Chief Creative Officer of The Training Arcade & The Game Agency (a division of ELB Learning) - exciting, engaging and educating learners.
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For many, artificial intelligence conjures up an image of humanoids such as from Ex Machina or C-3PO. Many people do not realize how often they use AI during their day. Google searches that are tailored to our search histories, Amazon personalized product recommendations, Alexa letting us know whether we will need an umbrella and website chatbots interacting with us as customers are just a few examples of how AI is fully integrated into everyday life.
Yet an air of apprehension still lingers around the idea of AI technology. Why? In my opinion, AI should not be viewed as something to replace human involvement but as a way to enhance human capabilities and free up our cognitive load so we can potentially create and innovate more.
From that perspective, AI would seem like an ideal technology for learning and development. However, while increasingly popular, I believe AI has yet to reach its full potential in L&D.
In today’s constantly changing business and economic landscape, L&D entails much more than simply providing training for an organization’s workers. It’s about building a continuous learning culture that enhances employee performance while also upskilling and reskilling workers to adapt to changing needs. Offering employees engaging, useful development options can help boost productivity, improve employee retention and create a positive company culture overall.
I believe L&D is essential to the long-term success of any company. Organizations should be taking advantage of any tool that can give them a leg up in training and development, including artificial intelligence.
So how can you incorporate AI into L&D?
From LMS To LXP
Traditionally, learning management systems have been used for compliance, HR and employee training. These learning platforms provide a place where administrators can assign and track structured training.
Taking it to the next level, a learning experience platform or AI-powered LMS can use learning algorithms to gather data and personalize the learning experience for users. AI can test a learner’s existing knowledge and adapt the learning journey to fit their individual needs. The pace, depth and breadth of the content the learner consumes can be adjusted to their unique requirements. An AI-powered LMS can harvest data from all the learners using the system and then make the learning experience adaptive.
Miguel Caraballo, director of learning and development at Hodges-Mace, provides an innovative example: "Imagine this, your rookie sales person is about to visit a client. When she pulls into the parking lot, the company learning-bot pings her phone offering to show a micro-learning class about positive first impressions along with a link to the prospect’s ‘About Us’ page and her manager’s last coaching notes." That is a truly personalized, relevant and timely learning experience.
Automation For Creation
Rifle through the pages of any history book and you’ll find many variations on a theme: inventions that automate a task, from the printing press to the assembly line. These inventions make working more efficient and cost-effective. By working in tandem with AI, L&D has the potential to minimize grueling hours of administrative work, thus freeing up time for innovation.
AI can speed up basic tasks like:
- Summarizing text
- Generating writing pieces
- Determining the appropriate writing style for a specific task
- Generating personalized question banks
- Creating photos from text
- Generating questions for clients based on their needs analysis
- Editing scripts
In addition, AI can improve communication and coordination across an organization at a large scale, ensuring everyone always has access to important information. According to Steven Carton, "It can do this by transcribing meetings people could not attend, facilitate[ing] communications between people and deliver[ing] information through basic chatbots. During presentations/meetings, information will be able to be called up almost instantaneously."
So where does that leave the employees? They could then have more time to create, innovate and upskill. With administrative work handled, companies could also expand their reach without increasing costs.
AI And E-Learning
Traditionally e-learning has been a one-way stream of delivering information. AI gives us the ability to make e-learning feel more like a back-and-forth flow or a conversation with a knowledgeable guide.
According to Carton, "AI’s ability to imitate human reasoning and decision making should also boost the effectiveness of these e-learning initiatives by adapting learning processes to different user’s preferences and strengths."
Or perhaps we could use AI-powered gamification to create an interactive, immersive experience by transforming work-related content into adaptive learning experiences. Chatbots or learning scenarios can be tailored to a learner’s experience level, career level and competency to provide real-time, intelligent feedback. More importantly, the conversations between learners and chatbots can provide companies with useful data that can be used to gauge their employees’ needs and competencies.
Like most emerging technologies, AI brings about speculation and worry about existing jobs and strategies. However, it need not be that way, especially in a field where content and data are so crucial.
AI won’t take away the creative thinking of an instructional designer, but it could free up time by generating potential assessment questions. AI would not be able to take away a creative director's artistic ability, but it could help generate ideas when time is of the essence. As Donald Clark, CEO of Wildfire Learning, states, AI is not a person and should not be personified, rather it should be thought of as competent technology without comprehension.
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