CELab - Ep 188 - Customer Education Doesn’t Have a Confidence Problem - It Has a Visibility Problem: Irana Wasti of Thought Industries

Speaker A: M. I want to put an uncomfortable idea in front of you. You've spent, what, a year, two years or more building your academy. You branded it, you structured the learning paths, you've thought for the budget, and you measure its success by how many people show up to it. Thought Industries is arguing that that's backwards. Their line is the academy is the source, not the destination. Think about where your customers actually go when they're stuck. It isn't your academy. It's the search bar in your product. It's your help center. It's a Slack channel. And increasingly, and let's be real honest about this, it's ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. So their bet is that your job isn't to drag people to the portal. It's to make your academy the verified source that feeds all of those places. They built the plumbing for it. Conversational AI that answers from your actual content with citations and what they call answer Entry engine optimization. AEO pushing verified content out to where questions are actually being asked. Now, I've spent real time inside Thought Industries over the years. I know this platform. And I'll be honest with you, what they built in the last year is different enough that I want to take another look at it. A new CEO, a whole new AI layer, and this argument on top of it. So, no, I'm not going to tell you they've entirely got this right yet. That's the real debate at hand and we should have it on the show. But they've been doing customer education longer than almost anyone in the space and their headline is still the truest four words in our field. Trained customers don't churn. MongoDB, Celonis, Gong and Synthesia run on it. So go argue with them. Thoughtindustries.com. Hello again, everybody. Welcome to C Lab, the customer Education laboratory, where we explore how to build customer education programs, experiment with new approaches, and exterminate all those myths and the bad advice you get that stops growth of our company's adoption, retention, you know, the spiel, all that customer success and experience stuff that we care about. Dead in its tracks. I am Dave Darrington and I'm really excited today. Up, uh, to Rana. Say hello to the audience and tell us who you are and we'll get into this.

Speaker B: Uh, well, hey, Dave. And hey, everyone. I'm excited to have this conversation. I think it's going to be a really interesting and insightful one. Um, excited to be part of this conversation in general, as I joined Thought Industries about a year ago as a CEO. Uh, Being newer to the customer education space, uh, but bringing lots of interesting, diverse background into the space. So I know we'll talk more about it as we go, but really excited to be here.

Speaker A: Great. I'm excited. I've been, um, excited to get to know you, to learn about what's going on. And we're going to get into all of that today. But before we do, let's have a little fun. As usual. This is the international day of where we go and look at what is the National Day or the International Day today. We pick one, talk about it, and then we'll continue on with the show. So you looked at the page. What did you think? What popped out to you as the day of?

Speaker B: Uh, well, one of the things we're celebrating today, it's a national school picture day, so I'll pick that one. Yeah. Yeah. So I have two sons. Uh, I have one that just started college, so he's a freshman at college. So unfortunately, no more school picture days for him. Um, and I have another one who is a freshman in high school. So there was definitely a school picture day. Um, and so, yeah, over time, I've gotten better at remembering when those picture days are. But we definitely have some of those pictures from prior years where. Well, it's a fun memory.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that it's actually the chronicle of school. Like, oh, we really, we really did this. Oh, my gosh, I can't believe your hair is all messed up or whatever. Yeah, that's hilarious.

Speaker B: Yeah. Or you're wearing your favorite Stranger Things T shirt for the picture day.

Speaker A: Oh, my pick for the day is I like the one that says it's are you okay Day. Um, that is something that we tend to forget about. And we, we'll make sure that all our peers. So if you have a friend out there in customer ed that's uh, having a hard time and, uh, you know, I've had some days lately that have been interesting too. Cause I'm working in the trench, learning every day. Reach out, say hello, important. All right, let's get into this. We got our warmup done. What I always like to do, Ron, I'd like to frame up what's going on, where we're at, what we're going to talk about today. All right, to frame this up, we're going to, we're going to talk about you platform. We've got, um, a lot going on at Thought Industries today. And my hypothesis, most important thing is we, you've released a report which is extremely important. We look forward to these, I look forward to these every year. Um, because you go out, you get some really good data from people that matter, that are working and driving these education programs. And before you've introduce yourself to the world and the audience, here's what the anchor is. Customer education doesn't have a confidence problem. Meaning we know it works, right? We have the, we have the receipts. Um, it has a visibility problem, wearing a confidence problem.

Speaker B: Close.

Speaker A: I love that. I'm not going to get into that. We're going to come back to that in a minute. But let that audience sink into your head as we get to know Rana. So can you give me a little bit more about where you come from, what you're doing, what your, your charter, your mission, your mandate here is at Thought Industry today.

Speaker B: Absolutely. So I've, I'm coming up on my one year anniversary with Thought Industries. Time surely does fly when you're having fun. I joined Thought Industries as a CEO have bringing with me my background in products. So most of my career was built on product discipline and product work roles and also go to market experiences. So I've run businesses and product businesses in US as well as across Europe, Middle east and Africa. And so for me what was really interesting about coming into DOT Industries in this role was that um, a lot of what you do as a product leader, as a business leader in charge of products is you want your products to get out, to be out there, to be used to deliver the value they were meant to deliver to make sure your customers are happy, engaged, uh, supported through the entire customer journey. And so for me when joining Thought Industries, what excited me and uh, why I was excited about this opportunity is that this is a company in the category that actually whose entire mission is to accomplish that is to help those customers, those end customers of every business out there, be successful at whatever it is they chose, whether they chose a product or service from the businesses that we partner with. And so the idea of is like how do I bring in all of those learnings about building products, shipping products, taking products to markets, all the different markets. How do I bring all that experience into a company whose job is that to really empower uh, the businesses and their customers to get the most out of their products and services. So I love the problem statement and the customer job to be that we were, we were solving and then the opportunities to solve it even better. Um, ahead.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a, that is really great. And that's, that is what I would always hope for. Right. You're coming in from. But You've had, you've been at IBM, Intuit, GoDaddy, Typeform, Bill, and then now a learning platform. You've got an amazing pedigree of the learning you've done. Um, the question I have most of all here I think is I want to go back into your product experience. So a product person walking into a learning company, I think for one that is such a really good connection. I mean seriously. And I, we didn't talk about this before, but I always feel like there's a disconnect between product and the customer. Like there's not a direct through line or channel, uh, of communication. However, I've had some really interesting experiences in customer education. One of them I recall from was Nick Meta when he was at Gainsight. I came in and did this report where I've been similar to you. I've been in consulting, I've been in high tech, I've been a developer, I've been in product. I've done all these different things and I did this analysis that showed how we interface with the customer and our product team was like, oh my God, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen. And I didn't know this and that's a surprise. And let me tell me more. And we had like, we were connected and that's. And that was such an important thing. What's. But what surprised you most? You've done a year there, a year. Congratulations. What has surprised you most about being in this category?

Speaker B: Yeah. So what was interesting when joining and just kind of learning about the category and meeting so many customers. I really enjoy engaging with our customers that we serve. So the businesses that we serve and really hearing about their stories, what they're looking for to do with the, with the platform, beyond the platform, just gathering all that input. But what's fascinating for me is that coming from the product world, you build the product and you think about the customer journey, but you really think about the customer journey when it comes to the product. Right. Like how does customer onboard onto the product? How do they use it? How can they use it more? What new functionality they can unlock in the product? And coming into thought industries, it was really interesting to see the customer journey but from a different lens. Product is part of it, but there's so much more to that customer journey. And the role that education plays across that customer journey now to me feels is like the best hidden secret. Right. Being back in the product role. I don't even know how often I interacted with customer education teams. Right. Because again, your center your sort of beginning and end. Is that product right? Like again, you want the customer to move through your product, use the product. That's the metrics you are, uh, measured on. But there's, there's this other way to look at the customer journey from the customer education lens of how informed and educated and empowered does your customer feel every step of the way, which by the way, starts before they even use you as a product or choose you as a provider, all the way to that ongoing sustainable usage. So for me that was quite fascinating to see how, actually how on one hand it's a much bigger scope that customer education covers across the customer and prospect and customer journey and at the same time how kind of a hidden it is within the companies, the visibility it lacks within the company. So that to me was just a really interesting surprise unlock and really helped me think through how to evolve, uh, customer education, where to take this category and how to evolve what we do at DOT Industries.

Speaker A: Exactly. And I think when we were talking about this just before we started our discussion, let me bring that back up to the top. How important this. It's a surprise. I guess it's not a surprise to me because I'm living in the trench and I choose to be here. When I say living in the trenches. I'm an active customer education manager, building content, distributing content, doing everything. I don't have a team at the moment. I will soon, but I've had big teams. I've had all kinds, uh, I've had all the perspective. This is where I want to be, this is where I choose to be. I agree with you. This work is so vitally important. But the challenge, I think more than anything is how do we get that above the line, below the line, attention, the executive connection and threading into product that shows the value that we provide. And that's where I would pivot to say, you've got the 2026 State of Customer Learning and AI report that we're going to talk about here in a moment before I would like to finish up some of the new directions. And where we're going, that's crucial. And I, and I see it every day. I go, well, hey, are we thinking about the customer when we're doing all these things? Or maybe we spend a whole lot of time in internal enablement, teaching our field how we're going to sell and what the product does. And then, hey, you know what? We forgot that there is this customer sitting there waiting. And I spent millions of dollars on this platform and I don't know what to do with it. Okay. Um, we failed. You know, we didn't. But I'm trying to be a little contentious here. Okay, let me go back to one other thing before we jump into some of the big key stuff. So I want to ask you about what you're building now. Um, some of the prompting I picked out of your discussion before. Learning and learning and intelligence, the AI wave is something you're addressing. This concept of omnichannel learning. Oh, my God, I love this so much. And conversational AI learning, um, from your April launch, this, the era of static content, sending customers to a portal and hoping they find the right answer is over. Seymour, that is interesting.

Speaker B: So, absolutely, I think there's two components to this. One component is that customers, end customers. And, um, by the way, when we say customers, we mean the end customer. And when we say business, we mean the actual business that provides the product or service. So customer behavior is changing, full stop. None of us are surprised to hear that. We all see it, we all experience it firsthand. And we also have seen in the past how sort of a consumer behavior bleeds into business expectations or business product expectations and as well. And that's exactly what we're seeing here, right? We want our answers immediately. We want it at our fingertips. We go to different channels now for answers. We, uh, all have our favorite Cloud ChatGPT tool that we default to or Gemini or whatnot. Um, customer behavior is changing. That's part one, I think part two in what we just talked about earlier is that this visibility problem, that is a problem for the business to recognize that customer education plays a bigger role. But, but there's part of it is on customer education teams as well to be open to expanding how they think about education, where they deliver it, where they make it available. And so for me, this is what we try to summarize with our AI wave and that omnichannel learning, and honestly, omnichannel and conversational learning, which is what we both launched as part of our AI wave, is to say we have to recognize that customer behavior is changing and we can use that as an opportunity to really improve, improve the role education plays in that full customer journey. Because now your prospect and customer should be able to get the rich information about you early on with their evaluating companies. You should get that rich information in the place where they want it. It could be in the learning platform, but it could be in so many other channels. Product, community, help center, again, ChatGpts of the world and so on. And it should be in the format that that customer wants. Again, we're being trained as consumers for that chat now to have the interaction that's more conversational. Right. So that, to me is what's exciting about recognizing the customer behavior change and using it both to address the customer need, but really almost kind of uplift the role that education plays, um, in this new business, new ecosystem.

Speaker A: I really like this approach because it's so immediately resonant with my felt experience of the reality of the field I work in, that I've been in all of these companies. Um, different field, different kinds of technology and not, I mean, I started in pharmaceuticals and as a chemist, we're not going to do anything with that. But the concept of learning, and I kind of want to pivot back to this conversational AI concept, uh, my experience about learning. Now I'm gonna take two coins, turn sides of the coin on this from a, uh, consumer, a learner. I've gone from, okay, gonna go to Google, gonna Google it. And flubbing through all the, okay, I didn't get the right keywords here. And that doesn't look right. And that search was kind of like being in a library, but it was faster. I didn't have to go to a library. But this whole movement. And I really kind of want to get away from thinking about AI as, oh, ah, this big monster. Whatever. All the tools we've had before are still there. The difference is now I have this intelligence. It's like, um, it's way beyond a response. It's. I can go to Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT. It's all they could add for a copilot on a football game. I was watching right now, it's like, okay, wherever. It doesn't matter, the outcome is the same. I want to converse. Hey, agent, tell me X, Y, Z. And that was, that's transformational. This is as big as it was in the, like, what was it, the 90s when we started getting web browsers and stuff? And I mean, that was huge for me and I was right there. But now it's kind of, It's. I don't find it hard, but it's very transformational. Or I sit down with, um, ChatGPT, or I use Claude more right now, or even Gemini for work because it's integrated with everything. Okay, I want to say, hey, okay, I work at a company called Vast Data. Very complicated technology firm building platform for AI to build, to develop upon. It's all technical. And I'm always looking at acronyms and things like that. Where do I Go to ask questions. Now I go to thought because I've got it hooked up with MCP and other things into my, I get all these answers immediately. I can answer questions and with confidence and. But then there's the flip side of it that I was going to tell you about. So when I was at Atlassian, one of the things that I saw with, we were looking through data in our inter interconnection with our LMS and we were seeing the wave of, you know, you, you, you look, you know this well. When you look at a dashboard and thought industries and there's like a wave every week, you see it kind of go up and rise and fall. But there was this diminution over time where that curse has been going down slightly, not all the way. But speaking directly to your omnichannel concept, what our hypothesis was and the validation we had for it is, oh my God, why didn't we think about this? People are less engaged directly with the channel that we have set up where we ask you to come to us. And now we're, they're seeking information from Law, chatgpt, whatever. And now the gap is how do I, how do I make sure that that is smart and has all the right stuff? And because like we, we tend to hide or obscure. This is your visibility anchor. We've, we've obscured. We're like, come to me, come to me, I've got my lms. Go into it, learn.

Speaker B: No, yeah, I, so I agree with your point and I think when I hear, you know, when you talk about like you guys seen the numbers go down, the people coming to a platform will go down. To me that screams opportunity. Actually, it's not the loss of business, it's actually opportunity to really elevate the presence of education and really insert it into every customer touch point on a much bigger scale. And so when I joined that industry, like I said, I meet a lot of customers and one of the early customers I met had this phrase that just stuck with me. She said that she feels that her customers now either want a two second answer or a PhD in something. And I thought that was really interesting because she's right again. We are being retrained to expect two second answers. We want to get the answer, not just a link to where to go to get an answer. Um, but at the same time it's not as, it's not an either or, it's an and. Right. You can elevate the information you make available to your prospects and your customers. You can bring it to different channel. But it doesn't eliminate the need that sometimes there is a more structured training that's needed. Sometimes there are categories of training where you want the customer to be dedicated specifically to training and use a platform for that. Again, to me, it's an. And, and that's why I call it an opportunity. Right? Like it genuinely expands your, the expands the areas of your touch points with the customers, the format you can bring to the customers, the number of times you can engage. And ultimately that actually helps that customer more. Right? Like in the, in the olden days of a year ago, having every customer come to your learning platform to get the answers they need, that doesn't seem right for the customer. Right? Like, that's disruptive. We all knew that, um, we all knew that. We all know that. Again, now we just have technology that enables us to do something about it in a very, very sort of seamless way, very, uh, context relevant way. Uh, which I think is, again, it's a win win.

Speaker A: It is absolutely a win win. And just to support and amplify what you're saying, I look at, I look at the, um, I look at customers very differently today than I did 10 years ago. When I say a customer, I no longer mean an external user of a platform exclusively. I see how enablement teams don't view the work they do as impacting a customer directly. They're more focused on the stakeholder. I see enablement teams within companies now trying to build a scaffold and get their learners, their team to adopt. Because they paid for the platform, they want people to go and they. And. But that, oh my gosh. Yeah. I want to get a quick answer because I'm in the middle of work, I'm trying to do something. I don't really have time to go back and scroll through a bunch of videos and click through scorm files. I just need to know it now. But, you know, I'm building certification programs for really complicated stuff where you could do real harm if you reconfigure something incorrectly. I mean, the server's fried. A cluster was worth millions of dollars is toast. Right? You can literally burn stuff out if you don't do things wrong.

Speaker B: There's also verticals like life sciences that we serve and others where it's like this. You know, there's a real requirement there to be knowledgeable about the product in a certain way. Right. To your point. Certifications help with that. And again, that's why I think it's a, it's an. It expands the opportunity it doesn't in no way shrink it, even though your numbers might look like they're going down based on the visitors to your original platform.

Speaker A: That's right. It's, it's. I like that. It's an opportunity space where now we have to think differently about how we're collecting data, how we're working with stuff, where things are going, how do we distribute? Okay, let's pivot from this. I want to get to the report a little bit when we've talked about the space. So Your report, the seventh edition, 250 leaders you interviewed, was this a validating thesis you already had? Was this validating your thesis or was this changing your whole company roadmap now? In certain ways. Tell me a little bit more. Let's get into, let's get into the report because I'm, I'm, I read this through a couple times and it's really interesting.

Speaker B: Yeah, Um, I think it was both. Right. So again, coming in, um, one of the ways I would get to know the space, which is definitely new to me, is by having conversations with customers and really getting into, by customers, I mean the businesses we serve and really getting into understanding what their business goals are, how the expectations are changing, budgets are changing, top of mind concerns and so on. The report helps make it more quantitative. Right. Helps sort of elevate and help some of the things stand out more than the number of conversations that can have one to one or through the roundtables. But I think the conversations I had directly with the customers, again are those one off examples that I'm sharing here. Like, you know, customers want different formats, like the two second comment. We also talked to our customers who seen dramatic, dramatic decrease, like literally a step change, decrease overnight of the number of learners that come to their platform when ChatGPT came out. So we have gotten enough of those qualitative insights to form a hypothesis for a strategy. And the report really helped validate some of those, maybe add on to those as well. So the qual and quant together really helped us set the strategy for the company.

Speaker A: That's, that's great. Let me, let me go through a few things and then I want to get in, I want to get into the meat of this because I think it's really important and we framed up the discussion really well. Um, okay, so the takeaway top level is the 2026 state of customer learning. And AI report says 99% of leaders are confident their program influences business outcomes. Okay, uh, hold on to that. And 72% of them say that they have the data to prove it. And then let's get back to our visibility problem. Right. It's. Yet education is still. I want to say this contentiously for impact, Rana, but this is meant to be a little catastrophic or apocalyptic. And yet education is still one of the first functions that businesses would consider to cut where there were a layoff. Okay, that does not. That's a. They're in contention with one another. Like, why, if we show and we feel that learning is such an important lever in our business, and I believe this. Yet I've been through this experience personally. I've seen other teams and friends of mine go through layoffs because they're like, uh, oh, we don't need all these people. Let's get rid of the education folks. Both of these things can't be true. So tell me a little bit. Tell me a little bit more about this. Like, um, I don't know where we want to start exactly, but let's talk about that tagline. How. How is it? How do we feel about that? We've got the data, we've got the receipts. Why is. Why do we continue to have this problem? Invisibility.

Speaker B: Yeah. Um, I think there's two things I would say to that. One is, as I mentioned earlier, like, I do feel coming into Thought Industries and meeting a lot of folks who run customer education teams is it oftentimes feels like the best hidden secret, right? Like, it's just never at the top of. It's never the top of the dashboard, like executive team dashboard kind of metrics. Even if the metrics are there, they just never make it to the highest level metrics, um, to the highest level metrics yet. I think there's a second issue here, though, is that, um, this is part of the challenge that we've seen, um, across customer journeys. And this is part of the. The opportunity we see with the new technology is that it feels like more people at each company believe they do customer education than just the customer education team. And so customer education, when people hear the word customer education, they think of a one isolated instance, one platform, one team, one destination. But if you ask product folks, they'll say they do customer education. They have prompts and product. They have guides and product. They have those, you know, onboarding tours in product. They've now have a chat in product, right? To provide education. So they'll say they do customer education. You've got community leaders, right, who run customer communities. That's education. You've got people, you have got teams who run help Centers that's they'll say they do education, they provide the help. That's the help center. And so when we think about customer education, right, Oftentimes it's kind of a, it oftentimes people think okay, it's like it's one team, one platform. But it, but because it happens everywhere, it diminishes the value of the one team, one platform. So again back to well what happens when your product team tries to educate or your community tries to educate and your help center tries to educate. Oh, and by the way there's Academy who is, is the content consistent? Is the content reliable? Is the content the same? Is it up to date? I think we all know the answer is no. And so I think part of this is understanding that we've got to stop treating this uh, in this teams. By the way, it's also, it's on the business and it's on the teams themselves is like stop thinking of it as you are in this corner, you run this platform, your data is, your content is the most accurate, which it is. Um, but start thinking about it as like where does education happen so that you can't. When you can be associated with customer education across the entire customer journey versus be that one to one relationship. Customer education means just another platform. And I think that's why the budgets become at risk because it's just thought of as like it's just another platform. And we've all every year look at our spend. Every company, regardless of the size, we look at our spend and we say ugh, uh, this feels redundant. This other thing could do it. Close enough. Good. Enough. Good. And I think that's why the budgets are at risk because it's just viewed as this like own standalone platform. I think the point that's missed is that it is the richest content, it is the best formatted content. It's the content built by people who are specialized in how to help customers learn. Now it's a question of how does customer education disassociate itself with just being that one platform and become sort of a customer journey. Um, question which will I think then um, help elevate the metrics that the proof points uh, that the team might have and probably will elevate the visibility of what customer education does to a more high level dashboard.

Speaker A: You're inspiring me right now to think and thinking about all kinds of things that I'm experiencing at the moment and let me pull some number from the report and then we'll move forward in our discussion. But this really connects with me personally. One of the things that the report said is that as an example, let's Talk pre sales. 43% of programs are accountable for lead generation. That's a pre sales outcome. That is not a. Uh, let's. I'm getting to siloing, I'm getting to organizational. There's a series of podcasts that I'm, I'm m going to be releasing soon where we're stepping into organizational design. Right. Um, the, the growth of a business and the things that happen. And we're talking very specifically about how customer education should take the lead on the content architecture. The what is what. The customer is everybody. When you build a team that has an enablement person, an enablement person that's over here. It was sales enablement for, uh, partner enablement. Whatever. You have this disconnected and disharmonious fabric of learning that's happening where everybody's responsible for one internal customer. And then I have everybody. I have everybody. And what pains me a lot of the times is to see, okay, I'll have somebody that's talking about Legion, like, hey, can we do a training for. Yes. Can. Can. Can somebody that's just curious log into my academy?

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: You know, can. Can you. All of these things we. I will. This, uh, is my hill to die on that. I think what we've discovered in customer education transcends everything. It should be the tip of the spear and the fabric of our learning and not. And then we can pollute the thing, the whole space with, okay, no, it's enablement. Oh, no, it's L and D. No, no, it's, uh, a scale. Digital success or no, they're all derivative. It's education that drives it all. Everything else is part of it. So we start from the top, distribute, right?

Speaker B: Yep. Yeah, absolutely. And we have the proof points on that. We absolutely do. Where again, if your customer, not customers, your prospect wants to look up who's the best tool for whatever they're trying to do. And the answer that's fed or that's used in that Response through again, ChatGPT called Gemini is fed from the rich content of learning, of education. Just imagine how much richer that answer is, how much more valuable that answer is. And we've actually, through deploying our omnichannel learning, we have the proof point, we have the case studies where not only do we drive more traffic to your academy, so it's not a, uh, again, it's not a zero sum game, but it's more qualified traffic because they've got the Better answer. So I agree with you. I think education should be the tip of the spear because when you're exploring who you want to partner with approaches, you should be as informed as you continue to be throughout the journey. Just, again, it just has to be contextual when you're a prospect versus when you already been using the product. But I think the other challenge to your point is that, you know, why is a lot of content gated? Why does it require login? Um, it goes back to, you kind of get what you measure. And I think oftentimes the customer education teams, in an attempt to show their value and attempt to survive, an attempt to keep the budget, they put the metrics in place that almost force them to think isolated versus expand. So the visitor account, the logins, the completions, some people charge for education, that's a revenue drive. And, uh, that what the team feels like, it's what keeps them alive. Right. So again, it's back to being put into a corner to improve your own existence forces a behavior that may be more closed off than available and then making yourself more available. And I've been doing customer roadshows. I've done London, Dallas, I've got New York and Boston, Chicago coming up next week and been engaging, uh, with customers where, when I talk about omnichannel, when I talk about AO. So again, ChatGPT, co op visibility, um, I get mixed reactions. I get a reaction of, this is exactly what we need. We want to be present, we want information about us to be accurate. And I get a reaction. It's like, wait, what, Wait a second, that's my gated content. And for the record, we don't put out your gated content. You have all the permissions. Of course, we don't do something that overrides your governance today. But it actually then prompts a, uh, dialogue. I was like, well, why is it gated? Does it all have to be gated? Is there some of it that could actually help you drive more visibility engagement throughout the customer journey by making something more visible and then keeping something for gated for where again, it needs to be more structured. Like, it actually opens up that dialogue and that gets the different thinking going of, like, how to evolve in this, in this world. So it's, again, it's an interesting transformation time, right, for everyone. Again, back to customer behavior is changing. It's forcing a transformation. Um, how can I feel like customer education teams have this very unique opportunity to really truly expand and step up to the challenge, um, in a much bigger way. But it does require rethink of what does success look like, how to think about the full customer journey. Um, which again I think to me presents an opportunity.

Speaker A: Yeah, I agree from you. Um, I'm going to skip forward and we always have a script here to go with all of our notes. And one of the things that this time, this. There's a couple of points here. One of them is we're. We have a discoverability issue and, and I wanted to get into that. Okay. LMS platforms look and, and go with a couple different models. Monthly active users is one. Then you have uh. And then when you have like paid seats, which is. This is a leg. A legacy approach for a lot of platforms where, oh well, you, you can have a hundred people in or 200 people in. Good lord. Okay. This is totally counter to everything I'm trying to do. And in fact in previous incarnations of my career, I've gotten into very, very sticky situations with finance because I have to come back and say, oh well, I've been really successful and I've had 2x, the 3x 4x people coming to our platform. Oh my God. Well, we can't afford this and we can't spend more money on this. Like, okay, uh, look for me, butts and seats aren't.

Speaker B: Are.

Speaker A: Uh, that's a vanity metric to me. How long somebody engaged with a piece of content and did they complete it? I uh, I couldn't care any less because I've always looked at things from the lens of success and outcomes. Did you get your answer? Yeah. Did you figure that out? Great. You want to learn more? Yes. Do you want to get certified? These are. Our attention is all over the place. So one of the issues is that discoverability paradox, you know that okay. We're. Our programs are. 43% of our programs are accountable for lead gen. Now we're gated. Oh, well, like I've had this recently. This person wants this doesn't. Doesn't work for a company. They're trying to learn. One of my favorite stories ever was there was this young person in college. I was at gainsight at the time. They reached out to me, found me and asked me this, sent me this really nice email and it was, hey, Mr. Darrington, you know I'm blah, blah, blah. I'm going to this university and I really want to learn this because I want to get a job in this field. Can I get access to your academy? Why should I have had to answer that question? He found us. He knew where to go. He put that extra energy into reaching out to someone to get access. And I said, here's a key, and you know what? Here's a workspace to plan and you can come talk to me if you get in any trouble. And the rest of my team and leadership, like, what? Why are we doing that? Well, this, this kid ended up getting a great job working customer success. We helped. And not only that, came in with confidence and understanding of the platform that they wanted. Btu, like that is transformational. Right. And it's, it's, it is. And again, I'm, um, just distracted a little bit from what we were talking about. I'm more into the visibility, more into the fact that, that we are looking at education as a fabric and we can't silo and we can't niche down and we can't have people that aren't all part of the same thing. We have to have a source and a font of information that's good in all kinds of ways. Right. Um, one of them is search, uh, discovery, stronger search. 46% of people that responded to your, um, survey said, uh, well, I want to get the right learning to the right customer. And then that's even ahead of AI guidance.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Um, which was 30%. There's all these stats here. And again, go, folks, go. Read this report. It's really interesting. Uh, it's well done too. I enjoyed reading it. There's a lot of stuff into here that we're not just going, hey, go into articulate, create a course, throw a bunch of this stuff in it, make some AI slop, put it out. Oh, man, this isn't the way we're doing it. We are active, important person or function of a team. Right? Um, yeah. Can you go into that a little bit more?

Speaker B: Yeah. And to that point, again, nobody says we should reduce the quality. Right? Like, I think it's actually the opposite. I think the quality of that education, the quality of the content gets reduced when you do put AI interface or a chat interface on top of incorrect content. And in fact, that is also a problem out there. It's not just visibility, it's the accuracy problem. Right. Again, when you keep content gated and you bring customers to the content that you wrote, it might be the most accurate now, maybe out of date, because development now happens much faster, but it is the most accurate. But now when you have, um, agents or chat interfaces running on top of content that isn't utilized, not the content that's in the academy, you also don't know the accuracy of it. And we've seen that like your, your, um, AO answers, your ChatGPT answers and so on, they're not always accurate. And it's not because the algorithm is wrong, it's because the sources are incomplete. And so again, um, there is this sort of a little bit of a fear that you are going to dilute yourself if you make your education available or the quality will go down. I actually think it's the opposite. Right. Again, let's go back to your, uh, in product chat. Where does it get its content from? It's only as good as its content. And I bet you it doesn't come from, from your academy. Right? Let's go into your community. Let's go into your help center. Again, those are all siloed sources, probably not of the most accurate content. So again, back to you. As educational leaders or an education team can actually bring the better quality of content and make that available across the customer touch points. That's an opportunity. So I think visibility and accuracy are so important. Um, and again, create those new opportunities. And again, we've had customers who had to deal with the accuracy problem and like I said, we've built our solution for Omnichannel ao, for example, to solve for that, to solve for visibility and to solve for the accuracy. And we've seen real results from it. And that again, what helps us, what earns us the right to keep, to keep preaching about it, keep talking about it is that. Let's think about this, um, let's think about these differently.

Speaker A: Yeah, I, I want to dive into this a little bit deeper because you're talking about omnichannel learning. I get that there you, you've brought up. And it's kind of new to me because I actually hadn't thought of it before intentionally. Aeo, when you say that, okay, answer engine optimization. I want to learn a little bit more about that because. And I'll, uh, I'll frame this with going back to the Atlassian experience. One of the things that we discovered is that, okay, people are using. We could see the evidence. People are using ChatGPT, Claude, whatever, and, or other people have created content and it's out there. That is. And you talked about some fear like the pro clutch of oh my God, somebody else created this. It's not me. It's not, uh, officially brandoned, branded canonical. It's not ours. Okay, we lost control. Control that already.

Speaker B: Exactly. That is no longer our choice.

Speaker A: No, but what is it? Can you tell me a little bit more about. Because I'm thinking now, hey, okay, I'm thinking about LLMs, I'm thinking about models. I'm thinking I really want to take a big ball of stuff and pare it down and then curate that into a snapshot. And pardon me, because I'm thinking in, I'm thinking about my vast product that I'm training people on. And one of the things about it is that we're taking an entire corporation's data, uh, and making it discoverable and making it uh, and secure and making basically helping organize everything for a business where we normally have it all in servers all over the place, but now you can find it and that discoverability opens up. Um, I mean there's governance and stuff on top of that. I won't deprecate the importance of that, but I'm, I don't see this for education as much because what I'm trying to do is look at all the stuff that I learned and some of it's in Confluence and some of it's over here and someone's in Google and it's all over the place.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: We've got the capabilities to bring that, cure it, ship, curate it, shepherd it. And my job I look at as I'm the filter, I want to build a model which is effectively in my learning platform, in the core. That's system of record, right? That's where we put everything. But now I unlock it. How do I get that out to the world? Can you tell me more about the directions you're going to make that discoverability and to make things more accessible in an omnichannel format?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And as you just said, the train of controlling where customers go to search for about you and get the answers, not just the links that left the station. Right. Like, and like I said, it's already got the station to a point. That customer behavior has changed, our expectations have changed, we expect an answer first and then we can choose to go and learn more. So in that world, if that's the case, and by the way, that's not just because of uh, you know, we have ChatGPT now that we go to and so on. That is now behavioral expectation whether I'm in product or elsewhere. Right. Like that conversational engagement that results in an answer first and then more information if I'm interested, that's now becoming the expectation across the touch points. So our job, and that's what we're focused on is how do we make that um, available for you as a business that we that serves the customers by leveraging the richest content that is out there, which is Education content, Right? Like, how do we make your Academy accessible to the Academy? Content accessible across every touchpoint. And by the way, how do we make it, um, visible across the touchpoint? The content is already rich. It's rich, it's accurate. We help it structure in a way that serves itself better for answer engines. Um, but it always goes back to it's the best source of content. It's the best source of content to deliver to the customer. So if we can all sort of align on the idea that yes, originally Academy was the source of content and the destination. Right? And over time we've moved to where it still could be the source of content. Now, uh, we have many destinations, but by the way, we're not even done yet. We're on the path where why does it have to be the only source of content? Why can't we use other sources of content to make the content the most rich possible and then distribute it across the touchpoints? That's where we're going to be going. But again, on that journey, the part where Academy is the source's destination is just, uh, such an unrealistic expectation. That's just not the case. So whether you like it or not or agree with it or not, it's just not the case anymore. So why not at least look for ways to embrace that as the change that happened and then now bring it to again to at least to the different destinations or touch points. While we're also working with our customers to build a layer we can help ingest content not just from Academy, but from elsewhere to, um, then deliver in that omnichannel fashion.

Speaker A: I dig this so much. I mean, you're flipping the script a bit about how education has always been done. Um, the core idea here, we're getting into this build once, distribute many territory. Um, there's some keywords in there that I like to, to caution people against, you know, like personalization, bespoke things like that. The core is, look, I'm a customer. I'm trying to find something. I'm going to go into Claude and ask questions and I want to learn wherever I want. That's it. That's a demand. Now, now let's play the, um, let's role play a bit and oh, well, now I've got this program and my company's, I'm the CEO and I'm paying a lot for this education team and I paid even more for this LMS and, and now nobody. And this is, um, I'll cite my good friend Donna Weber, who used the Reverse field of Dreams quote. If you build it, they won't come. Since I built a wall, how why is anybody gonna stand outside the wall? I have to pay to get in. No, we're in a post Google world where world's getting rocked. I mean, I have my own fears and the things that we need to do in AI right now, um, and I get into some heated and emotional and upsetting arguments about is this stuff going to kill us or is it going to make us better? Well, you know what? For me, I see how as a customer education person and there's some other people, there's a podcast episode. Well, this whole year has been this journey and talking about how people are not just talking about AI, but they're doing stuff and they're leveraging their platforms in new and unique ways. Uh, one of them is person I talked to earlier this year was made this whole swarm of agents that built content and put in the right place and distributed it. Another experience I had last year when you're talking Omnichannel, um, one of my team members who now just landed a job at OpenAI. I'm so, so proud of this guy. Um, he's on my team and he built content and he put it on YouTube and it outperformed anything we could see. Whereas. And that was stopped, right? Because it's like, well, this is scary. Why? You have a million views on a, um, on a video on, on YouTube. Are you. And people are learning from that. That's an opportunity. Now we're coming in more. What I want to see from what I'm hearing from you about your platform, is that I want a platform that I can build upon that gives me the ability to not so much personalize, but allow that dream journey of someone. They, they get kind of like marketing content, but it's marketing education content. And like, that was really interesting. And now I'm going, I, uh, want to learn more. And you might take a micro course and get a badge and I can show off that badge to my boss or whoever and then I want to get certified. And. But this happens in this disconnected, disjointed thing. And a lot of the times I get people saying, well, no, just we gotta do old school. We gotta do the class and go to the class and get this right. It's not working like that. So I'm really appreciating your vision where it's.

Speaker B: Yeah. And it's interesting you said something where we're flipping the script on customer education. I actually think of it slightly different I actually think of it as we're actually going back to the original job to be done. And again, this is where my product codes come in. Uh, what is the business here to do? What is any business that we struck here to do? They want to grow through the success of their customers. That's what they are here to do. What is the every end customer trying to do? They're trying to get the value, realize the value from the product or services they've purchased. Those are the jobs to be done of the business and the end customer. We somehow decided in the past that, uh, the way to solve it is to siphon traffic to a destination where the best content will live and the only destination where customers can come to learn in order to use the product. Uh, has it always been, should it always been the answer? Probably not. But today we have the technology that maybe enables us to solve for the problem faster. So that's kind of how I think about our strategy, how we think about customer education. It's not about starting with the platform or, uh, sort of starting from one place and saying, how do we go to these other places? It's actually starting from customer job to be done, if that's the job to be done. And, um, let's say whether we are a platform provider or not, regardless where we started from, if I just have a blank page and a customer job to be done, how would I draw a solution? And when you draw the solution, when I drew the solution, the answer isn't kill the platform. That's not the point. There's room for it. It's just an. And it's a part of a bigger job to be done that now can be solved by pulling in different sources, distributing content in different formats, touch points. Um, and so that's kind of the journey we're on.

Speaker A: That is amazing. I like how, I like how you frame that because, hey, we, we have a lot to do. We have, we, we have to help customers get to the information they need. We lose sight of this as we start focusing on, uh, product releases. And I've got to make sales numbers and stuff like that. But to get to all of that, we have to have a substrate of learning. And now if we're able to, you know, delegate that out, get it to a different place, we. And going back to some of the other things, we talk about confidence. We know, we know 99% of your respondents are confident of that this approach works. And we, and what you said, uh, um, I'm thinking ahead to, I'm going to Attend Devlin this year. And, uh, what I'm doing, what I've been really trying to do, is find a home for all of us to. To go m. Many homes. But where do we get together and where do we learn from each other? And the. The. The point of what I'm saying here is that the message that I want to share that we have nurtured and developed over the years is that customer education is a. Is like a fabric, right? It. It's all over your company. It's the core of your company, uh, for the learning piece. And we have the data to prove that because by merit of working in customer education, we've worked with tools like Thought Industries, Platform, and others where they unlock the things that we've never seen before. That is the engagement data. The. This is hard stuff. Right? It's so hard because I'll even cite some stuff from. From, um, from report. Okay. A lot of people, 39% of respondents say they cited a lack of analytics expertise. Okay, wait, our bandwidth. What does that mean? Well, it means we. We've got the data and we're not looking at it. Or, you know, we have data silo, or now we're getting into leadership. Um, customer education is not a leadership priority. I see that all the time. Um, or, you know, 34% cited, learning happens outside an LMS. We can't track it. No, we're at a point now where if we. We choose wisely about the tooling we put together, our. We in customer education have taken a very outcome, space, data, informed perspective on learning. It's really rooted in customer success. Can you get to the outcome? Did they get to their desired outcome? The customer, whoever that customer is, that customer could be a new team member that's just onboarded. That customer could be a partner who needs to go out and engage with a, uh, with my customer by proxy. And I have to bless them. So I have another training thing there for them and them for the customer. So there's all these things. What we're ultimately saying is that out of, you know, this whole cohort, we're able. We're able to do the things that L and D really couldn't do ever. And higher education would be a dream for, because you can't track somebody over a decade very easily. We can show the business. We do the math. The calculus, as I always say, is the area under the curve is learning. That area under the curve is data points that are spread out all over the place. So we're building, um, a core that we can Distribute out. We can bring everything together. We can take matrix information, we can analyze it and we can show look a customer. It's not just that ah, a customer went to learn something and got assert they actually transformed their business. That's what we're wanting. But yet we have things like oh well, we don't have budget or enough people to do this. And a lot of times leadership just puts a wall up for us that, I mean, I'm out there today. Um, I was on YouTube last night putting videos that we did from webinars and making sure to connect the dots and then bringing that back into my learning platform and making sure that's all organized in a new track. And I'm on LinkedIn say hey, we're going to do this thing or my dream is to get on TikTok and YouTube shorts and stuff with little or you know, be out on Reddit. I don't know. We've got to be anywhere and everywhere leading people back to understand how this is together. But we can do it. We got the receipts.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And I think to, to that point I don't want the customer education leaders to feel like it's the burden is on them. The burden is on us as providers to enable that. Right. Again, back to the Omnichannel example. Well, the burden's on them to be open to utilizing all the great new capabilities. But there's a burden on us as of a part providers to say, we as providers of learning platform have always built the learning platform and now we need to build something different or evolve how we think about it. And so again, when we launched our Omnichannel ao, it was all on us, right? Our customers just had to, our businesses just had to literally flip the switch, uh, either whether you want to use it or not. It's that simple. Like, so I don't want the customer education leaders to listen to this. And you know, we're already living in a time where things change so fast and you will every day, no matter how close you are to the news and everything, that's a new technology. You always feel out of date. Like always, it's just moving so fast. So I don't want your listeners to also take away as like, oh my gosh, this is a mountain to climb and I don't even know where to get started. It's actually about us, the providers. Right? Like the providers to evolve and help drive the evolution of customer education with the functionality that actually again, it amplifies the work they've already done. Um, and then on the other end is like it's up to customer education leaders to just really be open and open with us on feedback on what's working and who is interested in trying. And we've got customers who are building new functionality with us. They are build with partners. Let's work together to evolve this um, uh, to evolve customer education, but to really go and solve this bigger problem.

Speaker A: Yeah, I was, I'm interested in as. As we've been re engaging and I'm, I'm um, seeing your, your new roadmap and the things. I'm extremely interested in learning more about what you're doing behind the scenes and those build with partners. I could go on for hours about this Rana, but we might have to

Speaker B: do a uh, part two of our episode.

Speaker A: Well, that's on the table. You know, I'm, I'm, I'm hoping to see you in person at some events upcoming and we have an open space where I'd really have an invitation for you to bring one of your or multiple of your customers to show us. I'm um, originally from Missouri. You know, it's a show me state and I live by that. I want to see more about how we can build this tapestry together. You know, things that I'm really excited about and you don't have to answer this is. But okay, in the back end are we doing things like you're talking about aeo so we're making things discoverable or um, how does that all work and what do we need to do to. Now we're in new territory. Um, can we get an MCP server which I'm starting to see. So now I can use Claude internally, but I'd love to see that externally in some degree where, oh, Claude can actually ping my server and pull some stuff and then build a really good thing, but linking back to the content that's warehoused on my platform. All roads lead to Rome coming back, but it's out free. And then we're changing the concept of the value of the platform and where it fits into the uh, entire corporations that we're working on and that changes everything.

Speaker B: Absolutely. And just to that point, just maybe last point for me for maybe this part of the episode and we can do another part too. But my point is you're right in what you just called out that making this accessible and easier to access for the customers is important, but making the lives of those who administer education is also, is just as important. So I, uh, it's a really good point and I just want to highlight on that, but that's, that also is part of the roadmap. What we've launched already with our card launches and so on is that, um, it's, um, we have to both take care of the provider and how do we help them scale because the budgets aren't growing, um, but the expectations are. And at the same time, how we also use the technology to help their, their customers. So it's, it's definitely keeping both in mind. And that's why I started by saying we have businesses that are customers and their end customers as customers, and we sort of try to build for both.

Speaker A: Absolutely. We know with, with that thought in mind, we're. We're right at about the time we normally kind of wrap up, I will extend that formal information, formal invitation again for us to. We're going to talk more. And in fact, some of the things I like to do as we're walking out the door here is. Let's go back to the report, folks. We'll provide a link, um, to this as well. The report is something you want to watch. We as industry practitioners should always keep on top of this and join in on this conversation. Go reach out to Thought Industries, look at what they've got. Um, again, 99% of leaders believe education moves business outcomes. The gaps underneath that, that's where now we're bringing conversational intelligence and we're bringing, um, you know, the agentic stuff the AEO work in into play. There's a lot going on here, and I, and I have confidence that you're moving now in the right direction to keep pace with this immense transformation that we have with AI. Ah, I even stopped talking about AI. It's. These are tools, right? This is nothing different than connectors and integrations and zaps and all that kind of stuff that we had even a decade ago. Now we're layering on top of it real human engagement with words and in the moment and responses that come quickly or not. Right.

Speaker B: Y. Um, let's set a goal. Let's say that instead of having 99% of education leaders confident that program influences business outcomes, let's make it 99% of CEOs, um, are confident that, uh, their education drives business outcomes. Let's elevate, um, that impact.

Speaker A: Absolutely. Okay. Well, with that, are there any other things that you'd like to leave the audience with and download the report, take a look at it.

Speaker B: Download the report, Take a look at all of the functionality we've been building, because we're really marching in this Direction, as we talked about. And reach out, reach out with feedback. Reach out what you want to try, reach out. If you want to build with us like we are very much on the path of, let's solve this together.

Speaker A: Wonderful. Okay, thank you so much, Arona. Let's take the outro now. It's okay. This was a great conversation. I really appreciate the time spent today. I feel not only validated, but optimistic. Um, I'm looking forward to learning more. So thanks again for being on today. And now to our audience. You want to learn more, Remember we have our podcast website at Customered Education. Just easy to find, don't have to remember it, you know it. You, uh, can find all the stuff there. We'll put links and other information out so that you can reach out to thought industries and learn more. Also, um, we're part of the, the broader customer education community. You can connect with, learn from, share your ideas with your peers and other leaders who are out there. Find us on LinkedIn. That's mainly our home. Thanks to Ellen Cotta once again for our amazing theme music. If you need some jingles and intros and outros and all that kind of sound bed music for your podcast, that's a guy I would go to. And we've really liked working with them. Finally, if this helps you out, please help us out by telling a friend. Find the others, get connected. We're finding more and more places and again I mentioned I'm going to be a dev learn this year. I want to reach out and connect to you. If you hear this, reach out to me. If you want to talk, um, tell somebody about the show because this is about you and about folks like Arana and others. And we're here to learn together. So to our audience, get out there, educate, experiment, and find new people. Thanks, everybody.