Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Okay guys, today I want to talk about the revolution coming in, corporate learning. And I want to spend 20 minutes giving you the high level story. And we're going to be producing a lot more content on this in the next couple of months, including a big announcement at our conference in May at Irresistible. Now we just finished 30 to 40 interviews of Chief learning officers and we're in the middle of a very large benchmarking survey which you're welcome to take. I'll put the link in here. And essentially the conclusion that I've come to after having been in the learning and development market for 25 years, maybe 30, is that we are, it is time for a revolution in the way we think about corporate learning. If I go back to my early days in the E learning era, around the 2000s, we used to have chief learning officers that were very powerful people. They oftentimes were peers of the chro. They didn't report to the Chro. And they ran corporate universities, they ran sales programs, they ran leadership academies, they did technical training, safety training, operations training, manufacturer training. They had academies under them and they were change leaders. They worked on massive corporate transformations. They had a lot of power, they had a lot of authority, they had a lot of budget and they also did a lot of training. But they did a lot of other things. Somehow in the last 20 to 25 years those individuals either went away or got demoted to work in hr, under HR or even under the head of talent and they became the head of training. They may still have CLO titles, but the companies got much more focused on skills based hiring, skills taxonomies, employee experience, dei, remote work, many, many other topics became more important and this enormous industry of learning professionals sort of got pushed into the sideline. There's many, many reasons for this happened. One of which of course is that a lot of the new content was developed by external companies. There weren't a lot of new technologies in L and D, to be honest. We had a lot of sort of false starts. Virtual reality turned out to be successful for some things, simulations successful for some things. The learning experience platform was moderately successful, but essentially created a new legacy system. And the learning management systems industry, which was very exciting when I started my career became consolidated. All the LMS vendors got acquired and many of the sort of best of breed LMSs failed to grow as businesses so nobody would invest in them. The investment community now shies away from investing in learning companies, corporate learning companies. And so the ERP vendors started to build lmss, Oracle, SAP Workday and so the LMS market became less interesting too. So those products didn't really get innovated and Cornerstone bought up most of them that are left. And we still have Docebo, but there's only two publicly traded learning companies left, Docebo and Udemy. Udemy's stock price has dropped significantly because the content business hasn't been as fast growing as other areas of the economy. So many, many parts of the learning industry fell apart. The content industry itself hasn't been super successful, although some companies have done well. OB LinkedIn has, but Skillsoft hasn't done very well.
[00:03:28] And even technical training companies. So we've been sort of living in this world where this $360 billion very important investment that companies always need has been sort of stagnating. And I don't mean it's been because the people in L and D are some of the most creative, hardworking, intelligent business people I've ever met. But as it got more and more co opted by hr, I think many L and D leaders probably got pulled away from where they should have been, which is spending time with the business because, you know, learning is about improving performance on the job. It's about training salespeople, training engineers, training customer service people, training people in the stores, retail people, truck drivers, et cetera. And so those kinds of activities, which are the lifeblood of why we have corporate learning, including the white collar workers, have less to do with the skills management and strategy in HR and more to do with performance enablement, performance consulting and rapid development and distribution of great, great, great programs. Now, you know, so that all happened. And then the other thing that happened, of course, is we ended up building bigger and bigger teams. And if you look at L and D spending in companies, and we've done a bunch of analyses of this, it's bigger than you think. But because there's lots of instructional designers, there's L and D teams in the businesses and geographies separate from the corporate L and D group. There's multiple learning platforms, there's content being acquired by multiple parts of the company that sometimes nobody knows who's buying what. There's instructors and facilitators that are coming in that are contractors, people are sending people to executive education programs, spending a lot of money on that. And so there's this also this other issue that the L and D spend is a little bit hard to manage. And you know, it's not clear if it's being applied in the best places all the time. So learning and development professionals are doing that too. Well, you know, my premise over the next couple months as we release more information and research on this, is that it is time for a revolution. And the catalyst to this revolution is AI. Because AI as it is now starting to manifest in the products for L and D is the perfect technology to build content faster and cheaper and more efficiently and more effectively, to give every employee exactly the experience they want to learn, what they need to learn. Whether it be asking a question, taking a course, getting certified, getting credentialed, whatever it may be, doing a simulation, talking to instructor, taking an expert to keep the content current. Because with AI we can produce content, you know, almost immediately as topics change. We don't have to spend months rebuilding courses to create high fidelity content. Because AI can assess a learner's activities and assess a learner's skills much, much easier than any kind of adaptive learning platforms we've had in the past. And to give people a up to date modern consumer like experience to learning where maybe I only want to watch a TikTok video for now, or I just want to get an answer to the question and maybe be entertained for a minute or two and we'll go back to work, or I want to see what a peer has to say. And so this new world that's coming of AI platforms for corporate learning is going to be a revolution and it is going to replace and disrupt the incumbents. This is not adding AI features to, you know, the LMS or LinkedIn learning or the content library you have. Those are nice to have, those are important, those are going to be incremental improvements. But the ultimate revolution of learning is to generate content and curate content and manage content and manage experiences through AI from the ground up. And I have been thinking about this for several years. This is the reason we invested in Galileo. This is the reason we're going to be launching a new, you know, offering of our own in late May. But this is happening. The vendors that are on top of this are new companies like Sana, Uplimit, aorist and others that you'll hear more about soon. And what this means to you as an HR leader or an L and D person is it is time to kind of take stock of where you're spending money and what you're investing in in L and D to rethink the way you do this now because the learning space is so big and so broad and so complex. Everybody has legacy content, everybody has legacy programs, everybody has legacy assessments, legacy skills models, legacy videos, curricula that you built, that you're still using compliance courses and if you're a big company, you have maybe gigabytes or terabytes of that stuff. So AI is not a, you know, kind of throw the old stuff away and start over. The AI revolution in learning is going to be a way to re author or reuse the content that you have in a much more active, agile, exciting way for employees. Now we're talking to companies who are doing this and when they start rethinking their L and D strategy for the future, they suddenly realize that not only do they have opportunities to solve problems that have never been solved before, but they also have to rethink their L and D teams. We talked to a company last week in New York, a pretty good sized financial services company that has 120, 130 instructional designers, to say nothing of the number of facilitators and people doing course scheduling and lms, administration and reporting and other things they have. Those teams are going to have to be different. When we start implementing AI first platforms and learning, we're probably not going to need so many content designers, video creators, podcast creators, and various media experts that we have, which by the way is still a challenge in L and D. We're going to have people that do performance consulting, that meet with the business to understand what the real needs are, that curate the AI platforms, that train the AI systems to be better, and that build the special agents that we need to manage courses, to manage activities, to manage programs. And you can use AI for many things that used to be human. For example, facilitating breakout sessions. I just talked to a vendor that's going to launch a tool pretty soon that does AI facilitated breakout sessions. And the AI not only decides who needs the breakout, but it will give them interactions and activities to work on in the breakout based on their level of capability going through the course automatically. AI systems that will monitor who's not showing up for class, or who's behind, or who's not enrolling or who's excelling and what it is that they need if they are either doing great or if they're not doing well, as opposed to instructor doing that. AI programs that can schedule live events, that can manage the interactions and questions of a large number of learners doing it during a line of live events. So you can scale your instructor led training to handle more people, to say nothing of AI agents that can build content, build assessments, build simulations, build different kinds of learning experiences that are either simulation based, test based, or either a self assessment of people that is very hard to do by hand with individuals or with tools. So there's a lot of opportunity here for improvement in effectiveness and learning experience, scale and handling more users if you're a small L and D team, which means you don't need as big a team, and increasing the personalization and optimization of the tool for the individual. I mean, I don't know about you. I'm sure most of you have the same experience I do. Every now and then I really want to dig into something and I want to learn a lot and I'm willing to go through a YouTube video and scroll back and forth and find what I need to know or I'm willing to read a book or I'm willing to, I mean, I might be willing to take, take an entire course if it's well developed. But most likely. And that's, but that's unusual. Most likely I have something that just happened and I realized I need to know more about this topic. But I only have 10 minutes and I would like the system to know what I want to know and what I've already learned. And now I can, you know, type into a chatbot and try to prompt it to give me that information. But if I'm in a large corporation, the company should know a lot of that and help me get the information I need because there's a massive volume of information here. You know, one of the clients we're working on, working with on this is Rolls Royce. And they've told us the other day that the amount of maintenance information for the Rolls Royce jet engines that a maintenance engineer needs to know for the 40 years of R and D they've done on these jet engines, I think it's 40 plus years, would take you 500 years to read 500 years. So you can forget about going through a course from end to end on maintaining the Rolls Royce jet engines. It's not going to happen. You're going to have to pick up from where you are and learn what you need to know in a personalized way based on your level of experience and knowledge. And it's going to be really hard to do that without an AI based system. Now, the reason I use the word revolution here is that, you know, unlike the E learning era of the past, by the way, elearning was a revolution too. Those of you that are as old as me, you may remember that was a deal and it was a lot of money spent on it, is that this is a new paradigm. So we're not only are we going to be, you know, kind of using these AI Platforms for, you know, exciting transformations of the learning function and the learning operation. But the way we think about the learning problem is going to be different because if you had a platform that could generate content quickly and dynamically, that could assess learners on an ongoing basis and coach and develop them through tutors or assistants or agents or various coaching bots, you might spend more time on higher level concepts. You might spend more time on more advanced topics. You might spend more time on leadership and coaching and specific soft skills that are badly needed in your company that maybe are not well understood. You might spend more time on performance consulting. You might spend more time on, you know, getting internal experts into your company. You might spend more time identifying failure points or low performers or, you know, poorly performing products to figure out things that we could train people on that maybe the operational leaders aren't even sure about. That is really where learning belongs. I believe that the corporate learning function at its best is a consulting type of function where we're identifying root causes in the business, in the salesforce, in the customer service, and where in manufacturing. And we're finding ways to stay ahead of those all the time so that every employee is operating at a super worker level. That's really our job. Not teaching courses, training people with lots of curriculum, throwing out all sorts of libraries and hoping they find what they need. I mean, there is some of that. Of course, we have to take care of that part of the job too. But I think what's going to happen with AI is you're going to reach a point where you're going to go back to what you wanted to do when you first got into learning, which is get out there and meet people and really help teach them what they need to know. And by the way, as you know, the expertise that drives corporate learning is not in corporate learning. Most of the expertise is in the business or it's in a third party. So we're going to be able to spend more time finding the experts, bringing them into the learning experience, allowing them to share their content much more quickly in new modes, and building a better knowledge management system in the company. Now, the word knowledge management is kind of a bad word. It usually results in a project in it that never worked out very well. So we may not want to call it that. But I do think that part of this revolution in L and D is going to be storing and managing and curating knowledge bases that are relevant to the audience that you're serving. If you're in charge of sales training, you have to be linked implicitly with the sales enablement team, which might include pricing and product demos and competitive analysis and customer segmentation and all sorts of things like that. If you're in manufacturing training, you're going to being linked to new models of tools that are coming out in manufacturing, updates to processes, updates to supply chains, updates to equipment that might be in manufacturing. If you're in charge of leadership development, there could be changes in the way the business is going to market. New philosophies, new pay structures, new innovations going on in the business that have to do with the way leaders should manage their teams, budget changes, things that aren't really training programs, but you need to be aware of them and bring them to market. Because the learning platforms that are coming, the new ones are going to be able to store content of any form and make it available either as a course or as the answer to a question. So we're going to move back up as learning professionals into a much more to me, strategic role in the company. So if you're a CLO or rather a chro or a business unit head and you have a learning function, you know, in your organization somewhere, bring them into these higher level thoughts and challenge them to rethink their learning strategy to be more dynamic, more knowledge based and more modern and relevant. And under the covers of this is going to be AI. Now there aren't a lot of new end to end AI platforms yet, so you're going to have to do this with some of the platforms that you have. But there are vendors working on this. Sana of course is a big one that we work with a lot. I just got off the phone with Uplimit who's at very exciting new vendor working on this. I've talked to you about Aorist and there are others coming. Docebo is working on all sorts of cool things here and I think this is going to be in a sense a renaissance of this L and D market which has been badly needed for a long time. You know, from my experience, when I first got into HR in general, it was in training and it was in the early 2000s during eLearning and it was very, very exciting. Companies like Saba and Docent and Plateau and Click to learn and Skillsoft and Netji and Digitalthink one where I ended up working for a while and 9th house and all sorts of others were doing very, very creative things and investors were very excited about this space. I think that's going to come again. I think we're back. It's been 25 or 30 years maybe 25 years. But I think this resurgence of excitement, of value, of new ideas and new technology in L and D is here. Stay tuned for more. We're going to be doing a lot more to expose you to what we've been discovering in all these interviews and all these surveys. Take the benchmarking survey, please, if you can. We would love to get your personal experience in there. And we'll be launching a lot of this content and information at our conference at Irresistible. I'll be talking about it at the Learning Tech show in the UK the third week of April, and then a lot more to come over the summer. Thanks you guys for listening to me. I hope this has been interesting. And stay tuned for a lot more on this topic. Talk to you again.
