5 Insights That’ll Challenge Everything You Think You Know About AI In L&D

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 TODAY’S THOUGHTS ☠️

Hey there 👋,

I gotta say, it felt like I only just wrote last week’s edition about 10 minutes ago!

My week has been fast, full of travel and plenty of learning moments. I’m writing this with my 2nd (maybe 4th) cup of tea today. My 38 year old body doesn’t quite agree with the current pace of life.

But I have much to be thankful for.

I celebrate the start of my 3rd year of running my solo business, and we get to chat again about some juicy ways to do interesting stuff in the world of learning.

Before we get into today’s chat, I want to say a massive THANK YOU for reading my newsletter and supporting my work in all the ways you do. I’m not going to pretend I don’t get massive daily impostor syndrome with bouts of staring into the abyss, wondering “if it’s all going to fall apart”.

But seeing your weekly comments, emails and hiring me to work with your teams makes all that ‘self-talk’ worth it.

Anyway, enough about me with my emotions.

Recently, too much doom-scrolling on social and watching industry talks has shown me that perhaps we have more misinformation about the reality of AI in L&D and what it takes to make AI adoption a success than I’m aware of.

That’s not to say I have “all the answers”, coz I don’t.

So today, I’m sharing 5 insights that’ll challenge everything you think you know about AI in L&D.

These are pulled from all my experiences working with teams on this topic for the past few years and all the research I've pulled together from multiple industries.

Get your tea or beverage of choice ready, 🍵.

We've got lots to discuss!

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 IN THIS DROP 📔

• What will you do when your audience outpaces you with AI?

• The enormity of the possible is bigger than you think

• Sometimes the small things produce the biggest wins

TOGETHER WITH MENTIMETER

Turn presentations into conversations

I'm excited to share a brand whose product I've been using since 2019.

If you've been to any of my live talks, you've most likely seen me use Mentimeter, which means you've used their excellent audience participation tools (check out my talk from Learn Tech London for proof).

For those who don't know, Mentimeter is an Engagement Platform that unlocks the power of participation with interactive polls, quizzes, and Q&As.

Trusted by businesses, universities, and individuals worldwide, Mentimeter brings out the voices in the room, both virtually and in person.

See a Menti in action by checking out the Open Forum, a webinar shaped by the L&D community, for the L&D community.

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 THE BIG THOUGHT 👀

5 Insights That Will Challenge Everything You Think You Know About AI In L&D

When I think about the future of learning with AI, I don’t imagine it as more content and courses.

A rewiring of what we do and how we do it is here.

While most teams are stuck at the point of innovations from 2 years back, you can be ahead of this. Perhaps, this is the new reality of learning in the flow.

Conversational, not transactional.

I can’t help but get excited about conversational-driven experiences that not only develop new skills but also reveal more about ourselves and how we think.

Yet...I still see a lot of talk and not so much action, sprinkled with a lot of misinformation and actual understanding of Gen AI's power and limitations. That creates a problem if the L&D industry wishes to thrive in the new world of work with AI.

Here’s 5 insights I’ve picked up in my research, analysis and partnering with lots of L&D and HR teams over the past few years on driving AI adoption.

1/ Your customers are building their own solutions

The biggest problem, in my eyes right now, is the fact that our audience (I'm not calling them learners!) is able to design their own personalised and adaptive learning experiences with LLMs.

Whether they're good or not is another question.

I've been talking to clients about this for the past year. They mostly nod and reply 'that's interesting', but it's more than interesting. It's a threat coming right down the barrel at light speed to many L&D teams.

Why do they need you, if they have the gods of LLMs?

(I shared a post on this a few months ago: How will you respond to the changes in your customers’ experiences?)

We must ask ourselves, if our customers have access to intelligence on-demand and personalised learning experiences, how do you fit into that?

You cannot fight the adaptiveness and personalisation that generative AI enables.

That would be a foolish endeavour. Instead, you have to evolve as workforces will demand a new level of experience that they currently enjoy in their personal life.

We’ve been here a few times before.

As an industry, we’ve lost many battles to Google search, all of social media and YouTube.

We all want the sleek experiences from our personal use, end of story.

So, this presents a crossroads for us.

Either we keep trying to force people to places and spaces they don’t want to be, or design to meet them where they’re hanging out. The choice is yours.

If we look at AI as the dominant emerging operating system, you have your answer to the above.

2/ It's a transformation, not a training project

I find so many teams fail to see this.

And...one we need to consider if we exist at the end of it in our current form (so controversial, I know 😂).

If you're reading these words and all your team/company is doing is the minimal "Let's train everyone how to write prompts", then check out this post where I walk through the 4 levels of transformation happening across L&D with AI right now.

TL;DR: Stop treating AI adoption like a training project

3/ You can do a lot more with AI today than you think

You know I share a lot of innovations and tech demos.

What some don’t realise is that almost everything I share is available to use right this minute.

That's why I'm always surprised when I get weekly messages like "I had no idea this was even possible today" or "OMG! I thought this would be years away". Remember when I said about teams being stuck at innovations from 2 years ago, this is what I mean.

The most recent example of this is when I shared a video of me working with an interactive avatar from HeyGen.

It's basically a face and voice on top of an LLM. No static avatars or scripts to read from.

My inbox went mental once more, and it proved to me again that there is so much untapped potential with current technology. So many miss all of these innovations because they're too busy chasing all the shiny things!

You can find even more innovative ways to use AI to rewire L&D on my YouTube channel and on the dedicated AI for L&D section of the STT website.

Speaking of chasing shiny things...

4/ You're trying to sprint before you can walk with AI

Agent this, agent that is literally all I see on LinkedIn these days.

Granted, it’s a total echo chamber of people mostly shouting that back at each other, but by God, it’s giving me a headache.

The hype, mostly driven by AI companies, is becoming laughable.

Don’t get me wrong, AI agents will be very useful and there’ll be some great applications in L&D, yet you’d think a sort of world peace is about to emerge by the way the ‘influencers’ talk on social.

I work with sooo many teams and companies that hardly know how to use a basic AI assistant to even 50% of its potential. Adding agents into that mix is a recipe for both confusion and mistakes.

A lot of people need to slow down…

Pause… take a breath and find your centre (or whatever meditation teachers say).

Almost 90% of what you see paraded online is not a true agent solution. Not in the technical context, anyway.

Much like marketing teams decided to use the word “AI” everywhere post-2022, they’re doing the same thing by labelling everything an Agent.

Unfortunately, this has created a fractured understanding of what an agent is, and the definitions are always changing.

So, I decided to put something together to cut through that BS ↓

5/ Using AI for conventional "learning" tasks is not groundbreaking

Perhaps this is a controversial one.

I don't believe using AI tools to do more of the conventional content and course experiences in L&D is an impressive 'use case'. Whenever someone says to me, "I used ChatGPT to create my next course in half the time," I chuckle in my head 'That's cute'.

The same place where the 99% who could become obsolete occupy.

I keep using the word "rewire" so much in my work because that's what we need - a complete rewiring of what we do and how we do it. Be brave enough to say, "Does this need to be a course?"

With intelligence on-demand in everyone’s hands, our default operating system is becoming AI, and it’s not using courses to help people learn.

I know I keep saying it, but you don’t want to use AI to accelerate outdated ideas and practices. Instead, we should focus on rewiring what we do.

This quest of rewiring what L&D can do with AI has led me to think of a world beyond the course or event as the default delivery for learning moments.

I share one of those experiments in this one ↓

Final thoughts

There you go, friend.

Now you see what I see, and my hope is for you to use this to improve your work both with AI and if you’ve been given the ill-fated L&D mission of “making people use AI”.

→ If you’ve found this helpful, please consider sharing it wherever you hang out online, tag me in and share your thoughts.

Till next time, you stay classy, learning friend!

PS… If you’re enjoying the newsletter, will you take 4 seconds to forward this edition to a friend? It goes a long way in helping me grow the newsletter (and cut through our industry BS with actionable insights).

And one more thing, I’d love your input on how to make the newsletter even more useful for you!

So please leave a comment with:

1. Ideas you’d like covered in future editions

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I read & reply to every single one of them!

 👀 ICYMI (In case you missed it!)

1. You don’t need to go big to do well with AI. This is what I class as a real-world view on where AI can help you at work.

2. 3 questions you must ask before “How do we use…” A mental reframe I find myself sharing much more this year.

 VIDEO THOUGHTS 💾

How To Customise Your NotebookLM Audio Overviews

If you’re a regular reader, you know I talk about NotebookLM quite a bit.

Its audio overviews are a powerful way to turn your sources into podcast-style summaries (even though I found them gimmicky at first), but did you know you can tailor them before they're created?

In this video, I walk through how to customise your audio overviews in NotebookLM, including key differences between free and Pro plans.

Whether you're using AI for learning, research, or productivity, this pre-production customisation helps you guide the AI host to focus on exactly what matters to you.

After all, no one wants an AI voice parroting the worst parts of a 250-page report.

Bonus: I just released a full playlist of all my NotebookLM video tutorials in one place on the YouTube channel. I’m trying to get better organised with these!

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