As we pass the halfway mark for 2023, it's incredible to see the amount of change, emerging technologies and evolving trends already making positive — and sometimes unexpected — impacts on our customers, our business and our industry. As a business rooted in deep innovation, we're excited by this continuous growth across the talent landscape and the opportunity to explore limitless possibilities.
In the second quarter of 2023, we cheered on our customers as they took home some big wins, led meaningful discussions surrounding current trends impacting our industry and watched as our efforts to create and deliver innovative talent solutions came to fruition.
Let's dive into all that's taken place over the last three months.
Driving customer centricity and celebrating our customer wins
At Cornerstone, our commitment to a healthy customer obsession is at the forefront of our minds and at the root of every decision we make. So you can imagine our excitement when we get the chance to showcase some of our customers' latest and greatest wins.
At the start of Q2, our customers made a big splash as more than 20 of these incredible organizations we're proud to work with made the 2023 LinkedIn Top Companies List, recognizing the best 50 workplaces for career growth in the US. Claiming 6 out of the top 10 spots, you could say Cornerstone customers are changing the game in talent development, and we love to see how each of these companies is uniquely setting their people up for limitless success through learning, skills development, content and so much more. Check out the full list here to see our winners, and send huge congratulations to the teams!
The wins didn't stop there, either. Cornerstone customer Bristlecone was named a winner of the 2023 Nucleus Research ROI Awards, recognizing the top ten organizations whose technology deployments have achieved exceptional quantifiable business results. In just four short months since implementing the EdCast by Cornerstone Learning Experience Platform (LXP), Bristlecone achieved an incredible 323% ROI, reduced external training costs, increased training adoption, improved employee productivity and redeployed employees internally through upskilling and internal succession.
This is an amazing achievement for the Bristlecone team and a true representation of the profound impact that the right learning and employee development solutions can have across organizations.
In the spirit of customer recognition, we can't conclude this section without welcoming some of our newest customers to the team:
- Red Lobster Management
- Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan
- Independence Blue Cross
- General Motors Company
- Children's Hospital Boston
And a big thank you to those customers with whom we expanded our existing relationships within Q2:
- First Citizens Bank & Trust
- Foundation of California Community Colleges
- American Red Cross
- Ricoh USA
Introducing our award-winning Opportunity Marketplace
It's no secret that Cornerstone remains in an endless pursuit to constantly enhance our products and seek out opportunities to deliver innovative solutions that meet the needs of today's workforce. So, believe us when we say we are confident that our latest product announcement will revolutionize the way organizations grow their workforce and define people potential.
Our new Opportunity Marketplace hit the scene at the start of Q2. As the industry's first holistic career growth, mobility and talent marketplace, Opportunity Marketplace is available within our Talent Experience Platform (TXP). It combines the power of AI and human-centered design principles to unlock new possibilities for people and enables organizations to improve employee engagement, retention, workforce agility and internal mobility.
The cherry on top? In Q2, Opportunity Marketplace took home its first award win — recognized by the Lighthouse Research & Advisory 2023 HR Tech Award as the "Best Talent Intelligence Solution" for enabling deep insight into skills and providing continuous growth and internal career mobility opportunities.
Our leaders continued the conversation surrounding talent mobility and the important role that AI-powered technology can play in transforming the workplace throughout Q2. Our Chief Product Officer Karthik Suri outlined how our Opportunity Marketplace will give people more personal agency in their skills development in his recent conversation with Diginomica, while Our Chief Learning Officer Marc Ramos shared his take on the use of generative AI in learning and its impact on business goals to create more efficient learning experiences:
We also partnered with nationally recognized talent management expert Dr. Edie Goldberg to discover how to break down today's most prevalent internal talent mobility barriers and unlock new potential for organizations and their people. You can learn more from our recently published eBook, in partnership with Dr. Goldberg, sharing our take on priming organizations for the talent mobility revolution.
Prioritizing exceptional content experiences for our customers
As we welcome a new era of AI-powered and skills-based content discovery and curation, we aim to provide the most innovative solutions and streamlined content experiences for organizations and their people.
In Q2, we shared some exciting early adopter feedback of our newly launched Cornerstone Content Studio — an AI-powered, highly intuitive content curation, discovery and insights tool. With Content Studio, L&D leaders can consolidate how they search for relevant content across all their content providers, receive AI-powered recommendations, easily curate new collections and get direct visibility into content consumption trends — all within a single product.
Customers like Whole Foods Market, U.S. Bank, Baylor Scott & White Health and Wesco all spoke to the positive impact Content Studio has enabled for their L&D programs. If you're interested in more Cornerstone hype and hearing what these customers had to say, keep on reading here.
Talking skills, business and tech in the new season of our HR Labs podcast
We put our podcaster hat back on in Q2 with the launch of our newest season of Cornerstone's HR Labs Podcast. This season, our Chief Learning Officer Marc Ramos is exploring the theme of "Building connection into the workplace of the future" as he and our lineup of HR, talent and learning experts uncover strategies and best practices for creating a more interconnected work environment.
If you enjoy trending topics of the modern workplace — from tech-driven learning infrastructure, AI integration in talent management and innovative approaches to mentorship programs — then this is definitely the show for you.
Welcoming our new Chief Marketing Officer!
In Q2, we also welcomed Bernd Leger to the Cornerstone executive bench as our new Chief Marketing Officer.
With more than 25 years of leadership experience in the global technology industry, Bernd has a proven track record in developing and executing go-to-market plans that have resulted in double- and triple-digit revenue growth across various SaaS organizations. As Cornerstone CMO, Bernd plays a central role in elevating our brand, scaling demand and customer growth and positioning Cornerstone's accelerated innovation and industry-leading market vision.
We're thrilled to have another accomplished, forward-thinking leader on our side. Join us in welcoming Bernd to the Cornerstone family!
Recognizing the hard work of our Cornerstars
While we don't do it all for the awards, it wouldn't be a quarterly roundup if we didn't toot our own horn just a bit with our latest industry recognition. In Q2, we added a new lineup of accolades to our resume, reflecting the hard work of our teams to create standout products and position Cornerstone as the clear market leader:
- Fosway 9-Grid™ for Talent Acquisition – Strategic Challenger
- Lighthouse Research HR Tech Awards – Best Talent Intelligence Solution Winner
- Human Resources Director Asia 5-Star Employer of Choice Winner
- Training Industry Top 20 Online Learning Library Winner
- Nucleus Research ROI Awards Winner
- Telly Awards – Training for Corporate Use, Diversity & Inclusion, Social Impact and Education & Training Winner
- EdTech Breakthrough Awards – Overall LMS Solution Provider of the Year Winne
- Software Reviews Emotional Footprint Awards – Learning Experience Winner
- TrustRadius Top Rated Award Winner
- Global Business Tech Awards – Best Use of Innovation Finalist
Until next time...
Q2 will no doubt be a tough one to beat. The good news is Q3 is already gearing up to be a quarter of product enhancements, insightful industry findings, connecting with our customers across the globe and so much more.
Check back in October for another Cornerstone roundup!
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