How You Can Build AI Apps To Support L&D

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Today’s Thoughts ☠️

Ahoy there 👋,

I know, I’m breaking my once a week cycle, again.

It it self-imposed but since I had such positive feedback from last Friday’s extra edition. I thought why not give the people more of what they want?

So, we find ourselves together again for another short edition before the weekend comes.

Today, I’m sharing some more BTS (behind the scenes) of the work I’ve been doing in building AI apps for L&D tasks. I think these two in particular can spark interesting conversations on meaningful use of generative AI models.

The problem I see on places like LinkedIn with AI for L&D advice is the finite thinking on the enormity of the possible.

Too much focus on ‘perfect’ prompts (they don’t exist) and which LLM is the best. You could spend decades debating that one. Something that doesn’t get nearly enough attention is how those in the EdTech and LearnTech space can build useful solutions with AI.

Here’s a couple of things I’ve shared on LinkedIn the past few weeks you might have missed.

Building an AI Onboarding assistant to surface essential info

Welcoming a new employee is an incredibly important event.

• Gallup found that a staggering 88% of employees surveyed said their org doesn’t provide a good onboarding experience.
  

• In their research, HBR found that one-third of employee attrition occurs within the first 90 days, with poor onboarding being a major factor for these departures. Additionally, they discovered that a further 23% of employees leave before their first anniversary for the same reason.

This is the first meaningful impression new employees get of the company. Sadly, not enough give it the attention it needs but it’s not their fault (in most cases).

Line managers are mostly underprepared, HR teams are snowed under with their daily adult babysitting and L&D is navigating tsunami of orders across the business.

Its hard, I know.

Yet, what if we could enhance this process with the help of AI? I’m not talking about delegating the whole experience to tech, that would be stupid. I’m specifically looking at areas where we can provide quick in the moment support on low to mid level tasks.

Stuff like:

• Learning more about the company

• Who to contact in xyz team

• How to complete x process?

Although these seem small, they’re a significant part of supporting newbies to become capable and confident.

They’re often the things that fall into the cracks because managers, HR and L&D don’t have time to attend to them all. With an intelligent approach with the latest tech, we can make sure these needs are covered.

The added benefit is that if these are covered, this gives managers and HR teams more time to focus on doing the human stuff with new starters.

One of my favourite AI apps to build for clients is an onboarding assistant.

I see a number of clear areas for conversational assistants to support performance and learning. Onboarding is one of them (I’ll talk about the other two another time). This is not to replace human experiences, this is enhancing it.

Not everyone needs a huge LLM.

In this video, I share why you might want to use a refined conversational AI assistant with access to specific data and how to build the solution.

What if you could reduce human error in the pre-boarding process with AI?

After creating the video above, I started thinking about where else intelligent AI adoption could aid the A-Z onboarding process.

The it hit me.

Things like, "Oh HR didn't tell us this" or "IT didn't send that software request form". None of these things are helpful for a newbie to hear.

This is where a small team of AI agents could help mitigate the space for human error to improve the experience for all teams. This is an evolution of the onboarding AI assistant above.

By using AI to help with these types of tasks we can provide more time to focus on both employee and manager support.

At a high level (if you can't be bothered to watch the video) this agent team looks like:

• A supervisor to ensure all tasks are completed

• A HR assistant worker to carry out HR tasks and communicate with the Tech support worker

• A Tech support worker to setup all equipment and software, and confirm everything is ready with HR.

📌 The benefits:

1. New employees get a better experience with everything setup for their first day.

2. HR and Tech emails aren't forgotten or lost in the inbox.

3. Humans can focus on the important human elements of the onboarding process with basic pre-boarding tasks handled by AI.

This is humans + AI working together.

AI agents and multi-flows like this are the future of work. A lot of what I'm showcasing here is 12 - 18 months maybe even more away from mass adoption in HR and L&D.

As always, I hope this helps. Hit ‘reply’ if you have any questions.

Experiment and explore, always.

Sidenote: WTF is an AI agent

I’m well aware I dropped some words that might sound like an alien language to you.

So, let me backtrack a bit here.

Right now 99% of people use straightforward AI conversational tools like ChatGPT. That’s great. Some even build basic AI assistants in the form of GPTs- also good, even very good.

This is just the beginning.

Lots of big companies are working with teams from Microsoft, Google and OpenAI on their next-gen multi-flow AI agentic tech (yes another confusing mouthful).

This is what that means:

AI agents make decisions and follow instructions on their own. You can create a team of agents (like in the video) to work together on completing low-level tasks (note how I say low-level).

AI agents can connect to a LLM like ChatGPT, use tools like internet connection and work with other agents to make decisions. They will then bring the human into the loop when prompted to review it’s work.

I’ll share more on this as time goes on.

In other news

• How to be more secure with your data on ChatGPT

• The difference between the AI and Internet boom

Enjoy your weekend and we’ll talk on Tuesday.

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