Pearson keeps learning on track with support from Agentforce

Questions took learning off course

For almost 100 years, Pearson has helped people across the globe grow their skills and knowledge at every stage of life, from kindergarten through retirement.

“We focus on the whole learner,” said Gabriele Bauman, VP of Customer Relationship Management & Employee Platforms. “Humans are born to learn.”

As learners move through different stages of their education journey, questions come — from finding the right course to tracking a textbook or getting help with an account. With models like Gemini and ChatGPT reshaping how people discover, learn, and build new skills, Pearson saw an opportunity to make getting those answers just as intuitive, helping students and educators spend less time searching for support and more time learning.

Always-on learner support

To give learners on-demand access to conversational support, Pearson built the Pearson Virtual Assistant, powered by Agentforce. Now live across web and mobile chat in select Pearson businesses — including U.S. Higher Ed, UK Schools, and English Language Learning — the Pearson Virtual Assistant instantly answers FAQs, processes returns, tracks orders, generates invoices, confirms prices, and more, making it easier for learners to get answers and complete everyday tasks on their own.

For example, a student who needs to return a virtual study guide after a course change can ask for a return, and Agentforce handles the request from start to finish. In the same interaction, they can track shipping on a new textbook order.

And learner support doesn’t stop at chat. For U.S. Higher Ed customers who prefer to call, Pearson is extending the Pearson Virtual Assistant to the phone with Agentforce Voice. Available 24/7, the Help Agent on voice will resolve password and login issues, answer common questions, track orders, and provide invoices — giving customers many of the same self-service options by phone. 

Whether typing or talking, if a customer’s question falls outside Agentforce’s scope — or they simply prefer human help — they can reach a service rep with their conversation context carried forward.  “We have been able to give one Pearson face to the customer,” said Rob Power, Senior Principal, Technical Architect. “There is no way we could have done that without Salesforce.”

Connected data, smarter action

The right answer depends on having the right context. Agentforce routes each request to a subagent designed to handle that type of task, grounded in the trusted data it needs to respond. For questions about everything from course offerings to grading policies, Agentforce accesses Pearson’s internal knowledge library of thousands of articles and guides stored in Service Cloud.

For order questions, Agentforce accesses data from Google BigQuery via zero copy. Data 360 brings that order data together with Pearson’s knowledge library, helping Agentforce pinpoint a single order from billions of interactions without Pearson having to copy and maintain that data in another system.

For example, if a student needs a refund, they simply log in to their customer portal built on Experience Cloud and start a conversation via Enhanced Chat. In seconds, Agentforce gets to work, routing the request to the appropriate subagent, which checks the customer’s order history in Oracle ERP via MuleSoft APIs, then taps into Service Cloud, where customer cases and account details are tracked.

Agentforce cross-checks the purchase with Pearson’s knowledge base through Data 360 to confirm it’s eligible to return. If it is, Agentforce initiates the transaction and lets the customer know they’re all set.

When a request falls outside what Agentforce can handle — for example, “Do the credits I earned abroad apply to my U.S. university?” — the Pearson Virtual Assistant transfers the customer to a service rep with context. Every interaction is saved in Data 360, so future conversations — whether with Agentforce or a human rep — pick up right where they left off.

A growing workforce of agents

Since launch in August 2025, The Pearson Virtual Assistant on chat has already answered 225,000 questions. In their UK Schools division, 70% of questions are resolved autonomously. In U.S. Higher Ed, that figure is 56%.

The shift from rep-assisted to autonomous service is freeing Pearson’s service teams to focus on questions that require human judgment. Soon, those benefits will reach the phone, too. Once fully live, Pearson anticipates voice agents will handle more than 2,500 calls per month.

Up next, Pearson is putting more agents to work across the business. A sales development agent prospects and qualifies leads, while the Service Rep Assistant agent helps service teams respond faster. Pearson plans to expand Agentforce across chat and voice to every department, with marketing agents soon to follow.

“The demand we’re getting from customers for fundamentally different learning experiences is real,” Dave Treat, Chief Technology Officer, said. “We’re not waiting. We’re starting now.”