AI in Learning and Development

Speaker A: Hi and welcome to the Agile in Action podcast. Today I'm joined by Bhavneet Chahal, co founder and CEO at GoSkills. They are a leading platform for online education. Hey Bhav, how are you today?

Speaker B: Hi Bill. Uh, I'm great, thanks. Thanks for having me on your podcast.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm really excited for this. We met a very long time ago because we were working together building a Microsoft project training course. This is many moons ago. Then recently we started working together again because AI is becoming so popular and we're both getting involved in that space and I want to know what's going on in the instructional design and online education field. So I thought it'd be a good time for us to reconnect before we get started. Could you introduce a little bit about yourself and what Go Skills is all about?

Speaker B: Absolutely. So my name is Bhav. I'm um, the co founder and CEO of Go Skills. We are an online education platform. We create both bite sized courses for career advancement as well as a learning management system for companies to create their own training, their own incredible bite sized courses to deliver, uh, internally.

Speaker A: Yeah, and I think you're a little bit ahead of the curve with the bite size training because you know, I see that everywhere now. But yours aren't just shorts, they're really focused on a particular topic. Can you talk a little bit about what those bite sized pieces are and how that fits into your overall strategy for adult learning?

Speaker B: I think we can say we pioneered Microlearning back in 2013 when we launched Go Skills. The reason we created Go Skills is because I took an online online Excel course and um, it included some um, hour long videos and PDF downloads and I just didn't think it's very effective course. Right from the beginning we knew we wanted very short three to five minute videos. That's the bite size component. Each video also should come with something supplementary like we call them cheat sheets. So just the written information from the video as well as uh, an exercise so that you can apply your knowledge from the video and a short three question multi choice quiz again just to make sure you a knowledge check that you have the full understanding from that, that three to five minute video. And all our courses are broken down into these bite sized lessons.

Speaker A: That's great. And I think this is super useful for someone like myself who is a trainer because you know, very often we're training in person and we already prepare all of that content and what have you and whether it's in person or over zoom kind of the same thing. Maybe the training is a few hours long and so everyone's there learning together, having a conversation, but when you're staring at a screen, you don't really want to look at it for very long. I heard there's a stat out there, and I'm not really trying to, you know, call out any particular company, but my understanding is that a lot of the, if you will just pay $15 for this training courses, some of the more popular ones are the ones that are like 15 hours or 30 hours. And, uh, you don't get that guidance as a trainer to make sure that you have valid course material, exercises, cheat sheets, sample material that you can work with. And I really value the relationship that I've had with GO skills because you formalized it so that it makes it a lot easier for us as a trainer to really think through what we're going to develop for that three to five minutes. It's not like you just press the record button and say, here's what I'm going to teach you. You really have to think through it. And then I think the person taking the training gets that same value out of it because it's been thought through to a level that maybe it's not noticeable until after you've taken the course.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. We care deeply about the pedagogy of the course. So we do ask our instructors to create the outline first, uh, with each lesson having one very clear learning objective. And then we are quite prescriptive with the format as well. So we do try to enforce that three to five minute rule as best as we can, and then all that supplementary material as well, because we think that that's a nice format to learn online.

Speaker A: The obvious, what do we call it, the elephant in the room? AI is kind of right now at this moment a big thing. And that big thing means that there's big changes and those changes happen very quickly. And you know, there's a lot of capability now in an AI model to just say, hey, I want to learn something about this topic. And you can just type that in. Go into ChatGPT, for example, and say, I want to learn about gardening, or I want to learn this product. And it will walk you through it. Some people will do that. I think other people maybe like to be in person or talk over zoom, and other people just want to be able to consume the content. But I'm curious for you, what are you seeing in the space right now, in the learning and development and educational space? And what changes should we expect as AI continues to blossom the way it is.

Speaker B: When ChatGPT really came out with their product, we immediately went into like, oh, no, what should we do? People will just go to ChatGPT for all their online training. But actually taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture, we realize that that's not really the case. There's a similar parallel with YouTube. You could also go to YouTube and search for something very specific and get your answer, uh, immediately. And both AI and YouTube, and I'm sure there are many other examples where you need that very specific point just in time learning, then you can get that answer. But what we provide are, uh, structured guided pedagogical courses. So we take you through an entire topic from the basics right up to an advanced level in a very structured and guided way. And I think if you're just going to search into an AI product for a particular question, you're not going to get that holistic view of your skills and how to grow your skills.

Speaker A: Companies are starting to incorporate AI into every little bit, uh, every little nook and cranny of their product. So it changes really fast. The products maybe even change their look and feel, or a new feature suddenly gets added. Uh, I'm curious, are you seeing those changes impacting what your customers are looking for? And how are you thinking about addressing that?

Speaker B: If you don't, uh, add AI capability, you will be left behind in terms of go skills. We've added three AI products into our platform. The first is what we've called genie, and it is a content assistant. In our course builder, as part of our learning management system, you can create your own courses. We've got a product called a course builder, and, um, we fully integrated GENIE into that product. So it helps you create from the title of your course to the syllabus, even down to the content. So you can put in the lesson objective for that particular lesson, and it could, um, spit out a video transcript and a quiz and tons of content. And it just makes content creation so much easier for both our instructors as well as instructional designers or L and D managers looking to create custom training for their teams.

Speaker A: So I really like this idea of the Ask AI, uh, capability, and it's grounding itself is what I think I'm hearing. To use an AI term, it sounds like rather than try to answer any question anyone might have, it's focused on the training. And in all fairness, you shared this with me when we were prepping for the podcast, and I went ahead and asked some questions myself and it was kind of cool. I went into a course and I said, hey, tell me how I can do this, that or the other thing. And not only did it respond, it responded like the trainer, as you said, but it also gave me links to the relevant course material so I could watch it or follow up with the cheat sheets. I think that was a really cool experience because it's not trying to answer any and every question, it's trying to focus you on learning for that particular topic.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. We have scoped that just to the course content so that it doesn't go out and get information that might be inaccurate at all. Uh, it doesn't hallucinate it, it is just scoped to that particular course and we have fully integrated that into the platform. So if you are struggling with a particular lesson and it knows that another lesson might help you with a foundational understanding, it'll link to that. So, yeah, we're very excited about the Ask AI product and I hope it's the first step in many to create really personalized back and forth type training in an online on demand way with

Speaker A: the GENIE product now. And this is the one that helps the trainer build their course material more quickly. You know, we see a lot of material out there that goes out into the wild. I guess I would just say open up LinkedIn or go to some less popular news sites or blog sites and you'll see a lot of content that after you start reading it for a bit, you start to notice that it's just AI, it doesn't feel like a human wrote it. Maybe it caught your attention initially with some catchy one liner or something, but then you just lose interest because you're just noticing all those signs. And I'm curious, what are you thinking about in terms of keeping the quality up there for your training?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. We don't want AI swap in our, uh, trained materials and that tool is meant to help instructors to generate content, but it should not be the final product. It's really hard to start with a blank screen. And um, so this will help you almost brainstorm ideas for what you would like to cover in your course and how you would like to cover it. But we don't expect you to use what it delivers as the final product. You definitely need the human curation, the human eye for quality control. And also usually it's instructional designers or SMEs, subject matter experts creating these courses so they know what to include and what to exclude. And so that job is not going away anytime soon because I think that Human curation element is crucial.

Speaker A: Yeah. What I'm finding is that they're really good for, what do I call them, like explainer videos, you know? Here, just explain this topic to me so I can understand. I have taken a few courses that were generated fully with AI and can tell you for sure it started to get a little rough to continue watching it.

Speaker B: Yeah. Another thing that we found our AI product, uh, at genie that does really well is creating course titles or lesson titles that are really. They have a hook so that it makes you want to click onto that lesson and read on. So I think it's that creative writing aspect that's nice. Snes, they're excellent at what they do. They, they're experts in their fields, but they might not have the best way to hook an audience or the sales and marketing tactics to get someone to enroll into your course and then get through the entire course. And I think GENIE and AI polish on, uh, lesson titles and things like that can really help make the course a lot more engaging and put the learner deeper into the course.

Speaker A: That's actually a really good point because AI is actually trained on the world's knowledge. And one of those skills, those capabilities that a lot of people write about is how to engage people with content, how to be a good salesperson, how to be a good marketer. This is why I think most people don't necessarily write a good resume, because it's hard to sell yourself. You get kind of in the weeds as to what you do, and it's hard to pull back and say, who is my audience? And then how do I engage with them? So having that actually, I think is a super valuable tool. And that's also training someone to think differently about how they write their content in the future too.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a really nice way to use AI to polish a course and to really make it marketable.

Speaker A: I have a billbot that I call it. It's a trained on all of my writing and I have it just do a check for me. Is this writing like me? Because sometimes we just wake up in the morning and we're in a bad mood and sometimes our content that we write, whether it's an email or a piece of training material or an article or blog, whatever it might be, sometimes it just comes off the wrong way and you're not being authentic because you're in some sort of a space and it grounds you on that. And it's the same thing with content engagement as well, because you can just say, you know, What? I'm really good at teaching this topic, but I keep using technical jargon that maybe people don't know yet. And so AI can help smooth that over and say, well, wait a minute, you're creating this course that's going to teach the topic, but why are you using it right now when people may not even know what it means?

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. I think you're so good with the substance of the topic and your deep knowledge on a topic, AI can come on top of your content and transform it into something that's more applicable and nicer for a wider audience.

Speaker A: Um, now I am curious because of all of the changes going on in the world and people trying to figure out what their job might look like in the coming weeks, months or years. What are some of the important things that people should be looking for when they're taking a course? What are some of the things that you're looking to do at GO Skills to make the courses more valuable?

Speaker B: We're seeing a lot of demand for AI style courses. With AI and new technologies, you do have to keep updating, uh, your skills, learning new things. I think the most productive people in months or years will be the people that can fully leverage AI tools in their workplace. So whether that's Copilot or some other coding tool, you become so much more productive with your sort of sidekick. If you don't learn how to use AI in your workflow, I think you will be left behind. So it's essential to remain competitive and relevant.

Speaker A: I think one of the important things here as well to think about with AI is that it's not just about creating content. It's about using AI to improve what you're doing. So you already mentioned, like, polishing a course, maybe identifying ways to relabel things, but also identify gaps. So you can use AI to simply identify gaps in your content strategy, in your marketing strategy, in your sales strategy. You can have it analyze that and create new concepts and ideas for you. It doesn't necessarily mean you have to use it to create content. You can use it to help you identify new market opportunities and ways to improve customer satisfaction. And I think that's one of those skills that we keep talking about, prompting, which is so important. And we talk about AI being embedded in these products and, and you need to know how to use the prompts. But at the end of the day, find those gaps, Find those things that maybe other people aren't talking about that's going to add more value to the person that's purchasing your content.

Speaker B: Yeah, Speaking of, uh, using AI for the strategy, that is actually what we've been doing. We fed OpenAI's Strategy BT product with our demo requests data. So anyone looking for a demo on our website, and it produced this report which was truly mind blowing because it just showed us it was synthesizing a lot of data which we had seen before but hadn't synthesized in the way that it had done for us. And it brought out, like you said, opportunities industries and shows us demand. It even said things like, oh, there's demand for AI products and AI courses and it's still low compared to your flagship Excel, but it's increasing at a higher rate. So it helps us predict what our customers want and what type of courses we should create. And yeah, it was incredible to use the AI product in that way to help us analyze big data and illuminate opportunities within our business.

Speaker A: That's a great example of where AI, I think, is coming in very handy for people that know how to use it. I keep looking at it as like the 8020 right now. A lot of people are still learning, prompting, that's 80%. The 20% are using it to do what you're talking about right now. And usually those are people that have a mindset of, okay, is it okay if we just ask AI to go out there and figure something out and be okay with however it responds and be open to change? And it really does give you a lot more visibility into how people might be perceiving your product, despite what other data you might have.

Speaker B: Yeah, I was really surprised because it was so basic data as well. It was just an Excel sheet that we got from our developers. And yeah, we used ChatGPT's O3 model, which is excellent at analyzing data and it just produced this really beautiful report. And then actually my co founder, uh, put that report into NotebookLM, um, which is Google's note taking product and it created a podcast of the report, which was mind blowing. So I could, uh, listen to the report as if it was a podcast to help me digest all the information in a much more easy way.

Speaker A: Sometimes it's easier to just put on a headset and listen to the results rather than try to read through it all. And what's nice about those types of products is that it's a conversation. Right. That notebook LM you were talking about, or two people chatting about the data that they learned and giving the insights in a way that we are right now in the podcast.

Speaker B: Exactly. It's just so much more relatable. Um, and I feel like, it's more. You remember the data and the content. So much more when you hear it as two people talking as opposed to reading, you know, the information on a word doc.

Speaker A: Now, this podcast is for people who are leading in the agile space and looking to new capabilities. And of course, AI is one of them. A lot of instructional designers, and you may not call yourself an instructional designer, but guess what? If you are standing up at a user group and giving a talk, or going to conferences and sharing what you've learned, and if you are presenting material every day, guess what? You're an instructional designer and you're teaching people. I think whether you're formally doing that as part of your title or you're doing this as something that is just core to how you present information to people. I would love, Bob, uh, if you could just take a moment and reflect and give someone that might be an instructional designer some tips, some takeaways that they can use starting today. Maybe that would give them a leg up in how they might create their material moving forward.

Speaker B: I think I'd go back to what I said, uh, earlier about using AI to polish the course and to market it better with our GENIE product. When people use it, I can see the course titles just look so much more enticing. You want to keep reading to see what the course is about evenly. The course overview, those are basically sales documents, which I think AI does a really good job at putting together. It's one thing to create amazing content, but it's another to sell it. And that would be my tip for instructional designers to use AI to help them market their courses in terms of, uh, titles, lesson titles, books, and even maybe create a marketing strategy to get it out there so that people will take the course. You can create the best course out there, but if you don't know how to market it, no one's gonna take it. And, you know, it's kind of wasted. So, yeah, I would say that that would be my hot tip for, uh, instructional designers.

Speaker A: Thank you very much for that. And, uh, obviously I'm going to also say if you think that you have a good course, then you should reach out to go skills. I found that you are all very open to accepting someone's pitch for an idea and, and working with instructional designers like myself. I want to say right now, this is not a sponsored podcast. This is us talking. Because you and I built a relationship those many years ago, and we still have a relationship today, and we've been collaborating on creating AI instructional design content, and it's just a joy to work with your company and I really appreciate you for that.

Speaker B: Oh, thank you, Bill. And it's a joy to work with you. I love that we have so such a long standing relationship. I'm trying to remember when was it that we met? What year was that?

Speaker A: I think we decided it was when I got back from Japan, probably in 2012 or 2013.

Speaker B: Uh, crazy. Yeah, we started ghost skills March 2013. Well, we incorporated ghost skills in March 2013 and I think Microsoft Project was one of our very, very early courses. So, yeah, we love working with you and that's why we contacted you again when we saw that you were doing AI things. And yes, we're always on the lookout for, uh, instructional designers, content experts. If you love presenting on your topic and would love to do that in a more scalable way, please reach out to us.

Speaker A: How can people reach out to you?

Speaker B: You can reach out to us by emailing us@infofsceals.com or if you want to reach out to me personally, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. We have online forms on our website. We're a very small team, so we see everything that comes in.

Speaker A: Wonderful. I really appreciate your time today and it was so fun talking to you. It's always great to see you again and chat.

Speaker B: Thank you so much, though.