Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around for a long time but has only recently hit mainstream industries. When I think of its impact on content creation and customer experience, AI is already embedded.
I am most familiar with how it has been used in “marketing-related content” to automate the mundane, repetitive tasks in producing content, enabling marketers to make sense of an overwhelming amount of data, and helping to deliver better customer experiences. For sales there is Salesforce and HubSpot, whose presence in the industry grew massively over the last 10 years to drive greater productivity and visibility into the customer acquisition process.
Meanwhile, the learning industry has similar challenges when it comes to building courses, selling and marketing courses, delivering great learning experiences, and running certification programs.
We can use the marketing and sales AI-based tools, although I always find that they are not purpose built for a learning organization so require a lot of tweaks which can be time consuming to implement.
At least when using Learning Management Systems (LMS or LXP) and Certification tools, there is finally automated collection and generation of analytics and built-in templates. (Let’s celebrate!) Owners of learning programs however are still collecting and analyzing data manually to help understand their learners and the value of their programs. Often, this data is used to show their executive teams the impact that their learning programs are making so that they can continue to get funding and head count.
What about course creation and building eLearning? For the most part, we still follow a time intensive and manual process that requires a course developer to start with interviewing a Subject Matter Expert (SME) or searching around the company for knowledge assets they can use for training. The Chapman Alliance model quotes an average of 250 hours to develop one hour of eLearning content, less if very basic click and read or more if there are lots of animations and simulations. (Yes, this can certainly be debated!)
But good news. We are modernizing! AI is creeping into the learning industry, just like it did for marketing and sales, and starting to make its mark!
Now that the industry is used to SaaS (Software as a service) learning technologies through the rise of cloud-based LMS offerings to host and track online training (like Docebo, Thought Industries, and Skill Jar) and eLearning production tools to build eLearning faster through templates (like Captivate, Lectora and Articulate), AI is starting to take stage!
This is exciting for us in the learning industry. Just like our counterparts in our organizations who’ve benefited from automating mundane tasks, our time is coming!
Perhaps you’re a bit hesitant, as AI sometimes feels like magic and there have been examples of technology solutions touting that they have AI but it doesn’t always work like they say. But, lots of technology solutions DO work and make things easier. This is what we’re starting to see now in the learning industry.
With this exciting progress, I see AI advancing in the learning industry with more innovation to come.
Hopefully our teams will be willing to give these early tools a try as we transition to a new way of building, updating, selling/marketing, and delivering learning programs faster. Training people sooner.
If you are contemplating learning software and AI-enabled learning tools: