Does the prospect of Artificial Intelligence (AI) being part of your learning and development (L&D) processes concern you?
Perhaps you worry that AI could take over all of the tasks that make up your team’s process. Or worse yet, eliminate the human touch in learning completely.
Relax. AI isn’t a threat to the L&D world. In fact, components of AI have been around us for at least the last two decades.
It’s here to stay and must be embraced as a useful tool in the design of effective learning. I challenge you to invite AI to join your L&D team.
How Can AI Help the L&D Team Build a Better Learning Experience?
Since the digitization of learning, the role of L&D professionals has shifted in response to the way people prefer to learn. No longer do adults spend hours searching through library books; instead, they find the information on the Internet.
As L&D practitioners, our job is to support this new way of learning by encouraging and enabling self-driven learning activities.
AI is helpful in that it can predict a learner’s next move by the actions he or she has already taken. It’s not some mystery. This information is built around data points. Additional learning content identified by previous data can be served up based on the learner’s indicated interests, job role or based on what the learner’s colleagues have studied.
What does this mean for your team?
This means for your L&D team that you must design learning content that complements and supports self-directed learning, but at the same time, include relevant content that is syndicated from other online sources. This makes courses more effective and interesting to learners.
Your L&D team can also utilize data when designing new courseware. While staying within certain parameters to meet organizational goals, you can link additional learning opportunities to core lessons.
Learning developers should view AI as not only assisting, but also as a “colleague” who handles routine. AI can be used to research, curate, and tag content within the learning platform. While this won’t replace the services of a subject matter expert or internal reviews conducted by the L&D team, it can reveal more layers of learning that are required.
AI Enhances the Learning Experience for Employees
From the learner’s standpoint, artificial intelligence has many beneficial qualities. Deloitte’s 2018 HR Technology Disruptions report shares the positive impact that AI and augmented reality are having on workforce learning.
According to the Deloitte report, the emerging tools enable continuous performance management, greatly expand the possibilities for feedback and push us to reinvent corporate learning. This provides unlimited opportunities for L&D teams to improve the learning experience:
- Chatbots can give learners encouragement and answer simple questions as they move through learning modules.
- AI powered digital learning assistants can intelligently suggest additional content that learners may find useful.
- More self-service tools and directories can help workers find answers to technical and work-related questions.
With regards to the human capital management, learning is increasingly being connected to performance. Therefore, AI will eventually be useful for predicting the success or failure of employees based on their learning activities.
So is AI really needed in the L&D?
My answer is yes.
L&D can and should search for opportunities to work with learning tools that include AI. It will help not only in serving the employees a more efficient learning experience but will also help in linking the learning and business outcomes together. To sum it up:
- AI gives the power to speed up the search for on-demand learning for learners.
- Natural language understanding will make finding the needed information easy even from huge sets of data, long videos and documents.
- It makes learning more motivating for the learners by chatting or suggesting content that is suitable.
- Instructors will find AI useful in speeding up the process of finding the content needed.
- AI could provide a ready-made template for content creation that includes pedagogical and instructional aspects so that content is presented more effectively.
The instructor will be able to evaluate learners’ progress more efficiently with AI.
Ana Gebejes, PhD
Senior Learning Consultant, Valamis
Ana Gebejes is experienced in creating and growing innovative digital learning programs. She has been teaching in higher education for nine years and has a PhD in computer science. She first worked with Valamis LXP through her university, but since she liked Valamis so much, she decided to work for the company. At Valamis Ana is responsible for making the learning impact happen: she collaborates with clients closely in identifying their learning and business needs and translates them into digital learning.