Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Okay guys, today I'm going to give you the preview to the two hour session I'm having at the Learning Technologies Conference in the UK week after next. And just this is the beginning of a very long conversation we're going to be having over the next couple years about education and learning and the role of AI. By the way, this was also the week of ASU gsv. So the education industry is going through the same revolution in a sense as corporate. So first, generally, let's talk about what's going on in business in general. CFOs and CEOs are definitely concerned about the economy. We have trade barriers, slowdowns and uncertainty from political pressures. 92% of CEOs believe AI will improve productivity. I was on the phone yesterday with an ex chro of a large company who is now part of a large private equity company and she said that all of their private equity companies are trying to reduce about a third of their workforce with AI. That's the target. So there's a lot of expectations on the business side that we're going to shrink the size of our companies, we're going to make our business processes much more efficient, we're going to implement AI and the sooner we do it, the better to accommodate that. IT departments are spending money like crazy. I saw a study two weeks ago or a week ago that said that IT budgets are going up 62% with all the money they're spending on AI platforms. By the way, that's not going into HR, that's going into it. So it's things like the Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT core platforms to build upon, not necessarily applications because there aren't that many applications yet. Now that also means that there are AI teams, there are AI councils, there are AI steering committees, there are chief AI officers. Companies are looking at governance and security and operational issues and technology and vendors like crazy. Now we're starting a big study by the way of AI governance. I'll tell you more about that in another week or two. And HR is a part of this, but not the center of it.
[00:02:05] Speaker B: The center of it is probably much.
[00:02:07] Speaker A: More focused on customer service, sales, marketing, supply chain, operational things. But we're very much a part of this because we are a cost center in HR and L and D. And.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: That means that anything we can do.
[00:02:20] Speaker A: To be more productive and more proactive with our solutions is going to be good. And anything that we don't do is going to ask people to question why we're not part of the program as those of you who are HR people know in the middle of all this, the workforce is also under a lot of stress. Research that's come out from Gallup, the research that's come out from the Edelman Research, Edelman Trust Barometer, the research that came out from ADECCO late last year and some betterup just did some more of this shows that were at an all time low for two decades in employee engagement. And primarily the concern that employees have is they're worried that AI is going to eliminate their jobs. So as some of you may be, they don't know what the company's going to do to them or for them. And of course Elon Musk and Doge isn't helping that either. So we've got this pressure on the company to become more efficient from the top and this resistance to these changes from the workforce, but expectations and hope from the workforce that we're going to do this. So we have have to really, throughout hr, not just in L and D, have to really take this seriously. Because if we aren't doing a good job of improving employee services, simplifying and streamlining recruiting, improving talent mobility, making training much more dynamic and more efficient, somebody's.
[00:03:41] Speaker B: Going to do it for us.
[00:03:41] Speaker A: And that's what I'm going to talk about in L and D. The second.
[00:03:44] Speaker B: Part of the story is L and.
[00:03:45] Speaker A: D. Now I got involved in L And D almost 30 years ago. It was roughly 30 years ago, maybe 28.
[00:03:51] Speaker B: And what I discovered at the time.
[00:03:53] Speaker A: Was was that the training industry, which is massive, it's not just training, it's professional development, it's skills development, it's career development, it's coaching, it's mentoring, it's apprenticeships, it's certifications, it's credentialing, it's assessments, you know, simulations, virtual reality. There's all sorts of tributaries to this is a 350 to $400 billion market and that includes tools, technology, content services, instructors, LMSs, platforms, all sorts of things. And I'm only talking about the corporate side, I'm not even talking about the primary and secondary and tertiary education side. And what I learned early on was that it's not part of hr, at least it wasn't. This is a, an enablement function that is built up over the years to make sure that companies do their and employees do their jobs well, that there's quality, that there's skills, that there's capabilities in the company and that is very operational in nature. Now there's an HR piece to it and I've always drawn learning and development as two concentrics, two circles that over overlap. There's the operational part of L and D and then there's the HR part which is leadership development and careers and you know, maybe DEI and a few things, but that's actually a relatively small part. So the narrative is kind of like this. In the early 2000s, or really before I even got into this stuff in the 1980s, there was a kind of a big move by Jack Welch at GE when he came in to dramatically transform ge. There's lots of books written on this. This is the old ge, not the GE we know of. And he basically said we got to reduce overhead, cut the corporate staff, become the number one or number two in all of our markets, sell off the companies that are not profitable. And I need a C level officer to drive this. And he called it the Chief Learning Officer. And the, the individual that was the Chief Learning Officer at the time, I don't remember his name, started a whole series of initiatives at ge, including Crotonville, ge, the Corporate University and drove the capability changes and directives needed to shrink size of GE and improve the profitability. And the CLO title worked because the CLO title is broad enough that it's a C level job and it has.
[00:06:09] Speaker B: To do with learning and transformation and change.
[00:06:11] Speaker A: And when I got into L and D In the early 2000s and late 90s, I met a lot of these CLOs and they were business people, they were peers of the head of hr. They were not reporting to hr. They were transformation and change officers. They were very business savvy people. The CLO at Caterpillar was the chief economist at Marsh. McLennan was a very senior insurance executive. The CLO at IBM was the ex CHRO who became the CLO as a promotion from the CLO role. There was a CLO at the defense Acquisition University who was a senior military leader who was running the transformation of the Defense Acquisition Group. That's where all the money gets spent in the defense. And I met a lot of these people and they had really big complex jobs of not only just running training, that was actually sort of almost a small part of the job, but figuring how to deliver transformational change in the areas and initiatives and strategies that the CEO wanted. And underneath them there was training and training, administration and training, measurement and all that stuff. But that was a piece of what they were doing. And they built universities, corporate universities with academies or colleges like the College of Sales, the College of Manufacturing, the College of Supply Chain, the College of Finance and we went to work for those companies and I did this at IBM.
[00:07:31] Speaker B: And we as employees learned a lot from these corporate learning infrastructure.
[00:07:36] Speaker A: And that was really in some sense the good things that happened in the 1950s and 60s and 70s and 80s around the world. And then along came the Internet. And the Internet created a technology disruption to L and D as we moved to E learning. And the big value prop of the Internet was we don't have to spend so much money on travel and buildings, we can do it online. So everybody decided to create virtual universities and take all of the instructor led training and stick it on the web. And we had no tools for this. There were, you know, very primitive of video systems. We used Flash, which was very, you know, inefficient. And there was a lot of sort of page turning content that was developed.
[00:08:16] Speaker B: But it was really an exciting time. Venture capitalists were throwing money into the market.
[00:08:20] Speaker A: Skillsoft, NetG, LinkedIn Learning's predecessor was formed. I worked for Digital Think, which was a $2 billion publicly traded company, believe it or not, in 1999, doing online learning for it and other things. And then the LMS market took off and all of these old fashioned training administration systems became L. And the LMS was this huge market, there were dozens and dozens of companies. A bunch of them went public. VCs were investing in them and it was a really exciting technology driven training space that I felt was enough for me. I didn't need to get into HR at all. But over the 25 years since then.
[00:08:58] Speaker B: L and D changed a lot.
[00:08:59] Speaker A: Not only did the E learning stuff fail to deliver quite what we thought, but we had to come up with.
[00:09:05] Speaker B: Blended learning, adaptive learning, micro learning, learning.
[00:09:08] Speaker A: In the flow of work, learning experience platforms, self directed learning, and along comes the iPhone, YouTube, later, Twitter, then TikTok, then Instagram, and all of a sudden we've got this huge mess of different types of content we're trying to build for our employees. And it's really become confusing and messy. And while that was going on, this.
[00:09:33] Speaker B: CLO title went down and down and down.
[00:09:36] Speaker A: And now we still have people with CLO titles. But the most, most CLOs I meet report to HR and they report to the head of talent in HR.
[00:09:46] Speaker B: So they're two levels and sometimes three.
[00:09:48] Speaker A: Levels below the chro. So what happened to these C level officers that were driving change?
[00:09:53] Speaker B: Well, they went away.
[00:09:54] Speaker A: There are very few of them left. And what happened was a lot of the training got distributed into the business.
[00:10:00] Speaker B: Where it belonged anyway, as I've learned Over the years there's a centrifugal force.
[00:10:04] Speaker A: To training that it will always go to the point of need. So it doesn't matter what you build in corporate, if some manufacturing plant in China needs training, they're going to do it. They're going to either do it themselves or buy a system or outsource it. And you're not even going to know about it unless you can create this federated model. So in our early high impact learning organization research, the biggest and most important study I ever did that really created my career in this space. We looked at the fact that there.
[00:10:28] Speaker B: Were three models of training.
[00:10:29] Speaker A: There was the centralized model, the distributed model and the federated model. And I used to talk about federated model like the United States federal government, state government, local government. And companies really liked that idea and they started to build corporate teams that would manage the LMS and some of the E learning investments. Because you know, it's expensive to build E learning. Not every individual team can do it and decide what to outsource and what not to outsource. And then they created learning business partners or business learning teams that would work.
[00:10:59] Speaker B: With the business on the local needs that they have.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: And there were, I spent years writing case studies and doing research on, you know, what should be local and what should be distributed and how do you do translation and how to deal with cultural issues.
[00:11:10] Speaker B: And we tried to do things like.
[00:11:12] Speaker A: Created adaptive content, we tried to build the reusable learning objects.
[00:11:16] Speaker B: Cisco in fact, which was at the.
[00:11:18] Speaker A: Time the Google of today, or maybe the Cisco, was actually the OpenAI of today, the most successful, highly valued technology company on the planet.
[00:11:27] Speaker B: John Chambers actually went out and said.
[00:11:29] Speaker A: He thinks elearning is going to be bigger than email. He thought it was going to be the biggest market at all of all for Cisco routers. So they put a lot of money into building, you know, some ideas for reusable learning, none of which ever panned out, but it was really an interesting time. And what was happening was that we.
[00:11:43] Speaker B: Were centralizing and corporatizing a lot of.
[00:11:46] Speaker A: Things in L and D making. Maybe some corporate universities were being built, but a lot of virtual corporate universities were being built.
[00:11:52] Speaker B: But meanwhile a lot of the action.
[00:11:54] Speaker A: Was actually moving outward into sales, into manufacturing, into into the hospitals, the stores where it belonged. And so even though we tried to build this federated model, it never completely worked because it doesn't matter how smart you are in corporate, you really don't know what's going on in a day to day basis in a plant or a sales team or a hospital or a nursing station.
[00:12:16] Speaker B: So you need to make it local.
[00:12:18] Speaker A: So what basically happened, in my opinion, and I'm going to talk a lot about this over the next couple of months, is stagnation. Stagnation.
[00:12:26] Speaker B: We didn't really move forward much.
[00:12:29] Speaker A: And we're looking at data right now from our own research that's going to be published this summer that shows that the level of maturity in most of these advanced L and D practices hasn't moved that much. In fact, the level of spending has probably gone down per employee. When I used to do benchmarking prior to Deloitte on L and D, we would come up with numbers like $1,400, $1,500, $1,600 DOL dollars per employee per year on average and different amounts of money spent in different industries. But it's lower than that now and there's been a lot of inflation. So we've actually, despite all this talking about skills, we're actually spending less money on this. And I think it's because we kind of lost our way with how to do it and how to organize it. The other thing that's happened, of course.
[00:13:10] Speaker B: Is because of all of these new.
[00:13:12] Speaker A: Formats and technologies and media types, the content development teams in companies have become bigger and bigger and bigger. We have a client in the insurance industry who's going to be coming to conference. He told me he has a hundred instructional, instructional designers and developers.
[00:13:27] Speaker B: A hundred.
[00:13:27] Speaker A: And I don't think that's unusual in.
[00:13:29] Speaker B: A large company to have a lot.
[00:13:31] Speaker A: Of people doing this or it's outsourced to a professional development outsourcing company that builds stuff and, and they get to play around with, you know, cohort based learning or VR or simulations or leaders teaching or leaders not teaching or you know, whatever the formats are, the 702010 format, all these instructional formats. And there's a lot of learning science.
[00:13:53] Speaker B: And there's a lot of thinking that goes into this.
[00:13:55] Speaker A: And I don't know that it really has paid off that much because if you really look at the gap we have in leadership skills, soft skills, hard skills, IT skills in companies, it's still there now. In addition to all that, the content industry was created and a lot of very highly valued content companies, Coursera, LinkedIn, Learning, which used to be called Lynda.com, skillsoft, which acquired a bunch of companies, Pluralsight, many, many others, Udemy were very high, highly valued and all of their valuations have come down, down, down, down, down, because you can't use all that off the shelf content because 70% of your problems or more are unique to your company. So even if you get all this.
[00:14:38] Speaker B: Great stuff, people won't consume it because.
[00:14:40] Speaker A: It'S not really in bite sized forms in most cases unless you force them to. So the content publishers have been struggling to build more and more relevancy into their platforms while we as businesses are saying, you know, we don't need so much corporate stuff, we need stuff local that's unique to our spec.
[00:14:58] Speaker B: And it has been very, very hard.
[00:15:00] Speaker A: Because of the content technologies. We have to take a course that's a 1 hour, 2 hour, 3 hour course with a bunch of videos and interactivities in it and reuse it.
[00:15:09] Speaker B: It's really hard.
[00:15:10] Speaker A: And we've been going through this in our academy. By the way, you're going to see a big announcement from us. I'm not speaking to you as an analyst, I'm speaking to you as a user about what we're going through inside our company. So anyway, this was all going on. The LXP was a good idea. It didn't really turn out to be as transformational as we'd hoped because the LXPs are now filled with content and.
[00:15:29] Speaker B: It' hard to find things. And by the way, in the middle.
[00:15:31] Speaker A: Of all this, skills was kind of a big deal. So we built skills taxonomies and we started buying all sorts of tools for.
[00:15:39] Speaker B: Skills inference for recruiting.
[00:15:41] Speaker A: And the L and D people kind of got left behind on that too because they weren't really skills based. You know, great learning programs have skills based training in them, but they're not just focused on skills, they're focused on operational capabilities.
[00:15:55] Speaker B: That's what's so great about L and.
[00:15:57] Speaker A: D is we don't just develop skills, we develop actionable capabilities that can be.
[00:16:01] Speaker B: Used on the job. Whereas if you throw the L&D department.
[00:16:04] Speaker A: Into HR, they become much more conceptual and theoretical and get bogged down in all these taxonomy projects.
[00:16:11] Speaker B: Very few of which have paid off by the way.
[00:16:13] Speaker A: Some have, but you become a little bit distracted with that and not getting out there and really listening to the problems going on in the companies. Okay, so that's a very quick recap of where we are. And by the way, while L and D was getting pushed down into hr.
[00:16:29] Speaker B: It was distributed more and more into the business. And so now we have learning enablement.
[00:16:33] Speaker A: In sales, learning enablement and enablement in manufacturing, learning and enablement in the clinical profession, learning and enablement in IT and finance and hr. In fact, our academy, our HR academy, is so unique that it wouldn't have.
[00:16:47] Speaker B: Existed in the old world.
[00:16:48] Speaker A: But now people want dedicated capability, building.
[00:16:51] Speaker B: Tools and solutions in the functional areas and sitting in corporate, you can't do that.
[00:16:56] Speaker A: You don't have the time or the resources for that matter. Because nobody's going to fund it out of corporate. It needs to be funded elsewhere.
[00:17:02] Speaker B: And you know, many of the projects.
[00:17:03] Speaker A: At Deloitte that I was involved in in involved going around the clients, companies.
[00:17:08] Speaker B: And finding huge amounts of spend on L and D that was never tracked.
[00:17:13] Speaker A: Or accounted for to try to create a more rational process for this. But like I said, that centrifugal force is there. So as much as you try to ratchet it in, it's going to spread back out again anyway.
[00:17:24] Speaker B: Okay, so that's where we are.
[00:17:25] Speaker A: Let me also add that while this has all been going on, the people in L and D are some of the smartest, most creative, most innovative technology savvy people in HR. Most L& D professionals are really into tools. They're very academic and they read a lot. They're interested in science, they're interested in data. They are ready for technology at all times. In fact, when I was at IBM in the 1980s and we got our.
[00:17:51] Speaker B: First PC, the very first PC in.
[00:17:53] Speaker A: 1981 that came into the office, the first thing IBM tried to sell was train. There was a big video disc of training that went along with that PC. And we were fascinated by the technology for the training almost more than we were with the spreadsheets and the word processing. So technology as an enabler of learning has always been big and it always will be big, because learning is an existential human desire. And we will always take whatever technology we have and we will always apply it to learning. And that's why AI has been so cool. I actually think one of the reasons ChatGPT is so big is because it unleashed this passion we all have for.
[00:18:32] Speaker B: Learning things that have been hard to find.
[00:18:34] Speaker A: Okay, so the next chapter of the story is what's next? Well, it's very clear to me from my experience with Galileo, our research, my technology background and all the people I've talked to, including our whole team here, that AI is the perfect, most perfect technology ever created for learning. It is far more perfect than TikTok or the iPhone or whatever else you think is the coolest thing that happened to learning. This is a hundred times better. Because, as you know, AI can assimilate massive amounts of content in many formats. It can organize it and reproduce content in different forms very easily. It can build audio, video and advanced media. You can build conversations with it, you can talk to it, you can ask good questions.
[00:19:21] Speaker B: All the things that we've tried to do by hand in the publishing model.
[00:19:25] Speaker A: Of training can be done by AI. And by the way, training departments are basically publishing departments.
[00:19:32] Speaker B: All the instructional design and content development.
[00:19:34] Speaker A: We do is an old fashioned publishing model. We get a an order or a project from a business person, we do needs analysis, we do design, we do prototyping, we do outlining, we do content generation, we do testing, we load it into the LMS and then we push a button and we say, voila, it's published. You can now take the course and we cross our fingers and hope people like it. That is the old traditional newspaper magazine model of content. As you know, today in the non learning part of the world, we publish content in seconds and we edit it every minute to keep it up to date. And we author videos and audios as quickly as possible, including podcasts, so people can consume it in the way that's the best for them. And by the way, the big reason that corporate learning is different from education is that in corporate learning, people don't sit in classrooms and they don't have a lot of time unless they feel that it's worth their time.
[00:20:29] Speaker B: So they measure the consumption of learning.
[00:20:32] Speaker A: Through its utility and usefulness, not the test score they get at the end or the credential they get, or the, you know, kind of skills check they get in their skills database. Those are important, but not critical. The business critical reason people take corporate training is because they want to use it. They want to make their lives and their careers better in the job they're in. And they want to stop making the mistakes they've been making. So AI can do all of that in a highly dynamic way. And this now is going to completely disrupt the L and D market. I was just at the Docebo user conference this week and went through this with a bunch of companies and once we got through the story, they were all stunned because an all AI learning experience is completely different from the publishing model, from the old corporate university, from the old federated L&D department. It's going to be a dynamic content system. Now one important architectural thing to point out, the whole E learning market the last 25 or 30 years is based on an architecture where the content and the platform are different. And so you have this platform, the CellMS, that can talk to the content through SCORM or some other Protocol xapi.
[00:21:52] Speaker B: So that you can build the content.
[00:21:53] Speaker A: In one environment and then load it into the LMS and the LMS can track it.
[00:21:58] Speaker B: What that means is the LMS doesn't.
[00:22:00] Speaker A: Know very much about the content. The LMS can't dynamically path you through the content because it doesn't really even know what's in there very much. And the content can be developed in a completely unique format that may or may not be compatible with the lms. So you're sort of limiting yourself on the content development side so that it will fit into the lms, and then you're limiting it on the consumption side because the LMS can't tell you that much about the content because it doesn't know that much about it. Well, in an AI platform, all of that is the same. The content is the platform and the.
[00:22:30] Speaker B: Platform is the content.
[00:22:32] Speaker A: The corpus, the core information underneath it, which was the corpus we have in.
[00:22:37] Speaker B: Galileo, for example, is very, very rich and complete.
[00:22:40] Speaker A: It has instructional material in it, podcasts, interviews, documents, compliance process information, benchmarking data, spreadsheets, whatever you want to put in there.
[00:22:50] Speaker B: And then the system dynamically builds instructionally.
[00:22:54] Speaker A: Formatted content for the learner's needs that.
[00:22:57] Speaker B: Can be developed in a traditional instructional.
[00:22:59] Speaker A: Form like a course.
[00:23:01] Speaker B: Or it could be a chatbot, where.
[00:23:03] Speaker A: You just ask it a question and it answers it. Or it could be a tutor, where the system prompts the user or answers the user's question and prompts them through the discovery and learning of a topic and then goes away, but remembers what.
[00:23:17] Speaker B: The learner did and comes back later.
[00:23:19] Speaker A: And helps them get to the next level of understanding. And the content can be generated in any language. It can come out in an audio form. If you're on the road, you don't have time to read. It can come out in a mobile form or a web based form.
[00:23:32] Speaker B: And pretty soon, as these things get.
[00:23:34] Speaker A: Smarter, it'll be able to generate videos and characters and God knows what else. I mean, probably 3D stuff pretty soon too.
[00:23:41] Speaker B: And the content content system becomes a.
[00:23:44] Speaker A: Personality and a digital agent that you can literally talk to on your phone. We have a voice interactive system that's connected to Galileo through the Galileo mobile app that comes from Sana. And you can talk to it. You can literally ask Galileo questions and answer in voice. It's actually designed around my voice. So this is a completely different opportunity. Now, not every compliance course and operational training course is going to move over to AI. There's a lot of things people have.
[00:24:12] Speaker B: To do, hands on training, they have.
[00:24:14] Speaker A: To have perceptors, they have to be observed, they have to be qualified, they have to be certified to FDA or financial regulations, they have to pass tests.
[00:24:24] Speaker B: I mean, there's still a whole category.
[00:24:26] Speaker A: Of stuff here that's not going to be completely AI driven initially, but it's all going to get there in a big hurry. And what we've seen now from the companies we've been interviewing is that 70 to 80% of the expense in L and D is going to vanish and there's going to be a bunch of new jobs created to manage this corpus of information. And now there's going to be many, many other implications. What does the corporate group do versus what do the distributed groups do? Because this content generation technology is going.
[00:24:53] Speaker B: To be available in the CRM system.
[00:24:56] Speaker A: In the financial system, in the system that manages compliance documentation in a manufacturing plant. So we may or may not want a corporate wide LMS anymore or whatever. We end up calling it the AI based learning platform. But we may have AI, a custom built AI system in these different locations that uses the corpus to solve problems locally.
[00:25:19] Speaker B: And so maybe what happens to L.
[00:25:21] Speaker A: And D, which is one of the things I think is going to happen.
[00:25:23] Speaker B: Is L and D, it's not going.
[00:25:25] Speaker A: To be called L and D anymore.
[00:25:26] Speaker B: Is going to be managing this corporate.
[00:25:28] Speaker A: Corpus of information and working with the rest of the AI experts on how do we make sure that the content is up to date and current and safely bias protected and, and security protected.
[00:25:40] Speaker B: So that the employees can get what.
[00:25:41] Speaker A: They need immediately as they need it, generated in the form that they want it, and we know that it's accurate. So we're going to be doing knowledge management. We're not going to call it that because nobody likes to call it that, but we're going to be doing much more knowledge management. We're going to be doing enablement, we're going to be doing capability development. What about performance consulting? What about needs analysis? Well, that's going to change too. I had a long conversation with a bunch of people about that. The needs analysis that companies do today is very old fashioned fashion. We interview people, we ask managers a bunch of questions, we do surveys, and then we kind of build prototypes based on that. Imagine a dynamic learning system where you could look at the questions that every employee is asking about their jobs in real time and you can ask the system, hey, what did you know? We noticed that the sales revenue in the New York district are low. What have the salespeople in New York.
[00:26:32] Speaker B: Been asking the system over the last.
[00:26:34] Speaker A: 60 to 90 days.
[00:26:36] Speaker B: Summarize the questions and themes and tell.
[00:26:38] Speaker A: Me what is different about the New York group's inquiries versus the rest of this country. There must be some issues here. And you might find out that it is a learning issue. They don't understand the pricing model.
[00:26:49] Speaker B: Or you might find out it has.
[00:26:50] Speaker A: To do with management, or you might find out it has to do with the market, or your competitor just stomped all over you in New York, or, you know, a lot of stuff that you would never have found through traditional needs analysis. So you could see the natural direction where we can't call this the Training and Development Department anymore. It's going to have to come up with a new name. Now, I am not, you know, radical enough to say we're going to throw away everything we've been doing for the last a hundred years. There's a lot of you that have built incredibly important careers developing content, teaching people, instructing people, assessing people. There's simulation tools. I just, I just had a long talk with, you know, an amazing company that builds skills based assessments and skills based simulations on hundreds of different areas.
[00:27:36] Speaker B: Of business and technology.
[00:27:37] Speaker A: I mean, all of that stuff's still there, but it's going to all adapt to this new AI model where content is generated dynamically. Translation and personalization happens in the platform, not in the content. We are not going to have to do role based, tenure based stuff nearly as much as we have in the past. Skills, by the way, will be built into the system. We won't have to do skills taxonomy projects at all. I'll give you an example of that.
[00:28:02] Speaker B: So in our new academy, by the.
[00:28:03] Speaker A: Way, we're launching our AI Academy in.
[00:28:05] Speaker B: May at our conference.
[00:28:06] Speaker A: So you're going to see this real time from us. We have about 20 or 25 topics in HR and L and D that we focus on, each of which have subtopics. And then we have 94 functional capabilities in HR. And every year a couple of new ones come up, but they're mostly the same. And there's new topics we add periodically, but not a lot of them. Well, we told our new AI platform what the topics were and by the way, we've put all of our JBA content in there and all of our research content in there. And it told us it went through the content and it figured out what skills are being discussed in each of the content objects we have. So now when we build courses in our new academy, it already knows what.
[00:28:45] Speaker B: The skills are in those courses and.
[00:28:46] Speaker A: Those small objects or cards or videos or whatever it's building. And you can go in and ask it a question without having to look through a skills tax on them.
[00:28:55] Speaker B: If you want to know what is.
[00:28:57] Speaker A: Pay equity, for example, you can just ask it and it'll just answer you. Or you could say give me an example of pay equity and it'll go through the 500 case studies we have and pull up the ones on pay equity. And you know, you could say I want examples in my industry of this size company, in this geography. Or you could say give me a 10 minute course on pay equity or can you give me an implementation plan for pay equity? Give me an ROI model for pay equity. I mean, it'll do all these things for you. Because the word pay equity isn't a tagged skill. It found it in the content for you. So all of the skills based organization stuff that I haven't been that fond of, to be honest, isn't going to be that necessary anymore when these systems get rolled out.
[00:29:38] Speaker B: Now the thing that I'm the most.
[00:29:40] Speaker A: Concerned about, and I think the most disruptive part of this is that the current state of L and D is really mess messy. Most of you have legacy LMSs, legacy content, legacy content, relationships with vendors and publishers, lots and lots of custom stuff. You've built lots of tools that you use. And so we're not going to just wave a magic wand and all of this is going to suddenly become AI. But it's going to happen in a big hurry and it's going to happen much faster than elearning when the way the E learning thing happened was everybody tried to blow up their instructor led training in about two or three years. And they learned very quickly that we needed blended learning, we needed virtual ilt, we needed online video, we needed a lot of things that we didn't realize we needed in the first couple of months or years of this. And that's going to happen here too. But the big difference here is that similar to eLearning, AI is a cosplay too.
[00:30:35] Speaker B: You will need fewer instructional designers.
[00:30:38] Speaker A: Those instructional designers will be content curators, content managers, corpus managers to give you an example of what we do here. So we've got a lot of usage of Galileo, getting 30 to 40,000 queries a month now on Galileo. And it's brand new. I mean it's less than a year old. So we, we look at what people are doing with it and we look at the use cases and we look.
[00:31:00] Speaker B: At the content and how it's labeled and how it's arranged and we're constantly.
[00:31:05] Speaker A: Tweaking it to make it better. And when people tell us they can't find things, we figure out why they can't find it or we figure out maybe we don't have it and we go get it. So those are the kinds of things we're going to be doing in L and D. There's going to be a lot of jobs, jobs getting closer to the business because you'll know what people are trying to do very directly from their actions in the system. You won't have to build a whole learning analytics team and study courses and look at completion rates and stuff that's kind of irrelevant. You're going to be able to really look at, you know, actionable information. You're not going to have to have translation services. You're not going to have to outsource all sorts of content anymore. Some of it you may, but a lot of it you may not. You're going to be able to build custom agents to do things like compliance.
[00:31:46] Speaker B: Tracking, custom agents to do onboarding, custom.
[00:31:48] Speaker A: Agents to do analytics for you. I mean, there's just dozens of things we're writing about now that you're going to be able to do. And the L&D department's going to be smaller, probably going to be more distributed. You're going to be in a much.
[00:32:00] Speaker B: More federated model, leaning to the outside, not the inside.
[00:32:04] Speaker A: I think what happened, the reason the CLO role got demoted and maybe disappeared over time is the value of the centralized L and D function has dropped more and more and more year by year. Well, we now have technology and tools that allow us to deliver a virtual AI based academy, learning experience, university, whatever we end up calling it all over the company and manage these pockets of content, these corpuses. And we're doing this in our business. I mean, this is going to be the future of the jba. Our academy, which is going to be relaunched in May, is very, very different than it was before. And it's not only a really much more interesting experience for you as an HR person, but it's now open. You're going to be able to put your own content into it and personalize it for many, many things other than training HR people. And that's the same thing in all the other functional areas of your company too. So this is going to be really, really exciting. And so what we're doing now is come see me in London the week after next. I'm going to talk about this for about two hours. We're going to do a pretty interactive workshop at the Learning Technologies Conference. If you're coming to Irresistible, you're going to hear the whole story and see the new product from us. And for the rest of of you, let's talk at the Big Reset. Reach out to us and we'll show you what we've discovered. We have interviewed about 40 chief learning officers. We have about two dozen or three dozen incredible case studies of companies going through various different journeys. Of this we've talked to Degreed, Cornerstone, Up Limits, Sana, Docebo, Skillable, many, many, many of the vendors that are moving in this direction. There's gonna be a vendor shakeout 2 because the vendors that don't get there fast enough are going to get left in the dust once you guys figure out what this is and you change your expectations on what you want.
[00:33:52] Speaker B: And the final thing I'll just say is for those of you who work.
[00:33:55] Speaker A: In larger companies and you have good sized IT teams, you're going to be able to build a lot of this yourself. You may not need an AI vendor product for all of the things you want to do. If you're a user of ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot or another one of the off the shelf kind of OpenAI agents, you can build a lot of this yourself because the core content assembly generation translation engine is out there in different places. It's not only available from L and D vendors. So there's going to be a lot of interesting shakeout here.
[00:34:25] Speaker B: We are all over this. This is a big topic for us.
[00:34:28] Speaker A: This is going to be one of the key parts of my keynote in May and it's a 350 or more billion dollar market.
[00:34:37] Speaker B: So we're all going to be a part of this. And the upside is where we're going.
[00:34:41] Speaker A: Is incredibly good, positive business centric value add stuff.
[00:34:47] Speaker B: Now for each of you listening to.
[00:34:48] Speaker A: This that are scratching your head and saying what about me? What am I going to do? What's my job? What's my career?
[00:34:53] Speaker B: Just go with the flow here. Get your hands on Galileo or another.
[00:34:57] Speaker A: Tool, learn about how this AI works, come to one of our workshops or there's hundreds of courses being taught here. This by the way, is not AI tools to build traditional companies content. I've seen a bunch of stuff coming out from ATD about AI driven content development. AI driven instructional design that is actually not the right paradigm in my opinion. That will take you, that will allow you to do the old model faster. You need to think about the new model where the content is generated by the AI with your help, not you're using the AI to generate old fashioned traditional content and sticking it in the old fashioned element. So we can have a debate about that for those of you that want to discuss. And there's going to be a lot.
[00:35:38] Speaker B: Of new science, new engineering here, new.
[00:35:41] Speaker A: Tools, lots and lots of things to talk about. So couple quick things.
[00:35:44] Speaker B: Come to the Unleash conference in Vegas.
[00:35:46] Speaker A: We're going to talk about this in all of the workshops, the Galileo workshops we're doing there. If you want to talk to us.
[00:35:51] Speaker B: Come to the Learning Technology conference the.
[00:35:53] Speaker A: Week after next in London. If you're in the uk, you will get a chance to talk about this a lot there. We will also be going through this at irresistible.
[00:36:01] Speaker B: Irresistible is May 19th through 21st for.
[00:36:03] Speaker A: Those of you that have time to come out to California. It's an incredible conference that's going to fill up over the next couple of weeks. We'll go through this in all the.
[00:36:10] Speaker B: Rest of the conferences of the year.
[00:36:11] Speaker A: Because this is one of the biggest new parts of the AI agenda that's hitting business and HR throughout the next several years.
[00:36:19] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:36:20] Speaker A: Hope you guys enjoyed this.
[00:36:21] Speaker B: Sorry it was a little bit long.
[00:36:22] Speaker A: See you all next week.
