The emerging role of Generative AI in learning & development
Technology News | 2024-03-22
5 minute read
Introduction
In today's increasingly unpredictable and rapidly changing business environment organizations need the capability to rapidly upskill and reskill their workforces to take advantage of emerging technology and the latest business practices to maintaining their competitiveness.
As in so many other fields AI (Artificial Intelligence) and in particular Generative AI is also transforming learning and development enabling organizations to deliver more personalized, adaptive and effective learning and development programs, that can cater to the unique needs and learning styles of individual employees.
Let us look at a few of the emerging ways AI and Generative AI will transform learning and development in the next few years.
1. Personalized Learning Paths
AI can be used to analyze individual employee learning and development needs based on factors such as personal performance, Job role, skills, career aspirations and preferred learning style to develop personalized learning and development paths.
This ensures that employees receive training content that is aligned with their specific needs and helps them acquire rapidly and effectively the skills necessary for their role and enables organizations to support them in the learning and development needed to help achieve their personal career aspirations.
This not only help organizations achieve their learning and development goals but also helps them increase employee retention and satisfaction by supporting employee career aspirations.
More on Personalized Learning Paths:
2. Adaptive Learning Platforms
AI powered adaptive learning platforms help organisations optimizes learning efficiency and effectiveness by analyzing individual employees progress during training and then dynamically adjusts the content and pace of the training based on their progress and retention.
This approach optimizes learning efficiency by focusing individuals training on areas where training is most needed by that individual. Adaptive learning platforms learn the style of training that is most effective for training an individual and incorporates this into future training programs.
More on Adaptive Learning Platforms:
3. Intelligent Recommendation and Tutoring Systems
Generative AI powered intelligent tutoring systems provides employees with real-time feedback and guidance at the point of need to help them with learning and development.
By providing students with immediate feedback, answering students’ questions, and guiding them through the learning process, learning outcomes can be improved and sections of training programs that require improvement can easily be identified.
Training retention is a significant issue for organizations. After training, training retention levels quickly decline if the training is not regularly used. Over time this decline degrades the ability of individuals to perform the trained tasks accurately, efficiently and safely. Intelligent tutoring systems can help address this issue, by providing individual employee micro reinforcement training and support at the point of need helping to address training retention decline.
Emerging technology such as XR headsets and glasses are making it easier for organizations to deliver training and support at the point of need.
More on Intelligent Recommendation and Tutoring Systems:
4. Summarization Systems
With declining attention spans and a strong preference by employees for shorter forms of publishing together with reduced retention of long form content it has become increasingly important to provide content in an optimum format for consumption.
Generative AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) is increasingly being used to analyze, summarize, condense and extract key concepts from training content such as articles, documents, presentations and videos so they will be more effectively consumed, used and the content is better retained by employees for longer.
Generative AI and NLP are also powerful tools in ingesting, sorting, and categorizing content so it can be accessed and used more effectively.
This approach can also be applied to transforming translated content such as Japanese to English to optimize it for international markets and audiences.
More on AI powered Summarization Systems:
5. Insights from AI enhanced learning and development
Today using AI is enabling us to gain far deep insights into individual employee performance by processing and analyzing far more datapoints from far more sources to identify training and development needs.
AI can also provide deep insights into the effectiveness of training programs and make recommendations on improvements, increasing both the effectiveness and efficiency of training and development.
Conclusion
The emerging use of AI, particularly Generative AI, in learning and development will transform the delivery of learning and development and the insights.
It will help organizations upskill and reskill their workforce more quickly and effectively to help them stay competitive, in rapidly changing and often unpredictable markets.
AI will make learning and development more personal and able to meet the needs of individual employees more effectively.
It will also help organizations more easily support the career aspirations of their employees, and will be an increasingly key factor in helping to attract and retain the talent enterprises need today.
Recommendations
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Now is the time to look at how the emerging use of AI and Generative AI in learning and development could benefit your organization
- Look at how you could use Generative AI powered learning and development tools to offer Personalized Learning Paths to better meet the needs and aspirations of employees and to help attract and retain talent.
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Look at how AI and Generative AI can be combined with XR technology and digital twin technology to expand the capabilities of your employees.
- Look at how AI and Generative AI can help address training retention issues and maintain post training capabilities.
Nick Cowell
Principal Consultant/ Technology Strategy Unit, Fujitsu
Nick is a technologist with extensive experience in hardware, software and service development, having previously worked for leading technology providers across the USA, Europe and Oceania.
