Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Good morning, everyone. Today, as we prepare for Irresistible, I want to give you 20 minutes of discussion about the human brain learning and digital twins. This week, Eightfold announced a digital twin product which is essentially an AI system that can capture information from your emails and other communications and documents to determine things about your knowledge and your capabilities and your behaviors and, and then mimic that in a digital avatar. And, you know, this is kind of an innovative idea, but it's been around for a while. We've seen these before, and I think they were mostly done and have mostly been done for psychological bots and systems like Replica and others where you can talk to a bot. And apparently there's research, or at least journalism stories that Meta is working on one of these to go along with Instagram and others. And essentially these are AI systems that mimic human behavior and also capture human behavior as knowledge databases. And I would say, based on our experience using Galileo, this is a really good application of AI, because if you feed a system like this enough information, it does become a very smart consultant. That's exactly what Galileo has done now. Now we fed it 25 years of research, not just the behaviors of one person. So, you know, the application that Eightfold's trying to find is a, an expert, a call center manager, a leader, a manager, somebody in your company who's a guru at something and capture that information to be shared by others. This is, by the way, what Rolls Royce is doing, as I've talked about before, to try to capture the information on all the jet engines. Every scientific or customer service or product or technical domain, financial services, has people like this. And so this is a manifestation of knowledge management that is very, very big demand and very, very big market. Whether they be called digital twins or not is yet to be seen.
[00:02:01] And I'm a little bit personally not a fan of personifying AIs like this, because I don't think AIs are people. I think AIs are technologies that can be used for business purposes. And I think we somewhat can confuse our perspectives on what this stuff is by considering it to be human because it doesn't have the characteristics of a human behavior or emotional standpoint. But, you know, it gets into the issue of learning and knowledge. So let's talk about that, because this is a major theme of the announcement we're making on May 21, which, by the way, happens to be my birthday. So, as I've discussed in a bunch of podcasts the last couple of weeks, next week we're going to launch our big research paper on Corporate learning and learning in corporations has been around forever.
[00:02:48] You know, I'm sure back in the, you know, Stone Age, somebody had to teach the, you know, apprentice how to start a fire. And they probably did that, you know, face to face. They didn't really have any other ways to do it. And around the early 2000s, late 1990s, we went to E Learning and we created all these courses that were in face to face experiences and put them online.
[00:03:10] And the paradigm for corporate training and education and onboarding and support has always been the educational paradigm, the pedagogical model of learning that we all learned in grade school, elementary school, middle school, high school. And that is a teacher or a professor or an expert sits for an hour and gives you a lecture. You take notes, you do exercises, you go into breakout groups, you do simulations. And at the end of that experience of some period of time, whether it be one day, one hour, or one semester, you. You're expected to have learned something. But as you know, that is very good for some things. But you do forget a lot. I mean, I studied. I'm a very good student. One of the things I was blessed with is a mind that learns things very quickly through reading. So when I was in college, I spent six years actually as an engineer, four years in undergrad, and then two years as a master's. I learned a lot about science and math and heat transfer and physics and chemistry and mechanics and engineering. I was a mechanical engineer originally. I was going to go out and try to design jet engines and do aeronautics type of stuff. And then I got into the energy industry. And when I was in the energy industry, I went through a year of training on the refining and oil and petrochemical industry. And I know about all the different parts of an oil refinery. Do I remember any of that stuff? No, I don't remember any of it. I remember the concepts very well. I remember the way these things work. So if I got plunked into an oil refinery, I. I could figure out what was happening pretty quickly. But it's not operational stuff that I remember. And I doubt I could do a single problem set that I learned in college. Again, I doubt I could even make a stab at it.
[00:04:57] So there's this problem we have called the forgetting curve, which is very famous. The guy who's most famous for it is a guy named Richard Ebbinghaus, and he's been written about a lot, Herman Emighhouse. And he essentially studied in a variety of ways how quickly people forget things. And there are curves that show you that within a day you forget about half of what you learned. Within two days you forget about three quarters, and then it sort of slopes down. And the way we overcome that is through repetition. So. And it's often called spaced repetition, where we repeat the content later with a period of gap in between. So, so the second time you're learning something that's similar to the first time, you're forced to recall it. And the process of recalling it actually stimulates a deeper level of learning. And it, it sort of makes sense to me because when you're a little kid and you bang your knee or you burn yourself, you do tend to remember that you hurt yourself and you try not to do it again, but you tend to do it again. And then the second time you say, you know what, that's enough. I'm not doing that again.
[00:06:06] I've learned my lesson. You know, I used to get a lot of speeding tickets when I was a kid. After three or four speeding tickets, I stopped speeding. I don't know if that's learning or if that's just being a well behaved young man, but you know what I mean. So we have apprentices, we have mentors, we have managers, we have tools and performance support systems all designed to teach people how to do the things they need to do at work. Understanding the concept of the forgetting curve, understanding the concept of space learning, understanding the concept of reinforcement. And you know, in the business settings, it's so much different from in the education world, because in the business setting, the thing you're learning might change every day or two. I mean, there could be a new product, a new price, a change in the market, you know, especially if you're a financial person in the financial services industry, you're learning all the time. So the original educational paradigm of pedagogy is really, really inappropriate. And I'm not an instructional designer by career, but I've worked with a lot of instructional designers over the years and they do tend to have a somewhat. Here's my solution. Let me find a problem approach. In other words, every problem can be solved through training, and every training problem is a course. Now, I'm really not trying to insult anybody in this domain. I know it's much more complicated than that. And there's lots of other options besides courses. Everything down to a wallet card or a placard or, you know, a performance support tool and other things. But the paradigm of learning and development is learning now. And the word learning doesn't just mean education. It means, you know, learning on the job, learning in the flow of work, all of that stuff. So we've been, you know, doing this for at least the 30 years I've been here in an educational paradigm, creating courses. And most of the billions of dollars spent on content externally is purchasing coaches. We called our courses programs in the Josh Berson Academy because they were very much more complex than a course and they had lots of different, you know, interesting diversions during the program because we didn't want people to have a predictable experience because actually we found that it was more interesting to them when the program was unpredictable than when it was linear. But most courses are linear. Most of them have chapters. They're designed around the SCORM standards that track things like this. They go back to, you know, educational concepts and you know what? People don't like them. Now, I know that's a general statement other than the fact when you're brand new to a topic and then you do like linear learning. Most of us don't have time for linear learning. I think young people are much less into it than anybody because they grew up on TikTok and YouTube shorts and Instagram and they, they want to learn things quickly and they want to get back to work or back to whatever they were doing before and they want to be entertained in the process. So over these 20 or 30 years that I've been involved the learning and development domain industry profession has tried to figure out how to use these more interactive, maybe entertaining, short form space learning, repetitive learning techniques to make corporate learning better. And I would say we've done a meaningful but minor job at that. I mean, I talked to lots of clos, we just interviewed almost 40 closures. I have all the interviews in Galileo, by the way, so I can summarize them very quickly for you. And the vast majority of the large companies have enormous amounts of training that they're constantly trying to edit and update, translate to different languages and figure out how to get people to use. They do ROI studies, they try to drive completion rates, they do these sort of what I consider to be artificial measures of impact because they don't really know if the learning is changing the performance of the person in their job. So, you know, I would say that for all of the $360 billion that goes into this, it's an industry that's not that easy to measure its value, but it never goes away because everybody knows it's important and there's lots of cultural reasons and engagement reasons why it's good and people do enjoy learning new things. It's part of the reason they go to work, it's one of the reasons they take a job really, is to advance their career. It's. And I think human beings are born with an instinct to learn. I think one of the reasons that this is such a vital part of business is we are learning animals. You know, you can see Elon Musk learning while he's tweeting. I'm not going to make a comment about Donald Trump, but you know, there are many, many people you see that are very, very accomplished in many fields, including me, and they are always learning stuff. I mean, I'm learning things every day. That's the reason I work so hard and go to so many conferences and talk to so many people, is there's a never end to learning. And it's something I think most of us have a thirst for in the domains of our interest or our jobs or our careers. So there is appetite for this in every part of your company. The question is, how do we do it effectively, efficiently, in a timely, rapid, scalable, localized manner. That is hard. And you know, as I'm you're going to read about in the paper next week, the traditional course publishing paradigm is dead. I mean, it's not going to die quickly, but it's over. And the reason I'm so strong on this is observe what happened to ChatGPT. ChatGPT launched two and a half years ago, I think, and it went to a billion years users overnight. Why did a billion users Decide to use ChatGPT? I think they were all trying to learn something. They were trying to find out something, they were trying to understand something. They were trying to answer a question. That curiosity cycle that humans have is massive in companies. It's sitting there waiting to be exploited and used and leveraged. And we now know from ChatGPT and everything else like it that the conversational approach through typing or through talking or other means is the way humans enjoy the learning experience. Now, sometimes we want the teacher or mentor to tell us things, explain such and such to me. Why does so and so happen? How come I'm not getting a result by doing this, that or that? Why did this fail? I mean, there's a lot of times where we will pose a complex question and hope that the learning or the teacher or the system will explain it to us in the right way. This is why in our new system we have AI tutors and AI coaches and AI Josh to answer those questions for you. Sometimes I want to listen to it because I'm in the car. Sometimes I want to View it on a video. I've had situations where I'm trying to learn something. For example, I'm in the car and I'm interacting with something over the phone. And as soon as I get home, I go to YouTube and I look at the video because I want to see a picture of what they're talking about. And in five minutes, and on YouTube, I got it in my head. So we need these learning solutions systems, platforms, programs, courses, whatever we end up calling them, to be interactive in order to placate this really massive demand. And there was a really interesting article in the Financial Times this week, which I'll link to. I don't know if you guys can get it, but I'll. Maybe I'll find a way to get it to you.
[00:13:25] Where the woman who's in charge of the AI assistant in Google, you know, when you go to Google now and you ask a question, it shows you an AI generated summary. Unless you put, by the way, if you put minus AI at the end of the query, it will not do that. And the downside of that is that it's burning a lot of compute cycles to generate that little summary for you. But they'll get smarter at that and they'll reuse the summaries, I'm sure.
[00:13:49] And, and she said, what we are finding is that the number of queries per user per session is going up by orders of magnitude. And I call that the Curiosity effect. The Curiosity Cycle. The Curiosity Cycle is what happens in a classroom or anytime you're talking to somebody who's really knowledgeable and you ask them a question and then you ask them another question and then another question. And the more intelligence they share with you, the more interesting or curious you are about the next piece or the next implication of that answer. So what they've done with AI, what Google's basically saying is we've unlocked the Curiosity cycle, or the Curiosity circle, whatever we end up calling it. And I'll tell you what had just happened to us. So, you know, we've been producing research and selling it through memberships for a long time, mostly through websites before Galileo. And, you know, I would look at the utilization of our websites and, you know, maybe 100 people logged in on a given day. You know, I don't really know how much of it they read. And we would look at how many things were downloaded and it was, you know, in the range of, you know, maybe 2 to 300 to 500 sometimes on a big day, depends on how many people are there, what time of Day and so forth. Last week, Galileo had more than 7,000 queries. And I don't know whether the word query is even the right word because they're probably pretty complicated questions. We have individual users that are doing more than a thousand queries a week and we know, we know who they are, we don't know what they're asking. So there's an unlock here of learning and capabilities that has taken place that is a paradigm shifting opportunity for us. And this unlock of making the learning process and the learning content dynamically available through AI is massive. And I don't think we're going to call it learning. I don't know what we're going to call it. As you've seen me talk about and you'll see in the paper, I think we might want to call ourselves the Business Enablement function sounds like kind of a geeky term, but it's much more than learning. It's learning, it's enablement, it's empowerment, it's support, it's mentoring, it's coaching. Now there is still a world for coaches. I had a nice call with a large company that they didn't want me to share the story yet, but about a big change management program going on in a large consumer goods company and how they're using AI coaching to help. So there will be AI coaches. I don't know, you know, whether that will become a massive market or not. It is nice to have a digital coach that knows everything you need to know. And Galileo is going in that direction too. There's a bunch of those products on the market now and some of them are really kind of cheap, thrown together things and some of them are fairly sophisticated and I think they'll probably come very domain specific. But ultimately the real to me value of AI coaching isn't buying it off the shelf, it's doing it inside of your company. And that's where the digital thing, twin thing comes in. If you look at the combined intelligence of the Microsoft copilot and all of the information in the Microsoft graph and add to that the actual content in the documents that are created, not just the emails and the meetings and the transcriptions of the meetings, but the actual documents themselves, which by the way, Microsoft has access to that too. The copilot is basically a gigantic digital twin of your whole company. So some point Microsoft's going to use all that data to help us or we can do it ourselves, you know, with our own IT departments to see what's going on and why this sales rep is more successful. Than that one. And why this manufacturing manager is generating more revenue than that one. And the reason I'm getting into all this today is we have this big announcement next week and I want you guys to be ready for it. One more story and then I'll kind of wrap this up and give you some things to think about. One of the people I sat next to this week was the head of operations for the European business of a large restaurant chain. Who, you know who they are, but I won't mention their names. And she said, you know, they, they have franchisees, as most restaurants do. So of the, you know, thousands of restaurants they have all over Europe, I don't know, a pretty significant number of them are not owned by this company. They're, they're franchisees and they're very creative, innovative entrepreneurs running these stores. I used to work at one myself. And she said, I was in Canada and I ran across a very, very high tenured, one of our stores that had incredibly high revenue per customer, very high profitability, and very, very high employee retention. And she said, I discovered when I went there, I had to physically visit them and meet the managers. They were very, very good at training people. They had, you know, little placards attached all over the place and behaviors and all sorts of very, very specific education and training for everybody who worked in there. And people really liked it and they did a good job. The customers liked it. It was very successful. She said to me, you know, I'd like to pick up that story and share it to all of our restaurants, but I don't really know how to do that. I said, well, welcome to the world of AI. Welcome to Galileo. You could literally interview these people over the phone or go do a video interview of them and stick it into an AI platform like Galileo or others. And you could make it available to everybody and they could ask questions about it. And that would take almost no instructional design at all to do. And we were having dinner together and we spent the rest of the evening talking about this. So you can imagine the potential here when we unlock this publishing based pedagogical model of training and make it a different approach. I'm not saying that pedagogical linear training is ever going to go away. It's still needed and people do want it at certain points in their career for certain things. But it is a very minor part of the ongoing training and enablement of our organizations. Okay, so next week we're going to unleash a whole bunch of stuff on this as well as a new product, a new component of Galileo that I think you're going to be pretty excited about. And we're going to make it very affordable for everybody so you can leverage it. And for those of you coming to Irresistible, we have some really exciting stuff, including some brand new things from usc. We're going to visit some places that you've never seen before. I think if you're in Southern California, you want to come over, you can still get in. I think there's some seats available, lots of chros coming, lots of people from all over the world. I'm looking forward to seeing everybody there and have a good weekend and more to come next week. Bye for now.
