Forio's Next 25 Years: Building the AI-Native Future of Simulation Learning

April 2026 marked 25 years since Forio was incorporated. As CEO since 2024, I could not be more proud to carry forward the vision that our founders Michael Bean and Will Glass-Husain built, made possible every day by the talent and dedication of our team. Over 25 years, we have grown from our roots in System Dynamics at MIT Sloan to a platform where 65% of MBA students and more than 10 million learners have experienced simulations at the world's leading universities and enterprises. Every stage of our company's history has been defined by the same instinct: take a great teaching idea and make it a learning experience people want to be a part of.

The next chapter of Forio is defined by AI, which changes the pace and the possibilities for our business, our customers, and our team. We are leaning into our next 25 with a core belief: we make the leap from idea to simulation feel effortless, and from simulation to scalable learning experience feel inevitable.

What Forio Builds with Business Simulations

We build the platform, partnerships, and process that turn great teaching into scalable, memorable learning experiences.

Our customers are faculty at the world's leading universities, learning and development leaders at global enterprises, and publishers who distribute content at scale. They come to us because they want learning experiences that are engaging, team-based, and built on a platform that performs at institutional scale. The reason they stay is that our simulations are fun, people respond positively, and they remember the experience for years.

We are passionate about building delightful learning experiences that stick. Our enterprise platform, our institutional partnerships, and our branded content are where we do our best work.

As we recently wrote about training ROI, the question isn't whether training works in theory, it's whether people think, decide, and act differently on the job afterward. That standard shapes what we design and how we deliver.

We make the first 80% easy and invest our platform, process, and taste for great simulation design in the final 20%. That final 20% is the simulation mechanics, the pedagogical structure, the UI/UX, the QA, and the facilitation with debrief. All of it is built in partnership with our authors, who bring the pedagogy and subject-matter expertise no platform can replace.

What We Believe Forio Will Be Able to Do for Experiential Learning

The commitments below describe what we are building toward over the next 25 years. Some of this work is already in our customers' hands. Some is on the horizon. An AI-native simulation we recently kicked off with a longtime faculty collaborator is pushing the boundaries of what a learning experience can be.

What You Can Build With Us

Faculty will move from idea to live simulation on Forio's Epicenter faster than they ever imagined. The gap between writing a case study and having a working, scalable simulation will shrink dramatically. Historically, that leap felt monumental. We are making it feel marginal. Every great teaching idea has a simple path to becoming a compelling learning experience.

Custom simulations for faculty and enterprises will ship in weeks. A production-ready simulation that once required six months of design and development will be deliverable in six weeks. AI-native workflows compress the timeline and let us focus more of our energy on the design and pedagogy that make a simulation compelling.

What You Can Find in the Forio Ready-Made Catalog

Our Ready-Made catalog will be a source of simulations learners ask for by name. As prototypes become easier for anyone to generate, the relative value of curated, pedagogically validated, institutionally branded content increases. A simulation from a world-renowned faculty member, hosted on our enterprise-grade platform with facilitation infrastructure, delivers a learning experience that changes how people think, decide, and act on the job.

Our simulation catalog comes with a complete package:

• The simulation itself
• The platform to run it at scale
• Optional facilitation to deliver it, or training for your team to own the experience themselves
• The support to make every event successful
• Accessibility and translation readiness, the standard we are building toward in every new simulation

What You Can Build on Your Own

Customers will build with their own agents on Epicenter. Forio has spent 25 years lowering the barrier to building a great simulation. Each generation of our platform has extended who can build on it.

We started with our team of instructional designers, modelers, and developers working side-by-side with customers. Our Interface Builder brought in non-coders who could shape the experience without touching the simulation engine.

Agents are the next generation. Customers' agents will create prototypes in hours, build internal-use simulations in days, and for our most advanced partners, push into production with their own teams of builders. Forio's role is what it has always been: the platform, the taste, and the process that take a working prototype to a compelling learning experience.

Where Your Simulation Can Travel

A simulation built with Forio is yours to distribute. Custom simulations built with us are designed to reach further than your classroom. Faculty retain control over how their work travels, whether through our Ready-Made catalog, their institution's publishing program, or external partners. Our platform, Epicenter, supports every route at scale.

What Our Team Brings To it All

We are building an AI-native organization so that the faculty and L&D leaders we partner with thrive in this shift. Our role is to bring the tools, workflows, and craft that help them stay ahead of it.

We are fortunate to be thinking about these opportunities at this scale, with our team and an extraordinary set of partners, at a moment when the tools to do extraordinary work are more accessible than they have ever been. I'm thrilled to begin our next 25 years of Forio.

I'd love to build them with you.