From Upskillist to Ambition: building what comes after online learning

I have spent more than a decade working in online learning, going right back to the Shaw Academy years and through everything that followed with Upskillist. During that time, we helped more than 10 million people access education, built an enormous global learning library and worked with some of the biggest companies in the world.

I am genuinely proud of that. Giving somebody access to knowledge they could not reach before can change the direction of their life, and we saw that happen again and again. We saw people start businesses, change careers, earn promotions, develop new skills and finally go after ambitions they had been carrying around for years... But at the same time, not enough. Not enough people starting, ever finished. And it's been bothering us for years.

Spending that long inside the industry also gives you a very clear view of where it falls short, and over time there was one thing I found harder and harder to ignore: access to information does not automatically create progress.

We solved access, but the problem changed

When online learning first emerged, access really was the breakthrough. Knowledge that had been restricted by geography, money or circumstance could suddenly reach almost anyone with an internet connection. That was a huge change, and it opened doors for millions of people.

The world is very different now. People have access to more information than they could possibly consume: Youtube, series, videos, podcasts, books, templates, productivity systems and, increasingly, AI-generated answers to almost any question they can think of.

Yet making something important happen is still incredibly difficult.

Somebody can spend months researching a business without ever testing whether anyone actually wants it. They can learn everything there is to know about changing careers and still remain in the same role. They can become more informed, more organised and considerably busier while the thing that genuinely matters to them barely moves.

If I am honest, I think our industry congratulated itself too early. We became very good at giving people more things to consume, and we called that progress. Then we left the genuinely difficult part to the person.

They still had to work out what mattered, identify what they did not know, find the right information, connect it to their situation and turn it into action. If something changed, which it always does, they had to rebuild the plan themselves. When work, family, doubt or life interrupted, they were responsible for finding their own way back.

And let's be honest, it's not good enough. We can do better.

The people using these products were not lacking ambition. They were not lazy, and most of them were not short of information either. We had simply designed a system that gave them more answers while leaving them to hold the entire journey together in their own heads.

That is an extraordinary burden to put on somebody trying to achieve something they may never have done before, and it is the problem I believe the next generation of technology needs to solve.

Why Upskillist is becoming Ambition

That thinking is what has brought us here.

Upskillist is becoming Ambition. As part of a corporate reorganisation supporting this next phase, the Upskillist business and its assets are being carried forward into Ambition, including the technology, learning library, capabilities, relationships and experience developed throughout both the Shaw Academy and Upskillist years.

We are not pretending that history did not happen, and nobody is beginning again from zero. Everything we learned about the power of education forms the foundation of what we are building now. So does everything we learned about where education, on its own, falls short.

It is also important to be clear that I am not the original founder of Shaw Academy or Upskillist. I have spent nearly 11 years inside the business, including as CEO since 2023, helping to build and evolve it through every stage of its journey, but I did not start it. What I am doing now is something different: taking everything I have learned from being inside that system and using it to help create what I believe needs to exist next.

The name is changing because the company itself is changing.

Shaw Academy and the later rebrand to Upskillist was built around expanding access to learning, our old Shaw Academy tagline was: "To change billions of lives by providing great education, accessibly and affordably, to everyone."... A perfect analogy to the world that's not evolved over the last ten years.

Ambition is being built around the outcome that learning was always supposed to support: helping somebody make meaningful progress in their life. But learning is fuel, not the product.

Our purpose is to build what I think of as a progress engine for human potential. Technology that can help someone take an ambition out of their head, work out what it will actually require and keep moving when the path becomes uncertain, difficult or completely different from the one they expected.

I have been part of the journey that brought us here from the beginning. It showed me what access to knowledge can unlock, but it also made the limitations of the old model impossible for me to ignore. Ambition is the company I am founding for what comes next, and Kairo is our first product.

Kairo and everything that happens after the plan

Kairo is an always-on AI mentor for meaningful goals, built to think ahead.

You tell Kairo what you are trying to achieve, and it helps turn that ambition into a living path of decisions, learning and action. The important word there is “living”, because creating a plan is rarely the hardest part. Plenty of technology can produce something that looks sensible on day one.

Life is what happens afterwards.

New information appears. Assumptions turn out to be wrong. Important work gets pushed aside by urgent work. Confidence changes, circumstances change and the plan that once looked perfectly clear stops reflecting reality.

Kairo is designed to stay with the goal through all of that. It understands what somebody is trying to make happen, remembers the context around it and helps them work through what matters now. As the person takes action and encounters the real world, Kairo can adapt the path, bring forward relevant learning and prepare for what is likely to matter next.

The person should not have to explain their entire life again every time they return. They should not have to reconstruct the journey, remember every decision or somehow arrive with the perfect question before the technology can be useful. Kairo stays connected to the ambition and keeps working with the context it has built over time.

There are already plenty of chatbots/LLMs waiting to answer questions, content catalogues claiming to be personalised and productivity systems that assume people already know which work will genuinely move them forward. I do not think the world needs another one of those.

What we are building is an AI mentor organised around the ambition itself: what the person wants to make real, what stands between them and that outcome, what is changing and what will help them move now.

The best human mentors have always worked in a similar way. They understand what somebody is trying to achieve, recognise patterns that person may not see, challenge their assumptions and connect knowledge to the reality of their situation. They also help people recover when progress breaks, which it inevitably does.

Historically, that kind of support has been available to very few people. Exceptional mentors are scarce, coaches and advisers are expensive, and even when somebody has access to one, that person is rarely available at the exact moment uncertainty appears or an important decision needs to be made.

AI gives us an opportunity to rethink that. I am not interested in pretending technology can replace every extraordinary human relationship, because it cannot. I am interested in whether persistent, contextual and thoughtful support can be made available to millions more people than can access it today.

I believe it can.

Learning is fuel. Progress is the product.

I want to be very clear about something: we are not walking away from learning.

I have seen first-hand what education can do for somebody. The right knowledge, delivered at the right time, can change what a person is capable of and how they see their own future. That remains an important part of what we believe.

What has changed is not whether learning matters, but what learning is for.

In a world where information is already infinite, learning on its own is no longer the destination. It is fuel. It is what powers movement. But it is not the thing we are ultimately trying to deliver.

Today, AI can answer questions. It can respond in the moment, like raising your hand in a class and getting an immediate explanation. But that is still fundamentally reactive. It waits for you to ask. It does not understand where you are going, what you are building towards, or what is likely to matter next.

So if you are pursuing a promotion and something changes in your role, AI can explain it. It can even suggest what to do next. But it does not proactively bring you the right leadership video, the right podcast episode, or the right learning moment before you even realise you need it. It is not thinking around the corner with you. It is not connected to a long-term goal. It is not guiding a journey.

And when you look at most online learning platforms today, they are still operating in a similar way. They are just a sequence of static answers: here is a leadership course, now here is another one, now here is another one. Even when AI is bolted on—which, frankly, was exactly the first move I expected from our industry within months of ChatGPT being released—it still misses the point entirely. It was so obvious what would happen: every platform rushed to stick a chatbot on top of their existing system, as if layering AI over something fundamentally unchanged would somehow fix it. It doesn’t. It just becomes a slightly faster way to ask questions inside a structure that is still broken at its core. A feature, not a rethink. And I struggle to see how that meaningfully moves the needle for the end user, or delivers any real return, because it isn’t solving the underlying problem—it’s just dressing it up.

That is not transformation. That is just layering a chatbot on top of a catalogue.

What is missing is continuity, direction, and ownership of the journey.

Because real human ambition does not look like a list of courses. It looks like a path: start a business, grow a business, get promoted, change careers, become a better parent, master a craft, build discipline, find clarity, improve health, create stability, or simply feel more in control of your life.

And none of those goals are solved by information alone.

What people actually need is a system that takes that ambition and turns it into something real and structured: a North Star, broken into milestones, broken into tasks, supported by the right learning at the right moment, and guided by something that understands the full context of where they are trying to go.

That is what Ambition is.

Not a library of content. Not a chatbot with answers. But a living system for human progress.

A system that can:

• Define the end goal clearly enough to act as a North Star

• Break it into meaningful milestones that reflect real-world progress

• Translate those milestones into daily and weekly actions

• Bring in learning only when it is needed, as fuel for the next step

• Adapt the plan as reality changes, because it always does

• And most importantly, keep a person moving forward when motivation, clarity, or time inevitably breaks down

It does not matter if you are starting a company, scaling a company from $10 million to $100 million, trying to become a CMO of a Fortune 500 business, learning to be a better cook, building a photography career, getting a promotion, or simply trying to bring more structure to your life as a parent at home.

The shape is the same. The ambition is different, but the system is identical: define where you are going, understand what stands in the way, and keep moving through it with clarity and support.

That is the shift.

Learning becomes something that is woven into the journey, not something you go and find. It appears when it is needed, disappears when it is not, and exists only to move you forward.

But the product itself is not learning.

The product is progress.

It is the system that holds your ambition, builds your path, keeps you accountable to it, and evolves with you as you change. It is a mentor that does not forget what you are trying to achieve. It is a planner that does not lose context. It is a guide that does not wait for you to ask the right question before it helps you.

And when you put all of that together—North Star, milestones, tasks, adaptive strategy, contextual learning, and continuous mentorship—you are no longer talking about education in the traditional sense.

You are talking about a new category entirely.

A system designed not to teach you things, but to help you become the person who achieves the thing you set out to do.

That is the shift we are making.

What happens now

Ambition will become the company through which we develop our research, ideas, technology, partnerships and future products. Kairo is where people will first experience that vision.

We are beginning on the web, with mobile to follow. From there, we will keep learning from people using Kairo to pursue real goals in their businesses, careers and lives. Some of what we build will work, some of it will need to change, and the product will get better by staying close to the reality of what progress actually looks like for the people using it.

Upskillist will always be part of our history, and I do not want to diminish what it achieved simply because we now see a bigger problem to solve. It gave millions of people access to learning, and it gave us the experience required to understand what must come next.

The future of this business is Ambition because human potential is everywhere, while the support required to turn it into progress is still not. I think we can change that, and that is the work now.

Welcome to Ambition.

Scott Newton

Founder & CEO, Ambition