3 Ways AI Can Help Your L&D Business

**[00:00:00]** But these are three things that are very practical that apply to basically any learning and development type business. So if you sell certifications, courses, self-paced, live online, in person, whatever it is that you're training on, these three will help you. Even if you don't sell courses and you're doing employee on boarding or employee training and you just have the development learning and development environment within the company itself, that's fine too. we can we can apply those there too and and you can ask me about it as well. So the three AI use cases that we're going to talk about today are a lot of fun and we've implemented them before and they are very very useful. So I'm going to start with the first one because it's I think this the one that most people will align with maybe and there are two aspects to the first one. So that's why I want to tackle the first one first. Sound good? Cool. So the first one is going to be chat bots and you know I everyone has heard about chat bots and we've been doing chat bots since what 2016 17 but those original iterations of those chat bots for customers were more of a logic type things where you would have to build out a logic tree or a decision tree for every single step. So if you wanted to do something for courses, for example, it would take a long time because you could would build out these trees with hundreds of nodes. If this happens, go this way. If this happens, go this way. Oh, I need to go back this other way. And it was a mess. It worked, but it took a lot of work. And making any adjustment **[00:02:00]** was just you didn't really want to touch it. So they have definitely evolved. And there's a few different companies that allow you to do this. Of course, there's still many chat if you want to do it more in the meta area. If you're doing it for Facebook or Instagram, in some places you could do it for Tik Tok as well, then ManyHat is a good choice. If you are doing it for directly on your website, then some of the existing offerings for chat for live chat like intercom also have some ways to have like a little knowledge base or things like that. But what I'm talking about is a lot more interesting at least in my opinion than what we've seen actually implementing it. So say you want to create a learning pathway and so before you would have to create this web page and have everything there and sort of consider what a pathway would be for each type of individual and it would sort of be quite static. But now you can do these in a very dynamic way that just feels very natural for the learner but it's also easier for you to maintain. And I'll explain how this all works. So there's a tool called the voice flow that we've used before that is very nice. We're still using it and it allows you to use a node a visual nodebased system to create these chatbots or agents now even. And the premise here is you can create a chat experience for embedding on your website but then also for it to work via the phone. So people can call into it, people can text it, it can go to Telegram, it can go to WhatsApp, it could go to all **[00:04:00]** different manner of points. So if your customers are reaching out to you via WhatsApp, you could have this chatbot talk to them via that way. If they're coming in, sorry, through chat, SMS, and that that can work as well. If they're calling from the phone, we can set up voice agents for that as well. And of course, if they're on your website, it works there also. So it's a great way to manage some of the communication with your customers. Now specifically talking about learning and development companies which is what we're talking about today. How can you use it? So one very nice way to use it is to create learning pathways. So let's say you have 20 courses and a person might take course A or course B or course C or they might need to take all of them to get a certification for example or maybe there's an advanced master level of the certification and when someone comes into your website they will typically have to dive into all manner of sections on your site to figure out which course comes after which course which they should take which makes the most sense for them basically. But we are asking people to do all the work in a lot of these situations. So how can we make that easier for your users? And this is where a chatbot can come in. Specifically a learning pathways chatbot. The learning pathways chatbot can be built such that it reads from your existing library of content. And this is where it's really nice. Let's say you have your database and this would be on learn dash. This could be your product selection on Woo Commerce or Shopify. This could be what you're using on any other **[00:06:00]** like Moodle, Teachable, whatever other system. It doesn't really matter where you have your content. If you have a place or spreadsheet even, if you have a place where you have a list of all your courses and what the requirements are and what they teach and what they cover and who they're for, if you have this information, which you should anyway somewhere, even in your piece of paper, as long as you have that information, you can feed it into something like voice flow to make it be able to give the information, the right information to your users. So let's say someone comes into your site and you start asking them very specific questions. So you can say something like welcome I am your friendly course advisor whatever you want to call it and this course advisor can ask them a series of questions based on whatever your market is. So maybe they'll ask what is your current role in the company and then from there it might go into where would you want to go? What is the the role? what level are you trying to reach? What are you trying to achieve? And then which course have you already taken? Things like that. So you can ask them certain questions to see where they are. And then since these chatbots or agents, whatever you want to call them, are not necessarily strictly decision tree related, they can be smart. So you can tell it to understand certain keywords to from whatever they answer they can or you can set it to understand or extract certain type of information. So maybe you have a list of 20 or 30 roles that apply. So it could pluck out whatever they said, transform it in one of the **[00:08:00]** specific roles that you know you need to work with. And then from there you can have it ask more clarifying questions to the person dynamically because using voice flow you can have those flows but then you can also use LLMs within them and it's not just one big LM prompt. Instead you can have multiple prompts across the whole path. So as people are talking to it, it can know to see, oh, I don't have this information from the person yet. Let me ask it. And so it can ask things and it will always ask in a different way because you can get you can give it a prompt. And so it will it will just do it based on whatever the prompt is dynamically based on what the person is talking with it about and you're using all that context. And so this might sound a bit technical to some of you, but it's a great way to make the experience a little more unique for each person. And you don't have to make this huge amazing prompt that does everything for you and maybe make mistakes in here. You could do step by step, have it in a logical order. It could go through back and forth in that order and that's fine. But it will make sure that it captures all the information before querying the data. And then the fun part is it then can query your knowledge base specifically talking to your website to pull the information or you could do that in another batch process kind of way if you have a lot of data. And then it could decide based on that what courses it should suggest to the person to that unique individual who is talking to it **[00:10:00]** in that moment in time. And that's a lot of fun, right? Because it's giving it very specific advice which you might have given yourself and we've tested it and we've have been surprised on how well it works compared to what a person would actually tell them because it's really reading from your data. And if your data changes because you change something on your website, this can know to pull new data and always be up to date. So it could give them pricing, it could give them bonuses, it could give them coupons, it could give them whatever you want. So this this chatbot is not just something that will go through frequently asked questions. You can actually make it helpful for your visitors. And that's I think the real benefit of using a chatbot in a learning and development business. And so this would be an AI assisted chatbot which has some part of it being a flow and some part of it using AI and retrieval augmented generation for example to pull data from your knowledge base. Now there are some newer features that have come out recently where you can create agents and the agent will know to call different like an MCP kind of thing call different tools or different additional agents to let's say someone wants to know about their billing. They're going through the learning process, learning pathways process, but then they have questions about their billing. It could transition to another agent that goes and fetches using tools, fetches information about billing to give them the recent invoice or their balance due or things like that. And so you're saving a lot of time for your support staff. You can always have an escape fetch if you want for people **[00:12:00]** to actually talk to a human. But at the end of the day, I'll be honest. If I am looking for a specific answer, like where can I find my latest bill? I prefer the thing just give me the results immediately instead of waiting on hold for an agent for a real person agent for 5 10 15 minutes. And that applies not only to learning and development companies, this applies across the board. If I'm calling the doctor's office, I I sometimes don't even want to call them because I know I'm going to be put on hold and wait there for a long time. Whereas if the tool, the chatbot, whatever the thing is, can actually provide the information that I need faster, that's all I need. So the great thing about starting to consider using a chatbot or an AI assisted chatbot within your learning and development business is that you can then start applying and mapping different additional processes. So it can help with learning pathways to suggest courses and what order people should take them in. but then also it could allow them to look at their billing history, make updates to their account, see what information you have about them, that sort of stuff. And then of course there's an additional layer that you can add in which is more of a learning assistant or teaching assistant role if you will. So the teaching assistant role I really like because the teaching assistant role as a chatbot is very helpful. If you've ever taken an online course, you are going through it and then you find that you don't know how to answer something on a quiz or you didn't understand something. It sort of makes sense, but you're confused and you have **[00:14:00]** to ask someone. So, you have to wait for the teacher's hours, working hours, whatever method you have for that. Now imagine that you have a chatbot that is right there when they're learning specific to your students that they can actually interact with it and ask it information based on the learning material. So perhaps they are learning about I don't know wire gauges and they are seeing that different wires have to be thicker or thinner based on what amount of power they're going to be conducting. whatever they they just they sort of remember you talked about the materials but they're confused and they're like was it copper gold was it and so they could just ask it what what are these cables supposed to be made out of and so the thing will look in the database or your knowledge base and can respond very quickly something like oh yeah these are braided or non-braided they have to be insulated they're made of copper whatever the case may be it'll tell them and it can even tell them yeah you saw this in lesson two module 4 and you actually include a link there so they can go and get it from there or it could show them a snippet of the actual reference right there or you could even include a snippet of the video if you take it far enough. So imagine having that at your learner's fingertips. I think that's really really useful for people who are learning because at the end of the day they do want to learn. Well some of them do, some of them don't. you can't really do much. But if you make it fun, if you make it engaging, and of course, if you give them tools **[00:16:00]** to be able to get the right information fast, that's where it's really helpful. So, chatbots, again, we're talking about three things that you could use AI for in a learning and development business if you've just joined. And the first is chatbots, both for learning pathways, onboarding, getting people to choose the right course or the right course order. And if you haven't watched that, you'll be able to see in a recording and and see what I've been talking about. But then there's the sort of teaching assistant type one that I think is very very useful because it'll allow us to I don't know reduce the friction between somebody who's really really willing to learn and and the systems sometimes are too structured and it makes it complicated for them to learn what they really want to learn. Having a support agent, I think, is a great idea if you're running a learning learning development business. And remember, these can be all interconnected. So that same teaching support assistant can then help someone who's learning get billing information or see what other courses they should take, etc. It doesn't have to be confined to just that use case. So very useful. Now, another way you could use AI in a learning and development business is AI video generation. So, AI, I was talking with someone this morning and they weren't aware of the state of things. And by the way, if you're here, if you're watching live, and you're probably just watching the replay, but if you're watching live, drop a message in the chat if you have any questions about this, like how this could apply in your business. Please, by all means, we're on live on Twitter or X, LinkedIn, and YouTube. At least I **[00:18:00]** think we are, unless I click something else and we're streaming to another place as well, but those three definitely. And one of these use cases is AI video generation. And where we are right now with AI video generation is really far. It's not for everyone. It's not for everything. I probably wouldn't make it do my own videos cuz I could do my own videos. I have seen many scenarios where, for example, you might already have your course content. Maybe you had it created a long time ago. Maybe it's for a specific certification and maybe all of the course modules are just PowerPoint presentations, right? And and that happens and there's nothing inherently bad with it. People may have learned this way for a long time, but it is better if you can have something a little more dynamic to keep the interest of whoever's watching. So, if you already have a course that works that way and you've been thinking of recording video, but you don't want to appear on camera, maybe you don't have the tools, maybe you don't have the time, but you do want to provide something better than just the slides, then an AI generated avatar might be a good way to go about it. So, there's tools like Hen that do this for you and or you could do a mixture of Hen and 11 Labs, which does great voices as well. But the premise here is you can either grab an existing model of a person. There are all types of like men, women, younger, older, British accent, American accent, Chinese, whatever you want. There's all sorts of variations of these models that you can do just use out of the box or you can train your own. So **[00:20:00]** you can have something that looks similar to you or someone else or to just no one in particular just exists and then you can choose a voice or you can train it to use your voice or whoever's voice you want. And this is great because then you can give it a script and you could even give slides. So maybe you already have your slides but they were just read over as a voice over. Now imagine you could have someone that looks amicable and funny enough and they they're just giving the content the same content maybe read better maybe not. Maybe you keep the original voice. You could also do that. But now it's not only the slides. There's a person or the virtualization of a person talking and giving out the content. And so it makes it more engaging for people who are taking the course because at least they they feel even if it's not completely real some sort of connection with a human that's that's doing microp expressions and everything. So it's not it's not a bad idea. You could test it. There's free versions of a lot of this that you can use it as a trial. So maybe you have a course that you know works well or maybe you have a course that is underperforming and you just want to try it out. There's no harm in just going to heyen have it generate an AI avatarbased video with the script from that course that you already have and put it up and compare it and see what your learners say, see what your students say. If they like it, then great, you can make more. If they don't, we're going to get feedback and maybe they wanted some other **[00:22:00]** type of person reading it or they identify with some other version of the AI avatar. There's many things you can do and then you can mix them mix and match. If you want to go like really creative, you could have different versions. You can have the English version be one person, the Spanish version be some other person, French version be another person, and it could just change dynamically based on whoever's watching. and that there's there's many ways you can go about this, but AI video generation is definitely something you could use in your learning and development business. So, hope it helps. Now, the last thing I want to talk about is multi-tool automation. This we have seen recently quite a bit. So, if you don't know what we do, we for one build LMS websites, LMS applications for a lot of companies that sell courses, certification programs, that sort of stuff. And so we build LMS systems that are aligned to their brand, that have the exact interface that they want, that have the right supervisor portal, that type of deal. And so it's it's something that's a bespoke unique kind of learning management system for companies that don't want to use Teachable or Thinkific or something like that that's sort of branded as a third party. They want to use their own thing. That's what we build. And so we do that, but then we also do a lot of automations and AI stuff like we've been talking about. But one of the things that we've been asked about a lot is the automation of repetitive tasks of connecting different systems of giving people access to certain data that is not available in the system as a role based thing for example. And so **[00:24:00]** a good example is let's say you have some supervisors from a third party company and you want them to be able to see the course progress for their students or whenever they complete something and you don't want to give them access to your system because your system is a little more closed or there's just not a feature for that. Well, a good way to do that is you can have automations using make.com, which you could do as well. I mean, you could do it. We can do it for you, but you could do it as well. That's the point of it. Like make.com and then that sort of tools. It's like Zapier. If you never heard of Zapier, is it's there they're automation platforms that allow you to do thing A when thing B happens in another system. So, let's say your system triggers a completion thing event. Well, you could use something like mate.com to understand that that happened and then put the data from that completion into a spreadsheet, a specific Google sheet that is available to that supervisor, for example. And so that supervisor can now see the people that are completing the program directly on a Google sheet, something they can access, they can work with. They're used to Google Sheets or spreadsheets in general. Could also be a 365 sheet, be a Google sheet, air table, it could notion, whatever you want. you could basically move data around anywhere you want. And so it's a great way to keep your existing system without having to spend too much money recreating it just to get a feature and add additional features like reporting and things like that. For example, if you're using air table, air table is like a glorified spreadsheet, **[00:26:00]** but then it has a lot of extra features and it automations in itself too. So let's say you have your main system, you could have an air table that receives all the data of the completions, the progress etc. And then on Air Table, you can create these little dashboards and views that other people can get access to. So it's like a little mini app that they can use to both see information and even get feedback or even give feedback to to their students without having to actually use your system. So in some cases, we've seen some instructors have to come in and then use the system, but then you maybe you don't want them to use the system or your system is clunky or whatever. So something like this, you can create a whole separate interface without a lot of code or or no code at all and have them be able to view submissions from students that they're assigned to, grade them, enter feedback, and then from there have an automation that will automatically grab that, push that data back into your learning management system or to your CRM or wherever you want it. So the sky's is the limit with automation. You can do all sorts of things. And now automation has been there for a while. But now with AI, automations are faster to do and more dynamic. You don't have to be very strict in some cases with this field has to come in this exact format. For example, you could tell it this field should contain a date and it should be in this format. But if it's not, then understand what it is and just change it for me and the AI will be able to process it and **[00:28:00]** say, "Oh, it just says May 6th." Instead of saying May 6th, 2024 with slashes and the time or whatever, it could it could sort of abstract that and and understand what it's supposed to say and convert it and then continue with the flow. So multi-tool automation is another great way to use AI in a learning and development business. So here, there we go. three ways that you can use AI in your learning and development business. You can apply these really in any business, but we're being very specific about this because it's sometimes the examples have to make sense in the terminology that you see every day on a day-to-day basis. So chat bots as a learning pathway support agents or teaching assistants if you will AI generation AI video generation for your course material versus just having slides and of course multi-tool automation which is what we've been talking about right now. All right so thank you for joining me on this quick live stream and I hope to see you on the