What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
From Courses To Enablement: Reinventing Corporate Learning With AI
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
What if your best coach was available at any moment you needed help on the job? We sit down with industry analyst Josh Bersin to unpack how generative AI is replacing one-size-fits-all courses with real-time, conversational enablement that helps people perform, learn, and grow in the flow of work. Instead of chasing completion rates, teams can tap living knowledge: the latest field fixes, sales plays that actually worked, leadership tips rooted in company context, and multilingual guidance that meets employees where they are.
Josh traces the arc from early e‑learning to today’s AI agents, explaining why traditional LMS platforms will narrow to compliance while dynamic systems handle the real learning—search, chat, coaching, and updates that keep pace with change. We dig into vivid examples: a pharma giant capturing scientists’ expertise so anyone can query complex topics; Rolls‑Royce onboarding engineers to decades of proprietary methods in weeks, not years; and an airline using AI to share expert revenue strategies as they’re invented. The common thread is tacit knowledge turned into usable answers, with proactive nudges that surface what matters before you even ask.
We also spotlight the human side. L&D pros don’t disappear—they shift from course production to orchestration: curating sources, building guardrails, and designing prompts, policies, and taxonomies that make AI accurate and safe. Employees become superworkers as they learn by doing, iterating with systems that remember context and improve with feedback. If you’re wondering where to begin, we offer practical first steps, from piloting critical workflows to defining metrics that matter—time to competency, resolution speed, win rates, and sentiment about usefulness.
Ready to rethink training as enablement and put knowledge to work? Press play, subscribe for more conversations like this, and share the one process you’d reinvent with AI. Your idea might help someone level up tomorrow.
Interviews with Tech Leaders and insights on the latest emerging technology trends.
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Corporate learning and what it means for the workforce of tomorrow with one of the most influential voices in HR and learning. Josh Furs and Josh, how are you?
SPEAKER_01:Great, Evan. Thank you for inviting me. I'm looking forward to talking about these constantly changing topics.
SPEAKER_00:Well, thanks for being here. And uh one of your million followers on LinkedIn, so delighted to make the connection. Before we dive into AI, maybe introduce yourself. How do you describe your body of work these days?
SPEAKER_01:I consider myself to be an industry analyst. I've been studying um human resources and HR technology and learning and recruiting and all those leadership and all that stuff for about almost 30 years now. And then 15 or 20 years before that, I worked in tech. So I've I've uh sort of been on both sides of the world.
SPEAKER_00:Incredible. And what inspired you to focus your latest research on corporate learning specifically?
SPEAKER_01:Well, learning, you know, I've been doing corporate learning since the beginning of e-learning. So I was involved in the original transformation of classroom training to the web, and then all of the things that happened since then. And in some ways, AI is as big as all of that stuff added up because we're moving to a whole new paradigm. And um, you know, if you look at the growth of ChatGPT from zero to 800 million users in about two and a half years, corporate training has never even gone within an order of mag, maybe less than two orders of magnitude of that in all of the work we've done trying to build training systems, online learning systems, video. So I see AI as a really transformational way for employees, managers, other people to learn about work, to improve their skills, to enable them to do a better job, to improve their productivity in a totally different paradigm than we've had in the past. So, you know, I'll let's talk more about that. But it's a paradigm shift, and it's going to change the nature of this$400 billion part of business in a huge way, and it's just beginning.
SPEAKER_00:Indeed. Now we've seen some reporting that many gen AI projects are failing. This MIT reports that 95% of generative AI projects are failing. But learning and development is one of the few areas I think you'd agree where AI is working. What's that disconnect?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I don't think AI is failing. I think it's more a matter that it's new, and so we haven't really figured out how to take advantage of it in an optimum way yet. In the case of training, the traditional paradigm of training is the uh pedagogical uh instructor-led model where you have an expert or a subject matter expert in a company or a manager or somebody who says, I'm going to teach you something, I'll teach you what I know. And they put together a course or a you know an instructional program that might go through a few hours or a few days or a few weeks, and it'll have uh videos and things you read and assessments you do and simulations and tests and so forth. It's very much like the classroom instructional model. And while that's uh useful sometimes, 80 to 90 percent of the time at work, you just want to get somebody to help you. You want to learn how to solve a problem, you want to learn how to fix something, you want to learn how to improve your performance, uh, you do a better job on something that didn't work out, um, and then advance your skills through and sort of more of a um conversational approach. If you think about, you know, most employees they might get trained initially in a job, but while they're doing it and they're learning about things that they could do better, or the situation changes around them, or the technology changes, they want to get continuous help. And so the paradigm of ChatGPT or AI, where you can ask a question and use your own human curiosity to learn, is a hundred times more useful at work than sitting through a course. Um, it's almost a joke if you think about how much time people waste going through courses. And then, of course, on the on the HR side, now all the instructional designers are trying to measure the return on investment, the completion rate, they give you tests, and what they're trying to do is to assure themselves that all the work they put into this paid off. But you know, some of it does and some of it doesn't, because each employee um comes to their job with a different level of expertise already, a different level of skills that they're building on top of. So, and we can't personalize that as an instructor when we're trying to do one to many. Whereas AI literally generates the content as you need it. So, you know, if I'm an expert on sales and I just ran into a situation I've never seen before with a competitor, I don't want to go through sales training. I just want to ask, you know, I want to ask the system has anybody else dealt with this particular competitor? What worked last time somebody did it? Uh, is there something I need to know? Um, you know, I'm running into this particular objection. What do you recommend I do? AI can actually generate all those answers in real time and in any language. So I don't have to, you know, if I'm in France or Germany or you know, South America, I don't have to go find somebody to translate the content into my language, which is another huge expense for AHR. So this is a completely different paradigm. And I the way we've done a lot of work on this, the way we think about it is this is more enablement of your job, enablement of your capabilities, enablement of your performance, enablement of your skills, not sort of injecting learning into you in a more traditional paradigm. So, I mean, uh, you know, the funny thing about it is LD departments are just barely beginning to see this, and they're worried because it affects their jobs and their traditional model. Now, you know, I think I've met a lot of L and D people over the years, and most of them are gonna pivot and learn how to do new things. The other thing, Evan, just while I'm just kind of riffing here, there's another part of this that's that's gonna get changed, and that is the process we use to train people is basically a batch process. So we'll say, okay, you know, here's a you know something new that just happened. Let's interview everybody, figure out what happened, what the implications are in the company, and then we'll build this course and then we'll launch it. So that's a that's a sort of a step-by-step um periodic process called performance consulting, needs analysis, instructional design, and then um you know, launch and delivery of content. That can be done dynamically. So I know I know vendors now that have AI systems that will email a or they will call you on the phone or email you and say, Hey, do you have anything to add? Have you learned anything about such and such this week, or if you had any customer experiences or product experiences or internal experiences you'd like to share? Because I'm just checking on this topic because we're underperforming in this particular area. Do you have anything to contribute? And now a subject matter expert or a worker can say, hey, yeah, I I've actually been running into this, and here's what I did, and I, you know, I it it helped me. And they can collect this information from hundreds of people in like in an hour, assimilate it, and generate content as a result in almost real time. And I think it will go real time fairly soon, where these chatbots will be talking to these chatbots and they'll be responding to you in real time. So the the process of needs analysis or instructional design is going to radically change too. Um, and then the experience of the employee, you know, consuming this content or learning something might just be a conversation or a chat, or eventually these AI systems are going to be able to tap you on the shoulder and say, hey, you know, I noticed that in this area of your work you're underperforming compared to your peers. I got some tips for you that might make you a little more effective. So, you know, I can see a year or two from now, these digital teaching tools or whatever we call them, enablement tools are gonna be very, very powerful. And then this training department that has, you know, 500 people in it is gonna be gone. They're gonna be doing different things. So um this is a huge part of business. This is three, four, this is$400 billion of spending on learning management systems, search engines, assessment tools, content companies, trainers, um, you know, third-party content. It's it's this big ecosystem of training and learning um providers that support different parts of businesses. Some of it's regulated, by the way, some of it's compliance oriented, so you still have to get certified, but that's a very small percentage. That might be 10 or 15 percent. A lot of it's day-to-day stuff. So um just in that one area of HR and business, the return on investment is going to be just huge. And we're already seeing it. We we have clients right now because we have a platform of our own for HR professional development. It's an AI-driven system, and it has 750 um courses in it, but you don't even need to take any courses, you can just go in and ask it questions and it'll just help you.
SPEAKER_00:So wow. Um can rest as as probably you are. So are traditional learning management systems, the vendors, becoming obsolete, or can they evolve into this new model?
SPEAKER_01:There are, well, you know, in my history as an analyst, there have probably been a hundred companies that have built learning management systems. They've all combined and merged, and a couple have gone public, but there's very few investors poured money into that space in the early 2000s. Now nobody wants to invest in anymore. Now they're investing in dynamic content systems. Um, and those systems are there, and they're running compliance programs, and they're running customer training, and they're running academies and corporate universities now. So they're not going to disappear overnight. But this new uh format is gonna niche away and cut into it. And then some of the more compliance, you know, in pharmaceuticals and financial services and uh healthcare, there's areas where it's compliance mandatory training. You know, when I worked at Deloitte, you know, every year you had to take anti-money laundering and things. So that stuff will be around for a long time. But those systems are gonna get shrunk down to be, you know, sort of the bare minimum compliance platforms, and then all the rest of the real learning is gonna be dynamic. Um and um and it's really not learning anymore. I mean, I think we still call it learning, but it's it's and it's not really knowledge management, it's really learning, knowledge management and working combined. And the best word we've been able to think of is it's really enablement, it's productivity support. Um, you know, when I want to provide a when I'm a you know, maybe offering a contract to a client or uh, you know, a new proposal with a new price, and I want help and the system helps me, I don't know that that's really training. I I would call it more enablement. And there are enablement teams. See, in most companies, because the learning function is so slow, there's enablement teams that don't even talk to the learning function. So that the learning group kind of builds periodic courses and stuff, and then there's all these enablement teams that help people do their jobs. That all gets kind of combined together now, and then the um centralized L and D group becomes much more decentralized. And um, and then the other thing that's interesting is the maintenance of content. So let's suppose you did build a course or you did build a training program or a safety program, and then you know, six months later, well, we got to tweak it because this thing changed and that changed. Um, that can be done dynamically too, because um you could we we do this in our Galileo platform. When we load a new piece of research or a new program, the system knows to update the old one with the new one. That's a big project in a big company to do it manually. So that that that's another area of efficiency that comes out of this whole infrastructure.
SPEAKER_00:Amazing. So you work with so many leading enterprises uh who are rethinking their learning strategies. What's happening on the ground as we speak? Can you give us a snapshot or some anecdotes or stories how they're reinventing learning?
SPEAKER_01:I would say maybe 5% of the market is even aware of this. Um, what most I just got the phone with somebody a little while ago. Most L and D people think AI is a way to build courses faster. When they don't realize they actually don't need to build courses at all. But you know, you you tend to use AI in most situations. The reason that 5% number from MIT came out is most people think of AI as a way to speed up the way they're already doing things instead of as a way to do things differently. So um little by little, the stories are coming out and the case stories, studies are being written, and we do a lot of a lot of this is evangelism too, to just um show people this new paradigm and reassure them that there's still a job there for an LD person. You're just doing different things. Um but uh, you know, we have a large pharmaceutical client who's now using the same dynamic platform that we use, and um, they basically decided all leadership training, all soft skills, all of the science training, like like in a pharmaceutical company of these big bodies of science, and they're really very topical. And so you can't really build a course because there's a lot of science and research and existing technology in there. So, what they're doing is they're saying, let's get all of the scientists in these domains and start recording their information either digitally or even just interviewing them on the phone and building these corpuses of scientific knowledge. So now any employee can go in and ask a question and learn about that topic. Another example is Rolls-Royce. We did a lot of work work last year with Rolls-Royce. Rolls-Royce, the the uh not the car part of Rolls-Royce, but the um the uh UK science and really engineering Rolls-Royce, which builds jet engines, nuclear power plants, power systems, things like that. They're a very, very sophisticated technology company. They told me that at Rolls-Royce, they can get a master's degree in uh, say, mechanical engineering or even a PhD. They'll come to Rolls-Royce, and it will take them at least five years to figure out the technology that already exists in the Rolls-Royce before they can really start designing new um aeronautics information or missiles or nuclear stuff because there's so much embodied IP. So, what they're doing is they're taking all this existing knowledge and they're putting it into this AI platform so that new employees can get an onboarding program very, very quickly that's relevant to their academic experience or prior experience. So, um, one of the things this AI kind of learning stuff will do is it allows you to capture the tacit knowledge you have in the company and reuse it in a way that you never could before for onboarding, for new projects, for people just trying to be more productive in their work. I remember years ago, the funniest story, I was interviewing British Telecom, and they had before we had any AI at all, we barely had you know internet, and they had people would go out into the UK and to repair a piece of equipment, and they would open up the you know, this phone equipment and they would look at it and they'd say, I don't even know what this is, I've never seen this before. It's 20, it's 30 years old. And so they'd pick up the phone and they'd say, Hey, has anybody seen this? They'd say, Why don't you snap a picture of it? And we didn't even have a way to send a picture. So eventually they have this photo sharing thing where they'd send a picture and then they'd send the picture around and say, has anybody seen this equipment before? And some somebody will say, Yeah, yeah, I worked on that 20 years ago. I know what that is. You know, pull this screw off and change that, and that's how you adjust it. Um, this is everywhere. I mean, this kind of these kinds of scenarios are in every company: retail, hospitality, manufacturing, uh, you know, utilities, oil and gas. And um, we can now kind of get after these problems in a very, very different way. We're working with a new company, an airline, that's trying to reinvent the airline industry. They want to do a whole new model of revenue management and passenger management, and they don't want to copy what other airlines did. So they have a lot of gurus there. And so, what we recommended they do is interview the gurus and capture that information into this platform so everybody can learn about these new business processes, as opposed to try to build a course, which would probably be you know kind of a little hard to do because they're building a lot of this stuff in real time. So um, I don't know whether you call this knowledge management. That that word never seems to have stuck, but um it's very it's very exciting.
SPEAKER_00:It is exciting, and I'm excited. Uh, your enthusiasm is infectious. Yet in the media, we still see lots of uh question marks around the kind of roles that will be displaced, replaced. Uh what do you see? What kinds of skills and roles will thrive in this new, I think you call it curiosity-driven environment.
SPEAKER_01:Well, yeah, I read all that stuff. Today there was another article in the Wall Street Journal about it that I don't think was exactly correct. Um the real action is not going on in the amongst economists and academics, it's in the world of business itself, day-to-day. People are learning immediately, very, very quickly, what AI is good at and what it's not, and how to use it. And it's an iterative learning process. I can't take, I can't give you a course on how to use a chatbot and you're suddenly good at it. You got to learn it by doing it. Because the because the system changes, it's non-deterministic. So the second time you use it and the third time you use it, it's a little bit different. And so you have to learn how to use it. Um, so every single one of us are gonna learn how to use these AI systems, and we're gonna become what we call superworkers. In the case of LD, most of the people I've met over the years in LD are hands-on tinkerers anyway. You know, they like to build things, they like to design things, they like to use graphics or simulation. They're very, they're very used to this. So once they get their hands on these new tools, they're gonna be very creative. I I've actually noticed that in most new technologies, some of the early adopters of them are usually instructors or teachers or educators because they're very looking at new ways to reach people's intellectual capacity. And you know, what I've learned about the human mind in my own experience and doing all this work over these years is that most of us learn through sort of a didactic um conversational curiosity way of learning. Like in our company, when I want to teach a new analyst how to do the kind of work we do, um, I just ask them a lot of questions and I just challenge them to think differently. And that uh conversational or curiosity-based learning model is very, very well facilitated by AI. We never really had a good way to do it before. We tried social learning, but you know, you go into a chat bot, you ask a bunch of questions, nobody answers. You come back a day later, somebody answered, but they didn't quite say what you wanted, and then you know, pretty soon you get fed up with that. Um, it's the same as having a little expert sitting next to you all day at work. This is what our Galileo tool is. It's like a little HR expert that's there all the time, and he or she, they're always available, they're very friendly, they remember every question you ever asked, and they'll say, you know, hey, you you know, that's a good question. I remember you asked me the same question two weeks ago. Let me explain to you what's new. I mean, it's really different. Um, so this in fact, I noticed open AI is on the consumer side is building a business around using open AI for for education, not for training. Um, so it's a massive, massive thing. I mean, you know, Evan, the way I sort of tell say to people is we are basically learning animals. I mean, that's really kind of what human beings do from the minute we're born. We learn how to talk and we learn how to walk and we learn how to do this and that and read and so forth. And so in our com in our careers, the thing that motivates people the most is some uh sense that we're growing as individuals. And so if we can learn how to be better at our jobs in an in an easier way, we're gonna be more engaged, we're gonna be more interested, we're gonna be more curious, we're gonna be more creative. And so the L and D community, who might be a little bit freaked out in the beginning, we're will probably, you know, a year from now be all over this um stuff. And now that the technology is becoming available, there are more products and more vendor solutions. Um, the use cases are becoming clearer. You know, I think ChatGPT was a, you know, it's interesting. I think a lot of people think Chat GPT is there for like shopping, looking up stocks. It's actually a lot of what people are doing with it. If you look at the big study they just published, is they're doing it to learn things, to find information, to analyze information for some part of their life. That's what goes on inside companies all the time. Um, so it's a it's a big, it's it's way beyond LD. It sort of expands into much bigger, broader parts of business productivity.
SPEAKER_00:Indeed. And so for for HR and business leaders listening with some amount of excitement, but also fear, uncertainty, doubt, I mean, beyond reaching out to you maybe for advice or get using products like Galileo, I mean, where should they start if they want to modernize their learning approach?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I mean, if you if you go to if you look at Galileo, if you look at the stuff we have, you will immediately see the applications of this in training and learning and development in HR. Um, but I think this comes down to just your own ability to teach yourself how to use these tools. Use ChatGPT, whatever, whichever of the AI agents you like, and start asking it questions about your work and your job. And you're gonna find out it's pretty good, but not great. It doesn't have the content you need, it doesn't have the uh company information you need, or the maybe the industry information you need. And I would be willing to bet, and certainly big companies, there's an IT group working on something like this right now, building some kind of an agent for you. Um, and if they're not, you should tell them this to either call us or or or just get it together. Uh this is really a massive, massive uh unlock of productivity in companies. And this these statistics that come out, like from MIT, that only 5% of AI projects are successful. Um that's the just because we're barely starting. This this particular part of AI enabling people to do their jobs better, is not just training, it's customer support, it's sales, it's marketing, it's it's all over the place. So um, you know, don't be afraid of it. None, you know, these tools, these tools are are are easy to use, and you get to use them for whatever's important in your company. You know, if you're not if you're a uh a hospitality company and you have somebody in the front desk, you know, and a customer uh walks in and asks a question about the gym or whatever the food or whatever it is, and they're calling on the phone. Well, I don't know the answer. Well, they actually could know the answer if you had that information online. And that's not going to take you two years. You don't have to go hire a consulting firm to do that. You can literally buy a platform like Galileo and put content into it in a few hours. So um there's a lot of things.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we'll see many many folks are not calling those consulting firms at the moment because they're not going to be able to do that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's it's not that that that whole process of designing things in advance is being done by the AI.
SPEAKER_00:So if we reconvene in a year from now or two or five, what are the metrics that would tell you this AI-powered learning revolution you're describing is actually working?
SPEAKER_01:Well, you're gonna see you're gonna see companies saying things like, I couldn't do my job without my chatbot X. You're gonna hear that all the time. And then you're gonna see the next generation, the sort of the second order of this is gonna be when the data is not just available for you to consume and find and learn from, but the system now reaches out to you and gives you proactive advice and support on your job. So I think a year from now we'll have LLMs in our glasses or on our clothes, so we'll so or on our phones. So we won't have to go to our PC to get this information, it'll be available very easily. And the system will be smart enough to say, uh, oh, thank you for your you know for reaching out to me. I've got something else I need to tell you about, because in your particular situation, something's new that I think you might be interested in. And then if you say, I don't want to hear that, you can just tell the AI, you know, don't give me those kinds of tips anymore, but I'd like tips on this. So I think a year from now it'll be very proactive. And um, so much more advanced use cases will happen. You know, things like Evan, you know, things like leadership development and management coaching, and you know, we hire a$700 an hour executive coach for somebody, you know, there'll be things like that that'll be in here too. So you can just see this rippling across the value chain of how we support people at work and adding more value more and more over time.
SPEAKER_00:Amazing. So, where can folks meet you, see you over the next weeks, months? Um, and did I miss anything? We covered a lot of bases.
SPEAKER_01:No, I'm I'm our website is joshberson.com. I go to a lot of industry conferences. Um, and it and I really recommend people get their hands on our on our Galileo tool. It's very inexpensive because it's designed for people in this profession, in the HR and the learning profession, and it's a way to immediately touch a system that's custom designed for these applications and see it in action. Um and um and you know, I have a podcast that people like to listen to, and we have all sorts of things like that. So uh, and we like to talk directly with clients. So, you know, if you're listening to this and you have this particular situation in your company and you'd like to run it by us, just reach out to us and we'll set up a call.
SPEAKER_00:Well, thanks so much. It's been a blockbuster chat, and I learned a lot. Appreciate your insights.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you, Evan.
SPEAKER_00:And thanks everyone for listening, watching, sharing this episode. Check out our TV show at techtimpact.tv, now in Fox Business and Bloomberg TV. And I'll see you at Gartner Expo in Orlando. Thanks, Josh. Thanks, everyone.