm your profession, your company name (if you’ve mentioned it), your goals, and so on, to adapt accordingly.
Human and Confidence-Boosting
“Research shows that people are more open to asking questions to their AI teacher than a real human teacher because of the fear of being judged,” said Jonathan. “This experience is designed to overcome that fea,r and it helps them ask questions to an AI tutor who knows them but doesn’t judge them.”
DataCamp’s courses are domain expert-designed. The highly-qualified human instructors brainstorm and develop the curricula within 40-300 hours. The material is then passed on to the AI tutor, which can adapt the delivery based on your needs.
When you sign up for a course, the tutor asks you questions about your domain knowledge. For example, if you’ve picked the SQL course, it might ask you which SQL variant you use. If you’re using BigQuery SQL or MySQL, it would make a difference in the choices of which topics to cover.
The AI tutor is cutting-edge; it’s trained with learning aids that help it frame examples, concepts, etc in diverse ways. So you can ask your doubts in the questions box, request the tutor to repeat, and even ask for clarifications with more examples. This minimizes the need to reach out to external sources, and you get answers that are relevant to your profile.
Interactive and Hands-on
DataCamp has focused on offering active learning over video watching. Even before the acquisition, the platform’s course completion rates were around 20%, compared to 5% for video-based platforms. For AI-native courses, the engagement is higher because they are designed to be interactive from the ground up.
The experience alternates between instruction segments, where the AI tutor teaches something new, and practice segments where you apply the skill. Instruction segments don’t exceed 3-5 minutes before you practice what you’ve learned.
The AI tutor keeps you on your toes, asking you for examples, setting up mid-lesson quizzes, and giving assignments aligned with your profession, making it easier for you to apply them in the field.
“If you have to write code, it will not show you the code. It will tell you this is how to do it and let you make it work in the code editor. We try to have the learner do the work as opposed to just watching or listening.” – Jonathan Cornelissen, DataCamp CEO
But AI in education has faced setbacks: low-quality courses, monotonous content, hallucinations, and disengaged learners. DataCamp’s new learning approach tackles these challenges head-on.
How AI-Native Learning Solves Hallucinations, Quality, and Monotony
DataCamp’s new AI-native curricula address three core challenges in AI education: hallucinations that compromise trust, quality concerns around automated content, and engagement issues that lead to dropouts.
Avoiding Hallucinations
LLM hallucinations (offering factually incorrect, fabricated, or made-up information) are tough to spot, compromising learners’ trust in them. DataCamp’s new-age AI-native courses have predefined lesson plans that keep tutors within the scope of the curriculum.
“We maintain a limited scope for each lesson and offer grounding with sufficient supplementary material, so it doesn’t teach from its own knowledge or memory. We want to use its intelligence but not its knowledge,” said Yusuf. “If someone asks a question that is completely irrelevant, the tutor will refuse to answer the question, even if they ask, ‘Where does the sun rise from?’ But, if the question is relevant but out of scope, it will give a short answer without a detailed explanation.”
Delivering High-Quality Learning
DataCamp ensures and maintains quality through vetted expert instructors and AI behaviors designed to manage attention.
“Every course needs specific domain knowledge,” said Jonathan. “We look for high-quality instructors who understand relevant skills or already have deep knowledge in the field. They might’ve written a book about the topic or conducted live training sessions in it.”
Once the curriculum is developed, the AI tutor is trained with “behaviors” that are patterns to manage learner attention and engagement. The tutor gets supplementary materials like data sets and diagrams, which it uses to model concepts relevant to each learner’s profession.
“We’ve been solving for quality, and that to us means a tutor that empowers them while keeping them engaged. There’s a lot of science around how you can capture and hold people’s attention, and we endow the AI tutor with those behaviors.” – Yusuf Saber, DataCamp Chief AI Officer
Solving the Monotony and Retention Problem
Online courses struggle with completion rates as learners leave due to content, structure, delivery, or design issues. DataCamp’s new AI-native approach aims to create a ‘flow state’ (where learners are fully immersed and engaged) throughout the course.
“It will ask you how to solve specific problems. Even if the answer is wrong, the AI tutor will guide you to the right solution. It constantly checks your understanding and asks you to explain concepts in different ways,” – Yusuf Saber, DataCamp Chief AI Officer
AI-Native Learning on DataCamp for Learners & Organizations
DataCamp has around 630 “classic” courses, and it will be adding AI-native versions of those courses to its platform.
Currently, three courses, Introduction to AI for Work, Introduction to SQL, and Intermediate SQL have the AI-native learning experience. Within months, the AI tutor will be embedded in data manipulation with SQL, Python, and R, plus data visualization and BI with Power BI and Tableau.
Jonathan and Yusuf are also developing AI engineering and AI fluency courses for professionals and organizations looking for quality learning solutions for their teams. DataCamp already offers its courses to 6,000+ organizations, upskilling their employees in data and AI.
“We see a lot of demand for engineers or data scientists who can work on engineering projects and in AI engineering. There are also non-engineers who need to be able to work with AI in their job, especially if they are in a competitive role,” said Yusuf. “We want to offer these professionals a high-quality and effective learning experience.”
Reshaping AI Education
Jonathan and Yusuf envision AI-native learning moves from one-size-fits-all courses to learner-focused, real-time teaching. It’s making personalized tutoring the standard, not the exception.
The AI-native courses are available on DataCamp, with the first lesson free to try.
This article was produced by the Class Central Report team in partnership with DataCamp.
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