Speaker 1:

From the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, welcome Inside the Ice House. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange is your go-to for the latest on markets, leadership, vision, and business. For over 230 years, the NYSE has been the beating heart of global growth.

Each week, we bring you inspiring stories of innovators, job creators, and the movers and shakers of capitalism here at the NYSE and Ice's Exchanges around the world. Now let's go inside the Ice House. Here's your host, Lance Glinn.

Lance Glinn:

Welcome in to another episode of the Inside the Ice House Podcast. Our guest today, Dave Cortese, is Executive Vice President and Chief Digital Information Officer of McGraw-Hill. That's NYSE MH. Joining the company in April of 2024, Dave has helped transform McGraw-Hill, guiding alongside CEO Simon Allen, the almost 140-year-old education leader into a new era as a recently listed company on the New York Stock Exchange. Dave, thanks so much for joining us inside the Ice House. Really appreciate you being here.

David Cortese:

Lance, thanks for the opportunity to come and chat and talk about all the great things happening at McGraw-Hill.

Lance Glinn:

Absolutely. So you joined McGraw-Hill as Chief Digital Information Officer in April of 2024, joining a company with close to 140 years of history and products that over the years have influenced and educated millions, but companies need to evolve, need to adjust obviously as times change. So when you first stepped into that role over a year ago, what was just the big picture vision for the company's transformation in your eyes?

David Cortese:

Yeah, well, it captured this perfectly with talking about how long we've been around. I mean, the company, McGraw-Hill has been around for 137 years, just to be precise. We have this incredible brand recognition, this red cube that everyone knows so well probably from their schooling and growing up. But as you said, businesses change, things change, and what's happened with the McGraw-Hill business is, just within the last few decades we've gone through this incredible digital transformation. There's been a lot of contributors to that. But if you were to think back even just a few decades ago, perhaps when you were an undergrad, or I was an undergrad a few decades ago, I'm not going to date you-

Lance Glinn:

For me, it was, I would say, what was it, less than a decade ago-

David Cortese:

There you go. So multiple decades here, but when I was there, this was a 100% textbook environment. Now I have a daughter who's a senior in university, 0% books, none. I mean, I joke that the only book she has is her MacBook that she carries around from class to class.

And all of that has happened really just in the last few decades. So five years ago, that got accelerated even more with the pandemic, right? There was this huge push to figure out how to get folks to be able to learn online, that accelerated something that was already in momentum. And if you were to look at our business today, you would see that two-thirds of the revenue that we have today comes through digital solutions, these digital learning solutions that we put out across our business units. And in that higher ed section, the university section I just talked about, 92% of that business is digital revenue-driven.

Lance Glinn:

Wow. Yeah. I mean, you talk about your daughter and the only book that she carries around is her MacBook. My wife's a third grade teacher, and I remember when I was in third grade, we had maybe not textbooks, but littler books to carry around, put in our backpacks, having our desks at school. And now even her students, they're all MacBook, they're all these different computers that they bring around. They bring home, they bring back to school, they charge, they use pretty much all day every day.

And it is crazy to sort of see that evolution from those textbooks or from, again, in third grade, those littler books to now everyone's using a computer, whether you're in college or whether you're in elementary school. And the word transformation, I think can mean different things to different organizations and obviously can vary in size from a company-wide transformation to one that is obviously on more of a micro scale.

But McGraw-Hill is such a well-known brand as we just discussed, so many, including myself, obviously grew up with it in our schools. How do you balance that old with the new modernizing while obviously keeping the same core truths that have allowed McGraw-Hill for the last 137 years to be so successful?

David Cortese:

Yeah, that's a great question. I think we like to balance the fact that first thing you want to look at is just the age ranges. So one of the unique things about McGraw-Hill is we cover the full learning continuum from kindergarten all the way through postgraduate work. At the younger ages, call it K through five, we still have the majority of that business is print-related. These are the workbooks that your wife is probably using in that third grade class.

When you have to practice things like writing, you want to be on print. We also want to be conscious of the student's time in front of a screen. But where we're able to leverage technology more as a part of that transformation and find some of that balance is, if you go back those few decades ago when we're purely in print business, you really didn't have the ability to capture much in terms of the student's interactions, being able to get insight to how they were thinking, and some of the technologies in these learning solutions that they have now in parallel with print, to some degree, again, at those lower grades, the further you get on that learning continuum, the less and less print materials you're leveraging.

I gave the example of higher ed. But now we're able through those learning solutions to capture more data. We're able to capture learning interactions, which we do across currently over 26 million digital users on those platforms. It's billions of learning interactions. So we can harvest this data and empower educators, teachers like your wife, with information that hopefully gives her a better view of where everybody's at. They can see where someone might be struggling, where they're excelling, who might need some motivation. And that's where technology's playing a big role for us.

Lance Glinn:

And so we're sitting here towards the end of 2025. First few questions, obviously talking about the history of McGraw-Hill, obviously blending in the old with the new, using this data that you just spoke to to also help teachers improve and help teachers understand their students better. But as you sort of look ahead and you look towards the beginning of 2026, which is not too far away, how would you describe McGraw-Hill's identity and mission in this new era of digital learning?

David Cortese:

Yeah. Well, so our mission just overall is to elevate the student population to improve learning outcomes for those teachers, those educators and those students.

And I think how we'd like to be known in the market as someone who is, at least from the seat that I'm in, is progressive, with putting technology to work again, in concert with the right tool set, to do that. And where we're really focused is around putting more personalized learning capabilities out into the market.

And so I want to explain what that means, because I might say it a few times and I want to make sure the folks who are listening, who are watching this understand. Personalized learning is where an educator can get an understanding of where each student is in their class, and be able to work with them one-on-one, right? So we're empowering them with information that allows them to work on an individual basis so that, again, the educator isn't necessarily focused on just the average. Historically pre-technology in the classroom or pre-technology from students' access to such, you might teach to the norm of the class and the outliers who are on one end of the bell curve and the other sort of get lost.

And we're looking to really get to a place where we can understand where every student is on that learning journey and find ways to elevate their outcome.

Lance Glinn:

David, McGraw-Hill obviously operates in a very competitive space alongside quite a few other players. From your perspective, what just sets the company apart, not just in terms of products, but just in terms of its approach to education and innovation there as well?

David Cortese:

Yeah, it's a great question. So there's never been a shortage of people that want to be playing in the education space. And that goes from early-stage startups all the way through to folks that are in our competitive set, and maybe even others, maybe some of the hyperscalers or the folks that are foundational model LLM players who always use education as their case study examples in a lot of things when they do product launches and such.

I think the thing that sets us apart is the assets that we have that are unique that we bring to bear for education. So what do I mean by that? Well, when we think about our moats at McGraw-Hill, one of the moats that we've talked about internally is the IP that we have, that content. I mean, for over a century now, we have been building and creating high-value vetted content that goes to work inside of these solutions.

Again, whether it's third grade math or it's postgraduate work in medical school. The other is the data itself. So again, I talked about the 26 million paid digital users that we have, our ability to sort of curate information from the solutions that we put into the market. That is a unique data set. It's a unique data asset that given the scale we have, the distribution we have into 14,000 school districts in the K through 12 space, into thousands of universities at the higher education level, that we can take a look at and learn from.

So our ability to look at that data and understand, what are people thinking where we might be able to hop in and help them with something, where might we be able to improve our product is tremendous. And then the third thing I'll mention on how we're differentiated from others who want to come and play in this space is that actual distribution model. So if you think about anyone trying to get into the education space today, it requires you to go out geographically and build these relationships with 14,000 school districts with thousands of universities.

We've been doing this for decades. I mean, we have these deep-seated relationships inside of these institutions that allows us to take advantage of when we put something out into market, we have this scale, that's already in place where we can put those solutions out into the market and let them run.

Lance Glinn:

And there's the trust factor too. These school districts trust-

David Cortese:

Huge value, right? Huge value. I mean, one of the things that, just to add one more point to that IP and that content side of things, one of the things that I didn't appreciate before I came to McGraw-Hill, was the fact that the value that an educator and a teacher puts on something that's vetted in equality, it's tremendous.

And these are our decision makers, the educators, the professors, the teachers in the classroom. Those are the decision makers that are buying our products. And I never appreciated how much value they put them in. We don't put disclaimers on our content. We can't do that. If you were to look at most of the AI solutions out there today, there's always a disclaimer, might not be right, might be accurate, check the results. We can't do that.

We're held to a higher standard, and we embrace that. And the reason we're able to do that is because of the tremendous authors we work with, some of whom are noble laureates, who are subject matter experts in all these competencies.

Lance Glinn:

So we're going to touch on AI in a little bit, but before we do, I do want to just talk about digital leadership as a whole because I think that term can mean very different things depending on the company and the context that it's set in. In your view, what does it truly mean to be a digital leader in the education space? And then I know you've talked about it over the course of our conversation, but how do you then translate that leadership into this impact for students, for educators, and really all the stakeholders involved, all the way up to even your shareholders?

David Cortese:

Yeah, great question. So I talked a moment ago about wanting to put technology and AI to work in personalized learning. That's a huge core tenant for us in this space. The others that we focus on, when we talk internally about how do we bring technology to bear, to make education better, we talk about things like making the teacher's life easier. Your wife, she's got 41 minutes a day, 30 kids in the class, she's got to teach third grade math or whatever the subject is. It's a hard job.

Lance Glinn:

Oh, I hear it-

David Cortese:

You hear about it, right?

Lance Glinn:

I hear about it.

David Cortese:

It's a hard job and everybody knows that. So what are the things that we can do for folks like your wife to make their job easier? The other thing we talk a lot about is, how do we strengthen that teacher-to-student interaction? How do we make that stronger? How do we empower teachers to do more of that? And you can imagine that when you have the ability to understand, in your wife's case, through data where each student is, it allows her to be more effective with the time she has in that classroom, in that 41 or 42 minutes a day.

Those are some of the things we're focused on to try to, again, elevate everybody in that class, but also make your wife's life easier and the time she has in class as effective as possible.

Lance Glinn:

Absolutely. Now, digital transformation, it's not just though about the tools, it's about obviously changing how people work, how people think as well. There's that factor invested too. That obviously has been a focus across companies of every sector, not just the education space, not just McGraw-Hill, especially over the last five or so years. How have you helped foster a digital-first culture in a company that, as we talked about earlier, is 137 years old and for so long was so textbook-based.

David Cortese:

Yeah. Well, the good news is that, I will tell you one of the things that I really welcome at McGraw-Hill is, we work directly with business unit leaders. So at McGraw-Hill we have four business units, K through 12, which is school, higher education, global professional, which is mostly medical school-focused, and the last is international. Every one of those business unit leaders is, fortunately for me, very pro-technology, understands the value that technology can bring to the business and to their customers and to the schools and educators, embraces the investments that we need to make there.

And there's a tremendous power in when you sit in my seat and you have a team of engineering and technology talent, to be able to lock arms with your business unit leaders and adopt the way they want to work and the way that they see schools going, it's tremendously powerful, when you give these people hard problems to solve, in changing the way schools are operating or the way that teachers are working, people tend to stay a long time. They like solving hard problems.

Lance Glinn:

So I mentioned we're going to talk about AI. Let's get to that because it is something that has obviously taken over the business landscape as a whole, not just education, not just McGraw-Hill, but sectors and companies that really do a host of a bunch of different things. It's become, however, one of the most transformative forces in education. I know my wife has seen it used, I know that her students know what it is, even in third grade. They understand sort of what ChatGPT is. They understand the different use cases to a certain extent of what it can provide.

From your perspective, what does AI really mean in education today in the perspective of how it's changing the way students learn, educators teach and institutions really operate from an elementary school all the way up to a university?

David Cortese:

Yeah. Well, it's showing up, as you said perfectly, in a lot of different ways. So first off, we tend to bucket the way it shows up for us. And you've got this bucket, which is study aids or apps that are helping students with learning vocab words or whatever happens to be. The second category is around automation. So auto grading, for example, helping teachers with administrative tasks, chatbot technology is coming to play a lot here, in helping just facilitate some of that administrivia.

And the third bucket is more that general gen AI that you see show up sometimes in translation services, or for us, where we lean in very heavily at McGraw-Hill is in content creation. So at McGraw-Hill, we still spend a fair amount of money every year creating content that goes inside of our learning solutions, when we're developing a new English language arts program or we're working with an author on a certain subject in the higher ed sector. There's content that we're building as a part of that.

And we've leaned very heavily on gen AI internally to help streamline and automate a lot of those things. Now where it's also showing up, and this is where no matter what age, even at third grade, I think a lot of folks understand this, is that those LLMs, the ChatGPT, that the gen AI piece for us has become a very powerful tool in the fact that we work with OpenAi, we work with Anthropic, we're agnostic to the model players, but we see the value of embedding some of those capabilities inside of our existing learning solutions.

So we can take Connect, which is the name of our higher ed platform, it's the number one courseware provider out there, and we can put in point solutions that are gen AI powered. And I'll give you an example just to make the point. We have a capability that we call AI reader where if you're in economics and you're in our course on economics and you're struggling with a term, you can highlight a passage and say, "Explain this to me a little simpler. I still don't get it. Explain it to me again differently."

Lance Glinn:

I could've used that when I was in school.

David Cortese:

Well, it's interesting, right? Kids who are struggling with a particular topic, they can quiz themselves on the topic just to make sure that comprehension is there. Now, where it gets really interesting is we can put these gen AI capabilities out there inside of our learning solutions, and we do, and we've done that many times.

Where it gets really interesting is now, again, being able to harvest the data from that. So what can I learn from what I just described you? Well, I can see inside of this economics class, what are people highlighting? What is it that they're struggling with? What is it that they're continually asking? Are they asking continually to explain supply demand? And if that's the case, we can see that and now message back to that professor and say, 25% of the class doesn't get this one thing.

They don't get this. Maybe you need to have a five-minute refresher at the next class to make sure that people understand this concept. You couldn't do this literally three years ago. What I just described around AI Reader in terms of the capability we've put into the platform, the data we're harvesting, how we're using that for messaging and insights, it didn't exist 24 months ago. And this is just where it's showing up in ways that, in some cases, we just couldn't imagine.

Lance Glinn:

Absolutely. And I think that speaks to, I think one of the biggest promises or potentials of AI is that sort of personalization, which you obviously spoke to earlier. And I think that speaks to that personalization aspect where you can see student A is struggling with this. Student B is struggling with this, especially in my wife's case when she only has, I think 21 or 22 students in her class. She's not in a big lecture hall, obviously, like they are in colleges, with 200 plus people, she can see that one of her students is struggling with this. One of her students is struggling with this, while during her prep period, she can talk to student A and she can know what student A is struggling with, work with them to obviously help boost them up, help their comprehension, help their understanding.

When it comes to that personalization and AI, how is McGraw-Hill really turning that promise that AI provides into a reality, and then helping those students like my wife's, succeed in ways that obviously differ from previous traditional methods?

David Cortese:

Yeah, I have an excellent example I can give you exactly on that, that fits even squarely within your wife's grade range. So in our school business, that K through 12 business unit, we have this solution, it's called McGraw-Hill Plus. And what McGraw-Hill Plus does is if you're a customer of ours and you are in math, you're using our third grade math program, let's say, we're looking at the student's interaction from that, we're looking at the assessment results at the end of each section of how they're doing.

We also can tap into, if your wife happens to be using, what we call supplemental and intervention products, these are products that if the students need a little more support in certain areas we give them to use, we can pull the data from there.

We also integrate with third-party state assessment data. So your wife may once or twice a year have to give a state administrative assessment, right? So what we're doing at McGraw-Hill in K through 12 is we're pulling data from the core subject platform, supplemental intervention platform, and that third-party state assessment. Now, here's where the magic happens. We apply data science in bringing that all together and mapping that against the state learning objectives. So if your wife is teaching in New York or New Jersey, that state has a specific set of learning objectives, that when they come out of that third grade class with her, they have to demonstrate competency.

And what we do is we map all of that data and insights and those state assessments against those learning objectives. And we very clearly outline through this very colorful wheel of a skills and standards graph, of exactly who is where. And we're really bringing the promise that you just described perfectly to light through this McGraw-Hill Plus platform. It is true personalized learning instruction where we're empowering the teacher to work with those students the way you described your wife would during break.

Lance Glinn:

And then you have all these innovations, right? You have the integration of AI, you have implementation and, say the advancements of X technology, Y technology, whatever it may be. But for you at McGraw-Hill, when you have these innovations, when you have these advancements, how do you measure success both tangibly and intangibly of a digital innovation? Is it about adoption rates? Is it about learning outcomes, or is it something deeper, like student engagement, equity scores? How do you really judge whether what you're providing is working?

David Cortese:

Yeah. I'll give you another great example, and I'll give a very specific innovation we launched last summer in our higher ed sector. Again, this is college thing, college here, we have an innovation we launched last summer called Evergreen. Now, again, let's go back a few decades to the textbook days. You'd have edition two, and then at three or four years later, you have edition three and so on and so forth. Well, again, 92% of this business in higher ed now is digital.

And so what we've launched is Evergreen, which is very analogous to an update notification you might get on your iPhone that says, "You've got something new here. Do you want to take..." Well, they force you to do it on the iPhone, but do you want to take the update and get all the new bells and whistles? And what Evergreen does is take that old legacy edition textbook two to addition textbook three, and makes it basically a seamless digital experience. So now as the professor, I don't have to worry about what's in the new edition. I basically click go, I get all the new content in that new edition, I get help from McGraw-Hill on redoing my semester syllabus and curriculum plan and what have you.

And so why is that an innovation? Well, because one, we're making sure the students have the most current information possible. The joke we use is, Pluto was a planet, when I was in school it wasn't a planet. Now I think it's a planet or a dwarf planet, right? Things change.

And we want to make sure that the book is not the one where it's not accurately describing Pluto as a planet or not. So one, we make sure students have the most accurate information. For the professor, of course, they're also making sure they're teaching the most current curriculum. So how do we measure this?

Well, when we launched Evergreen, we said if we could get more than 70% of the professors to accept that update, when that new content is available through a new edition, we would consider that a success. We just had our leadership team meeting yesterday, we're at 95% acceptance rate. They just click a button, they want that new information. So how else do we measure this?

Well, we also measure this because that will keep retention for us strong. Historically, when we had to go out and talk to a professor about moving between an edition of a textbook, it created an inflection point, right? So I'm asking you, "Lance, hey, look at this new edition and tell me if you're interested and tell me if you want to adopt and cut over." And you might go, "Well, if you're going to make me do some work here, I might look at what else is out there."

Now we've mitigated that, we've removed that friction, so that retention with that professor in that course for us will be more seamless and hopefully much longer. We expect it will be. And then for our Salesforce, they're not spending as much time out there having to convince and go through the process of explaining what's new, we just make this all digitally seamless, and the students win, the teacher wins, and McGraw-Hill wins.

Lance Glinn:

Absolutely. How do you determine though, the right time, what's your innovation philosophy? How do you determine the right time, the right place? Is it as simple as asking teachers, as asking administrators, as asking institutions? How do you determine, even take Evergreen as an example? How do you determine that that is where you want to take the next step? How do you determine that's where you want to innovate?

David Cortese:

Yeah. Well, part of it is something you just hit on, which is we want to make sure we're removing friction points wherever we can. So back to one of those core tenets on whenever we do anything tied to innovation, one of them is how do we make the teacher's life easier?

So making teachers' lives easier, or educators' lives easier, starts with what's the friction points? What are the things that are painful for you? What's the administrative task that's not allowing you to spend more time with your students? So with some of our projects, we're focused on that. What are the problems we can solve to make that teacher's life a bit easier?

The flip side of that is, we have to be creative thinkers with regards to what we can see in the potential of these technologies. When we started with the concept of AI reader, it started as a concept just to empower the student to have more personalized learning instruction. If I'm trying to scram for a test on a Sunday night at college, I can't get into office hours before 8:00 AM tomorrow morning. So I'm empowered to highlight things and quiz myself on this stuff.

But what we didn't realize was the insights for the professor that would come out of that, right? So we have to think ahead about what else the data and the information that we're collecting can be an asset for us.

Lance Glinn:

So as the husband of a teacher, as we've talked about, my wife being one in third grade in New Jersey, I see obviously firsthand how much teachers juggle. I mentioned it before, she comes home, I hear about her day every day, she hears about mine. I hear about all the issues that she's run through, whether it be with other teachers, whether it be with administrators, schools, whatever, students. It goes on and on, our teachers juggle a lot. There's lesson planning too. There's grading and there's also adapting, obviously these new technologies, some of which you've spoken to in our conversation. I think for her and for teachers, it could sometimes feel overwhelming, the amount of technology that they now have at their fingertips.

So with that being said, what steps does McGraw-Hill take to make this sort of digital transformation, these new digital technologies, easy to integrate and easy to use so that teachers spend less time troubleshooting and trying to figure out how to use them and can obviously spend more time just using them and helping educate their students?

David Cortese:

Yeah, this is personal for you, so I get it. I'm going to give you an example-

Lance Glinn:

And my wife will be listening, so she knows exactly.

David Cortese:

I'm going to give you an example in the higher ed space, and I'm only going to use higher ed and not your wife's domain, because about three weeks ago, I spent the day on campus at one of the Cal State campuses in California, Cal State Long Beach, and I had the opportunity to basically tag along with someone from the higher ed team. And I spent the whole day talking to professors and even some students who were there during office hours.

And a lot of my questions, of course, were focused on how they're focused, what are you using from AI tools? I'm learning. I'm there to learn and observe. And one of the most prevailing comments that I got was something that you just said, which was, the amount of apps and the amount of widgets and the amount of things that are coming at me as a professor here is just too overwhelming. And what this one particular STEM professor said to me was, "If I tell my students I've got six different tools or apps out there that I want them to use, they'll feel obligated to do that. If they want to meet expectations, they will feel obligated to do that." And his comment was, "I don't want that. I want them to be able to go one place where they can do the work, where they have the resources available to them, and if they want to come to office hours for support, that's great."

And so to your question, Lance, one of the things that we're trying to stick to very steadfast is, how do we keep the student in a single ecosystem where we tie these things together? I talked about core subject solutions and supplemental intervention. We also have a mobile study app called Sharpen.

We link that into the platform as well. So based on what this professor told us, we can keep them in one place, and everything is connected, and it's all supporting the same learning outcomes for them.

The other thing I learned on this campus was that... And this may or may not be a surprise to folks, is some folks just don't know where to start. And the other thing which will probably not be obvious to a lot of folks is the pace of education technology adoption, is not nearly that of high frequency trading.

The pace here is a little slower, and I think that gives us an opportunity at McGraw-Hill to almost be a river guide to these educators. So we introduce them to new technologies, maybe with a feature like an AI reader, for example, where they get some education and awareness about the benefits, but we hold their hand along the way. We want to be in that pole position to take them on the journey at the pace that they want to go. We do not want to overwhelm. We want to demonstrate the value first, and if it's embraced, then we'll go from there.

Lance Glinn:

So Dave, as we begin to wrap up our conversation, we've obviously spent the last few minutes talking about AI, talking about the different technologies that McGraw-Hill is providing to teachers and institutions and educators, so on and so forth.

One of the great things I think about AI, one of the most exciting things about AI is that there are so many more use cases that have yet to be discovered, right? We already know some of what it can do, but there are some estimates that we've only scratched the surface, 10% of what AI can really bring to us. There's so much more ahead.

What excites you most about where AI can lead in education and where these advancements in technologies can really bring the industry, bring the sector, and bring McGraw-Hill forward?

David Cortese:

Yeah. Well, let me start by saying, we believe that education is a social activity, and that as progressive as we've been at McGraw-Hill about putting technology out into the market, we see the value of the teacher and the teacher-student relationship as the most important thing, first and foremost.

So as much technology as we put into play into the market with new innovations, the teacher is really the person we're trying to empower with these power tools. What excites me the most is that I talked about AI Reader, and the fact that that was something two years ago that we couldn't do.

And there's a lot of things that we can do today, Lance, that just two or three years ago were not possible, either because it was economically not viable or the capability just didn't exist. And so what excites me about going forward, looking into the future, is the art of the possible with AI, because as I sit here with you talking, I can't help but wonder, in two years from now, what am I going to be saying two years from now about today that wasn't possible, but is possible then. We're doing some incredibly exciting things now with simulating in our medical school group, patient and student interaction, allowing a medical student to have a simulated conversation with a patient to refine their skills in analyzing and diagnosing illnesses.

I mean, this is stuff we couldn't do not that long ago, and it just makes me... I get very excited about not just the roadmap we have, which is very healthy, but just the art of possible what's coming.

Lance Glinn:

And I know I asked you earlier where McGraw-Hill sits as we enter 2026, but as we look to the following year and beyond, what does the next chapter look like for this right now 137-year-old company?

David Cortese:

Yeah, I mean, I think we want to continue to always strengthen our core, first and foremost. We have a great business across these business units in the K through 12, higher ed, postgraduate learning. There's still tremendous opportunities just within that core of the business, figuring out new things to bring to bear. When we think about what's next for us in terms of where the growth might come from, where I sit, it's really focused around new products and new capabilities.

So we just a few months ago launched into calculus, which was a subject we never had into the market, but we're putting a calculus product out into market that's machine-based learning, that's got algorithmic technology that allows to personalize a learning journey for someone to learn to their strengths and weaknesses.

I mentioned the fact that we're getting stronger in the mobile space with our Sharpened Study Companion. So I think the product portfolio will continue to expand. We'll explore new opportunities both with net new products, with expanding capabilities within certain grade ranges, and we will have to wait and see what AI brings along with that.

Lance Glinn:

Absolutely. Well, Dave, I see the life of a teacher every day, and I appreciate all that you, the leadership team at McGraw-Hill, everyone at McGraw-Hill is doing to make my wife's life better, and of course her students' life better as well. Thanks so much for joining us Inside the Ice House.

David Cortese:

Lance, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Speaker 1:

That's our conversation for this week. Remember to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen and follow us on X, @IceHousePodcast. From the New York Stock Exchange, we'll talk to you again next week Inside the Ice House.

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