We’re in the midst of an innovation boom. The emergence of powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are changing the dynamics of how people learn new things and the dramatic decline in the cost to acquire information.
Thinkific has been working closely with our customers to chart a new course through these times of disruption and opportunity. We’ve been hard at work defining the future product strategy and there’s so much to get excited about. With a strong vision for the future of Thinkific, we’re excited to provide more regular updates on what’s coming and when.
This is our first deep dive into the Thinkific product roadmap. In this post, we’ll be outlining our core principles on how we are responsibly adding AI capabilities into Thinkific.
The threat and the opportunity
Consumer behavior in the last three years has rapidly shifted. We seek answers from AI apps instead of Google. Social media is full of AI prompt examples that are promised to turn anyone into an expert coder, writer, or teacher. And while it might be easy to dismiss AI tools today — they make mistakes, they get facts wrong or even invent information — ignoring their impact would be a critical error.
These AI tools present a massive opportunity for businesses founded on deep expertise. As consumers become frustrated with incorrect information or the lack of depth and substance in AI-generated content, curated, human expertise suddenly increases in value.
Learning is also not just the collection of facts and knowledge. While AI can present you with data and information, achieving the educational outcomes a person is looking for goes beyond that. A successful learning experience blends knowledge gathering with application and transformation. We don’t believe AI can support this journey alone. Thinkific’s research shows that there is a fundamental need for a human element in order for learners to achieve their desired outcomes.
By harnessing AI for speed and productivity while focusing on human expertise and sustainable transformation, learning businesses can now grow bigger than ever before. This approach is at the heart of Thinkific’s 2026 product strategy.
Thinkific was a pioneer in online education for the cloud and SaaS era. Now, we’re reinventing ourselves for the AI era. As this shift begins in the weeks and months ahead, we wanted to share some thoughts on how Thinkific will be your trusted partner as we add AI capabilities into our product.
AI that delivers real value, not “slop”
The market is full of AI solutions that make for absolutely incredible demonstrations, but don’t actually deliver real-world value. They’ve filled our feeds with mediocre and repetitive outputs and our tools with solutions to problems we didn’t have. Solutions like these have been dubbed “AI slop” by consumers.
One of our core product development principles at Thinkific is ensuring that the solutions we deliver always solve real problems and deliver actual value for both our customers and their learners. Our approach to AI is no different and we wanted to share our principles on delivering “slop”-free solutions.
We are big believers at Thinkific in the “Jobs-to-be-Done” (JTBD) methodology. It is a well-established innovation methodology built around the idea that people don’t simply buy products, they “hire” them to make progress in a specific problem they want solved. JTBD focuses on the underlying goal (“the job”) a person is trying to accomplish, along with the context, constraints, and tradeoffs that shape their choice. A job includes not only functional aims (what needs to get done), but can also include emotional and social dimensions (how a user wants to feel). As we add AI to the product, it is our goal to ensure that we are leveraging it to meaningfully solve real-world jobs in a manner that delights and serves our customers and their learners.
AI that you can trust
As businesses selling education, your intellectual property and your learner experience must be treated as sacred. As we add AI to Thinkific, we’re taking many steps to ensure these are protected at all costs.
First and foremost, your intellectual property is NEVER utilized to train public AI models. We store your content in our own database. When we do need to leverage a public Large Language Model (LLM), we do so in an ephemeral manner by making real-time API calls that only send a small snippet of data in a “just-in-time” fashion. The underlying LLM providers never store that data. In fact, we only work with LLM providers that contractually agree not to train their models on our customer data. When we utilize data to improve Thinkific, it is anonymized and aggregated. You always retain full ownership of the content you input into Thinkific AND the content generated by any AI capabilities in our platform. We will never use your content (original or AI-generated) without your consent.
Second, we have put multiple layers of protections in place to reduce the risk of harmful or inappropriate AI-generated content. This includes moderation filters and alignment with the industry-standard OWASP Top 10 for Large Language Model applications.
Enterprise-grade security and privacy
Part and parcel to trustworthy AI is knowing that Thinkific has taken appropriate measures to ensure that the platform is not compromised and data is handled in accordance with the plethora of data privacy laws that have emerged in recent years. Fear not, we have taken the appropriate steps to fully meet the needs and expectations of a global enterprise.
Details are as follows:
- As has always been the case, we perform comprehensive security, privacy, and legal reviews for any technology partner we utilize. We employ Standard Contractual Clauses and continually reassess the performance of our technology partners. If we add a new technology partner, we will notify you of a new-sub processor within 15 days via e-mail. For more information, please see https://www.thinkific.com/thinkificsubprocessors/.
- Likewise, we have always been committed to complying with privacy regulations across all major global regions. This includes GDPR in Europe, CPRA in California, GRPA in South Korea, Quebec’s LAW-25, Canada’s PIPEDA, and other applicable laws. For more information, please see https://www.thinkific.com/dpa/.
- Lastly, Thinkific leverages independent, third-party security auditors to verify that all aspects of our operations adhere to best practices for security, AI, and data use. We hold a SOC2 Type 2 report and undergo quarterly third party penetration tests while operating 24/7 security incident monitoring. Your data is encrypted at rest and in transit and accounts can utilize multi-factor authentication with least-privilege access and/or Single Sign On identity providers. For more information, please see https://www.thinkific.com/security-overview/.
As we evolve our product into the market’s leading AI-native learning commerce platform for businesses, we will have much more to share very shortly — including some AI capabilities a number of our customers have been beta testing over the last few quarters. In the meantime, we wanted to share these thoughts and principles so that you can be rest assured that Thinkific is a trustworthy partner for helping you deliver world-class AI-enabled learning experiences for your customers.
