86: Using AI at Work to Rethink How We Learn and Build Expertise

Chris Daigle sits down with Panos Siozos, CEO and co-founder of LearnWorlds, to explore how AI at work is changing the way we learn, teach, and build real expertise.

Panos explains why access to information is no longer the challenge and why critical thinking, judgment, and structured learning matter more than ever in an AI-driven world. The conversation breaks down the difference between knowledge and understanding, the risk of cognitive laziness when relying too heavily on AI, and why learning still requires friction, effort, and human guidance.

They also discuss how AI should support learning rather than replace it, how credibility and authority are shifting in the age of generative AI, and what professionals and organizations must do to keep skills relevant as AI accelerates. This episode is a grounded look at using AI at work without losing the ability to think, learn, and grow.

🔎 Find Out More About Panos Siozos and LearnWorlds

Panos Siozos on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/siozos/
LearnWorlds
https://www.learnworlds.com

🛠 AI Tools and Resources Mentioned

ChatGPT
https://openai.com/chatgpt

📌 Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Panos Siozos
02:12 Panos’ background in learning and education technology
05:18 Why learning is not disappearing in the AI era
08:44 Knowledge vs real understanding
12:06 The risk of cognitive laziness with AI
16:22 Why struggle and friction matter in learning
20:35 How AI changes authority and credibility
25:11 Turning expertise into meaningful learning experiences
29:54 Using AI to support, not replace, human learning
35:18 Building premium learning products in the AI age
41:02 Final advice for professionals learning with AI

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Nobody will be replaced by AI, but everyone can be replaced by a competitor who is using AI better than us.

SPEAKER_00 0:06

I would imagine that the finance person in your company is probably saying, Oh, it can never do it as good as I can't. Therefore, I'm not going to embrace it. I'm not going to leverage it. What was that experience like for Learn Worlds when all of a sudden it had AI capability?

SPEAKER_01 0:21

So we try to be very careful from the beginning that guys, we're not trying to replace you. You are the directors, but we're trying to enhance you.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

For professionals that are listening to this, how would you recommend that they not just consume the content, watch the video, listen to the podcast, but that they actually internalize this information about AI specifically in their industry so that they can not just know about it, but actually do something with it?

SPEAKER_01 0:44

I guess using it every day and embedding it into your workflows and directing it is the best thing that we can do right now.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

Panos Teosos is a pioneer in online education and co-founder of Learn Worlds. With a PhD in educational tech and decades of hands-on experience, he's reshaping how we learn in the age of AI, turning deep expertise into powerful digital learning experiences. Welcome to Using AI at work. I'm your host, Chris Daigle. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs, and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. Right now, every business leader is asking the same question. What are we going to do about AI? If this is you, ChiefAIOfficer.com has the answer. We give you a simple path forward where we provide executive and team training so your people know exactly how to safely use generative AI in their day-to-day. We also manage the deployment and implementation to make sure tools actually get adopted and deliver results. And we'll also guide company-wide transformation so AI becomes part of your operating system, not just another shiny object. The companies that act now will increase productivity, cut costs, and grow faster than their competitors. Those that wait will get left behind. So if you want to make AI work in your business, visit chiefaiofficer.com and see how we're helping companies of all sizes finally get results from AI. Hi, everybody, and welcome to the next episode of the Using AI at Work Podcast. And our guest today is Penos Sozos, the CEO and founder of Learn Worlds. This is an interesting topic for us because one of the things that I hear a lot in social channels and in conversations is this impact of AI being able to generate content and training. And what does that mean for the traditional way of learning and developing skills and becoming a master of something? And this is a topic that Panos and his team have been focused on for uh since 2014, I guess, when they founded. And now I think they've kind of cracked the code on this. So, Panos, before we get started and talking about the, I guess, the future of education really as an AI-enabled or an AI-augmented activity, uh, give us a little bit of background on the founder side of things. I know that you started this in 2014 and that you guys were bootstrapped. Um, that's a long journey.

SPEAKER_01 3:01

First of all, hi, Chris. Thanks for having me on your show.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

Of course.

SPEAKER_01 3:04

It's uh uh it's longer, much longer than 2014. With my two co-founders, we started working on the educational technology space back in 1999. So that's when we first built our very first learning management system. It was part of an academic project within a university, our first LMS. We pretty much didn't know what we were doing back then, but we were very enthusiastic. We were doing our postgraduate studies in educational technologies, and we've been working on this space ever since. Uh, so we launched our platform in 2014. We were already working a couple of years before that in uh in stealth mode. As you said, bootswapped company, so uh a grueling journey to the first customer, to the second customer, tenth customer. So that was the obvious, that that was the way that we were taking. And in the beginning, obviously, we had to put the scientists in the backseat at some point, and we started learning fast from the market, adapting to market needs, bringing in uh in in some cases releasing features even overnight to keep up with the very fast pace of innovation that we were seeing in the education space. And as you can imagine, when COVID came along, this space, this speed uh uh multiplied even more. And we see that again with AI, which is again another uh AI, another COVID-level event when it comes at least to education, how we learn and how people will keep learning and working and even existing in the in the years that are coming. So definitely interesting times.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

Yeah, for sure. And the entrepreneur's journey is uh it's one of persistence for sure, as demonstrated by the 1999 timeline. Like I saw a tweet or an I don't know what they call it, a post this morning about somebody saying, I got rid of my Duolingo account uh and Grok taught me, you know, Spanish in 39 days. The the ability and the access that we have now to information has certainly shifted. One of the things that we kind of teach as a principal in our chief AI officer program is that the old paradigm of learning meant, you know, you you you got your you graduated from high school, then you went off and got a degree, and then maybe you got an advanced degree, and then you worked under a mentor and those sorts of things. Because the expectation with learning was that, you know, oh, I'm the self-identified expert or my credentials uh, you know, make me the expert. And in an environment where my subject matter was needed, I was expected to be able to recall this information on demand. And now with AI, I don't need to know about marine construction. I don't need to know about geology if if I'm a good user of the models. How is this paradigm of learning shifting? I mean, because you you guys have thousands of uh clients in your service that are supporting millions of learners. How are you seeing this uh AI kind of impact this paradigm that you were used to maybe from 2014 on until you know the release of generative AI?

SPEAKER_01 6:00

Great question, uh Chris. First of all, to start from the post that you mentioned, I doubt that somebody can learn Spanish in uh in uh you know three or four weeks with uh with with Grok, and I doubt that they can learn Spanish with Duolingo or with any other of these kinds of you know gamification where I just uh my daughter now believes she's learning Korean. What she does learn with Duolingo is some nice Korean words for being handy to order a coffee, but that's not how you learn a language. So even though all these tools are changing, and we have now we we were having kind of the same discussions uh uh a few years ago when people were saying, like, why do we need uh uh classes or online learning? I can go out to YouTube, I can go out to Wikipedia, and I can find everything, you know, with a with a tap of uh uh at my fingertips. Is this learning and does this uh uh change how we learn? The thing is that even though the tools are changing, our mind is the same. It's the same that it was 150 years ago, it's the same that it was a couple thousand years ago, it's probably the same that it was 150,000 years ago. So uh uh obviously AI is bringing a huge paradigm change, and it's following some of the changes that you already mentioned. The societal and economic conditions were already changing, and this is one of the reasons that we created Learn Walts in the first place. Already 10, 15 years ago, people were saying, should I get into a, I don't know, uh a couple of hundred thousand of student debts and go into a three or four-year degree to become a web developer when I can go online, pick up a few courses, and I could be a junior, naive, basic web developer in three or four months because I've done some kind of uh you know of a of a of a bootcamp or something else. I I think we we uh we need to understand that in this era the metacognitive abilities of learning how to learn are becoming even more important. It was already important until now, with all this abundance of information out there, to be very careful about how we choose this information, how we learn, what are the new tools of the trade, and how we direct our learning, and this will become even more important in the rest, let's say, of the 25th, the first uh century. So knowing things it's not important anymore. We understand. Everybody can find all sorts of facts. Uh, you know, you can ask uh an LLM and uh you you appear as a wise person, it's different than knowing how to learn things uh to become better at uh at learning. We cannot compete with AIs in the things that they are great, they are great at pattern recognition, they are great at synthesis, they are great at uh writing uh sheets of uh perfect written prose and text, and uh you know they can they can go with compete uh with AIs on this. If we do, we will lose. The same way that we do not compete with cars on the speed. There are other things that we do. We direct technology, we direct um uh we have to learn how how to bring in the creativity, how to bring in the direction, how to bring in the ingenuity, how to bring in the passion, how to bring in the empathy, the things that uh AI is can imitate, very good, uh scaringly good at some at some cases, but these are the the important uh things. So, what we see from our customers, because uh indeed our customers are coming to us with the same kinds of questions. Are online courses still relevant? Are online courses dead? Is school or university dead? We'll be just learning, picking up stuff by interacting with a GPT or asking an LLM to create for me a very specialized, personalized courses, course on how to fly a plane. It can probably do that. Would you like to come with me for a ride? Probably, probably not. So we are we are entering an era where uh content becomes obsolete very, very fast. It becomes a commodity. Anyone can now create content. You know, if you know a subject, you can easily uh interact with uh with an LLM and you can polish it and you can transform it, you can get your notes or your book or your your presentations and convert them into an online course or whatever, vice versa. You can start from an online course and convert it into something else. And we believe that in in this era of AI, we will need more learning rather than less. Our problem is not going to be access to information. It already wasn't there. Now uh we are talking about obviously LLM being able to create much better synthesized and personalized and uh uh content with uh with great presentation, uh, but the need for learning remains the same. And there is a big risk here for especially for our customers, for creators, content creators, course creators. LLMs can create some perfectly presented text. It's easy to believe that just consuming some of this text you are learning. So the the content is great, but it can also be shallow, and we know like we understand that brain is a muscle as well. We learn through friction. We learn when we get confronted with difficult uh problems that we need to solve. Just consuming content and having access to content, it's not the answer. Otherwise, already with our Wikipedias and YouTube channels and masterclass, uh, you know, all our all uh the uh all our uh uh subscriptions, we would be wise. We are not. Why? Because we need this guidance, we need to uh to come into a process of learning, we need to challenge ourselves, we need to engage and interact, not just with a bunch of content, but also with peers that are learning along with us, with a director, with an instructor who directs us through this uh this process.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

No, and one of the things I failed to mention, so listeners, it's not that Panos knows about this just because he he launched a business. You've got a PhD in educational design, like online educational design, right? So you didn't just read a bunch of stuff online about this, you got a PhD in the subject.

SPEAKER_01 12:27

So interrupt, and and again, we are not here. We understand that a big part of the learning will happen through informal means, online courses and uh lifelong learning and little seminars and webinars that you are picking along the way. I don't want to do I come from a university from an academic background. I definitely don't want to you know to to disfarage that paradigm. It's still going to be there. We need our pilots to be trained in the traditional way, our doctors, our surgeons, but for some types of knowledge, for some types of skills, the the university path or the four-year degree is already too late. We see that not just knowledge, but also skills, processes, software, the the way that all industries are pacing right now, it's extremely fast. So knowledge becomes obsolete even faster. So we need we it means we need to be learning 24-7. Just accessing the knowledge is not going to be enough. Just getting access to books and manuals and uh uh and videos is not going to be enough. We need to be in this always uh on learning uh mode.

SPEAKER_00 13:35

So this is interesting. We're starting to identify a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, right? As you mentioned, use the word, that doesn't mean that we're wise, and that's a pretty uh profound distinction there. So for the listeners here, if they're on this, it's because they're on a learning path related to how do I leverage AI? What does AI mean to my career? What does AI mean to my industry, to my family, and that sort of thing? In that case where the models are changing regularly, like I mean, weekly we're getting major updates and that sort of thing. For professionals that are listening to this, how would you recommend that they not just consume the content, watch the video, listen to the podcast, but that they actually internalize this information about AI specifically in their industry so that they can not just know about it, but actually do something with it?

SPEAKER_01 14:25

I guess using it every day and embedding it into your workflows and directing it it's the it's uh the best thing that we can do right now. As you said, there are major releases almost uh every every other week, uh, which is great for us. All these LLMs they're competing very fast. They also make mistakes, and we've seen that that they have released things that uh are uh bordering uh on the you know on the uh irresponsible, irresponsible, dangerous, and I'm sure that we will see uh more of these. I I'm using lately uh a nice expression that I I learned uh I heard from somebody that we are actually in the dial up era of AI. So, what we are seeing now, we are in the very early days, right? Like we we sometimes we fail to recognize it, but it's just a couple of years that we are working with this, and it already I know that it feels like uh 10, 20 years, but imagine what will be possible in five or or 10 days. So if five or ten years, and I I see this mistake happening, I see it with our employees, I saw it with myself, I'm seeing it with our with our customers. In some cases, you can get like a polished, great-looking result on your first try, and most people stop there and say, okay, this this is it, either because it's good enough, and in many cases, it is good enough for the first uh for the first try, but many people fail uh to uh when it's not enough, they fail to double down and double click and go inside and and uh work a prompt, provide context, and and go deeper and challenge and evaluate and uh and counter uh bring another competing LLM that will uh judge and evaluate the the results that they got first. So uh many people either get impressed with the first result and say, okay, this is it, I'm just setting it out, and we we tend to become kind of lazy. You know, there is a kind of a cognitive a cognitive uh laziness uh over there, or in some cases we we fail to go deeper. And we see that uh and we try to challenge our own customers with some of the content that they create because they get the first level output of uh of an LLM. It's easy uh for something that used to take them weeks to create an online course, now they're happy because they got it in a day. But you shouldn't stop there. Why not go for excellence? You why not get the strong parts that the LLMs are giving to you and add your own direction, meaning, tone, uh uh sentiment, uh pedagogy, you know, and and and work more with uh uh with that. So I I think my only answer now, again, because these things are racing very fast, and sometimes we try, even in our company, like with experts and people who use it every day, and sometimes we fail to identify a new release or an important feature or or something that uh that happened. I guess using it every day, using AI as a force multiplier, don't become uh you know complacent and lazy and just depend on first level uh results, keep working, directing, uh challenging, not just getting dumped content that has been dumped by AI or or sloped, uh, but try to get into uh structured outputs and constantly challenge. And this is where you under you start to understand what good looks like, what bad looks like. This is where you can uh you can uh start becoming better and you can start getting this assistance, this speed uh that uh that these things can uh can bring to any profession and to to any professional. I'm sure you you've heard it hundreds of times right now. Nobody will be replaced by AI, but everyone can be replaced by a competitor who is using AI better than us. It's like uh declining to use uh technology or the internet or anything else. It's a tool, it's a very potent tool, it's adapting very fast, so we need to be on top and try to keep it as part of our daily workflows and uh bring it into organization, into our team, even into our family. You know, that's also what I'm doing with my daughter, teaching her, not not uh sharing her, but understanding that okay, this is here, it will exist, we better, you know, come to terms with it and try to control it.

SPEAKER_00 18:49

What I'm taking away from that is that I don't know what your profession is or your industry, but I if I did, I could go to the LLM and I could get information that to somebody who wasn't familiar with that industry, I could present them with something and they would go, oh, Chris is an expert at it. However, you as the expert who's listening to this now, you know that whatever you get from the LLM is good, but it's not 100%. The knowledge and the wisdom that you've developed in your career or your industry allows you to take that LLM content and enhance it to where it's not LLM content, it's not exclusively synthetic, it's now human that's augmented on speed or uh quantity of content, but you as the expert still have that obligation for contribution to. Now you mentioned something about this cognitive laziness. And uh several months ago I saw I don't know, I didn't dig into the article, but it indicated, particularly in San Francisco, it was an investor, and he was talking about how when I talk to young founders who are on the models all the time, I'm noticing that they're having a harder time communicating with humans. Because they're they're they're outsourcing a lot of that thought or that a lot of that cognition, and there is some atrophy of that muscle, that brain muscle that you mentioned. Was that anecdotal, or is that something that as a a power user that we should be thinking about?

SPEAKER_01 20:18

Well it's not the first time that I hear of this, and it's also it's not the first time that this has been uh recorded or discussed. Uh there is a uh I will take you back to ancient Greece, uh Socrates, the the philosopher. Uh, there is a Socratic dialogue where he laments the discovery of uh of writing, because he says, Oh, this thing is making us lazy. It's making us lazy. Do you remember you know all the ancient people who could recite endless uh epics of uh hundred of tens of thousands of verses? Why? Because they they never had to write something down. My mother remembers something like 200 uh phone uh numbers. Yeah, I probably remember, I probably remember too. So were we were we destroyed by this? No, we just shifted, you know, the where our focus was. I'm sure that we lost some things. I i i it's it's clear when uh you run out of uh your phone runs out of battery, you wish that you remembered that phone number or that uh that that piece of of data. Things are are moving. Obviously, there are not just quantitative but also qualitative differences now with AI, because they come so much closer to the unique things that make us human. Because they can emulate um uh discussions, they can be your partner, your co-founder, they can you they can be your your boyfriend or your girlfriend, they can emulate all these things in some cases fairly uh good. So I understand that that some of our other functions might uh uh might uh atrophy. So I guess we better keep to our uh stick also and keep close our human friends, uh our families, our coworkers, and make sure that we can also uh write something from time to time without uh without having uh an LLM uh next to us. Do I feel threatened by uh I don't know the the the text editor and uh the you know the autocorrector or anything else? I I don't. I guess you don't. Most people who who are able to do it on their own and uh and they and they see uh a new capacity coming in, they they use it as help. I'm also I guess scared and I'm thinking about how the new generation that uh uh becomes native within this uh this space. So this is also why I believe that we should teach them, you know, again, how to keep how learning how to learn, learning how to be directors and not uh you know uh becoming uh over reliant on these things. I'm not sure. I'm sure that uh how I'm not sure how this goes. I'm sure that some people will lose the you know the bet and we will lots of their capacities with uh will uh will atrophy. Uh but uh I I guess we uh we we need to uh to keep have people be be alert and uh alerting how to learn and and keep new new skills. People are adapting. We've adapted to a huge amount of change in our even in our lifetimes, technological change. I so I think uh we'll uh we'll adapt to this as well.

SPEAKER_00 23:32

So you've mentioned metacognition and like thinking about how to think and learning how to learn. How is that changing and what are maybe some frameworks or best practices for individuals who have now have access to unlimited content on demand on any topic from any perspective that they want if they're using the models? How are you suggesting we become capable of learning how to learn and thinking about how to think in this age of generative AI with all that access?

SPEAKER_01 24:03

Uh I I guess I'm not sure if there is like one answer to this. Probably there are multiple angles, and it has to do also with uh uh with uh uh what people do uh for a living, you know, what's their skill, what's their profession, what they what they do know. Our like most of our experience comes with our own customers who are the creators of online courses. Uh the creation of content is something that is time consuming, it's difficult, it's a it's a it's a creative job. And uh obviously these people were also, when all these LLMs started coming around, they felt threatened. Like, like what will happen? Will we just be flooded with this uh AI slope? And uh we focused a lot on these people, we worked a lot with them on prompt gener uh uh uh prompt uh uh generation in the beginning, like how to start uh working with these things and how to start to uh to uh to to learn how to do this stuff. And uh we are helping them now to accelerate their time to content creation to value, and this is this is working. They understand that they can keep their own uh things, uh their own unique qualities, but they can also multiply their efficiency and their and their effectiveness. Uh so uh I guess it's a it's a combination of the things that we were doing, what we're good at, the things that we were doing, and using AI as a as a complementary tool on our side to become much more efficient and much more uh uh effective. And this is also our approach with our platform, this is our approach with Learn Walls, how to do uh human-centric uh learning and uh AI that comes as a co-pilot to help our customers to do uh to do better uh better work. I I think the same way that we are trying to uh include AI in the in the learning profession and in the content generation, uh people have to think about their own jobs and their own tasks. Uh definitely we need uh some kind of formal training, keep access to seminars and webinars and then small formal classes to help us master the tools, but also then we need to think about how we bring them into our everyday practice. Uh, what is the job that we are doing? What is in my work? If I'm running a small startup, I'm running a small agency, I'm a contractor, or I'm a consultant, what are my jobs to be done? Where do I spend more time? Where uh where is something that it's it's a chore, like it's a pain, I don't want to do it anymore, I would like to pay somebody else to do it. Can I go into these little things, have a copilot by my side, not to replace me, not to, but to to augment me and make these things uh uh faster? So even in our own business, in learnboards, the way we try to approach things say, okay, how can we do our job better? How can we do our job easier? How we can bring better quality? What are the pains that we have? We have these people here who are working on, I don't know, whatever, support tickets, creating content, doing graphics. What is the way that we can keep their powers, we can, and we can enhance them and convert them into superhumans that can that can be uh 30%, 50%, 200% more efficient, more effective, and more satisfied with their work. So I'm not sure if that that can give us a framework because this is obviously a very live problem. And uh we're also trying to figure out the solutions ourselves.

SPEAKER_00 27:30

Was all these content creators that are on the platform of Learn Worlds, they're they're translating their lived experience and their knowledge into a format that somebody who is uh new to that subject can ingest and accelerate their learning curve, right? But also, on the same token, somebody who doesn't know that subject can create that the AI slop, let's call it. As a listener who wants to better understand a subject, what are some of the things that we should be looking out for so that we can recognize, hey, this is authentic. This is from somebody who's pushed the buttons, who's dug the ditch, whatever that work is. Because again, I don't have that. If I don't know the subject matter, I don't have the discretion to be able to say, this is good and real, this is synthetic. How can we tell?

SPEAKER_01 28:18

I totally agree that this is a problem and it will become even more of a problem with all this content that uh that is going to be created. So the validation and the confirmation of knowledge becomes even more even more important. First of all, when I learn myself, how I like we say about us uh metacognitive abilities and being able to direct our learning, but when do I know if I'm on the right path? If I'm learning the right stuff and if I'm learning them to the you know to the to the level that is required so that I can you know fly that plane or use that software or do these kinds of things. So uh this validation, we see that from our from our customers and their learners is even more important right now. You want this certificate, you want this test, you you you need this kind of uh structure. So anything that doesn't bring this structure and doesn't bring uh this kind of uh uh you know uh uh and like some kind of validation, I I think it will it will leave people uh uncertain about what what they've uh learned. And this is usually the problem with uh you know going out on Wikipedia or going out on something like YouTube when it's enough. You just hop from one to the other, but you don't know whether you've achieved mastery or just uh you are just uh on the surface uh uh splashing on the on the surface. Another thing that we see is becoming more important now is this kind of authority that comes from a person who knows their stuff. Because in the past, we used to get that from the traditional, uh, you know, from the academia, because we know that this is like a school that you know it's running for 300 years, or it's uh validated, it's certified, it's board certified, state certified, or or or whatever. Um this now, in the era of AI, with all this content being created, again, it's going to become even more important. So uh just learning on your own on the side doesn't mean much. At some point, you will need to very to verify that. So this this verification with connecting the content with some kind of master, but also in some cases, this might not be an institution, it might be a person of authority. Because if you know that, okay, Chris is the the top guy to talk to you about how to use AI in your in your day-to-day work, you will follow Chris. Chris is the new authority, not uh the school, the the university, the college, or anything else. These are the people who know their stuff, they have been successful, and it's like in like just a couple of years ago, or something like becoming being a published author, you know. We we follow uh authority which now can be expressed in even more ways. So if you see a course out there that you from somebody that you've never heard, that doesn't uh include any kind of validation, is not connected to any kind of measurable outcomes at the end or some kind of validation, it might be great for your self-improvement, but you will not be able to translate it, to connect it with the reality, or to translate it to something that you know where you are standing. For us, for every learner, for every person, it's very important to know where we're standing, you know, in this uh pecking order of uh of learning, of status, to know where we are and what we need to do uh next. This is why we believe that it's not just the content, it's the safe space where we learn. It's the social content because learning is not a it's a team's fault. It's it happens we do it better when we when we learn together. And you also need this director, this coach, this uh this person who will show you the way, help you along the way, and now he or she has so many more tools because with AI, he or she can create all these personalized, very um uh guided plans for you. But at the end of the day, you have uh uh somebody who can verify that you're on the right path and uh and and that you've achieved some kind of mastery on that uh on that field.

SPEAKER_00 32:28

No, this is this is very helpful. So my takeaway from this would be for anybody listening, before you uh invest the time into learning from a certain channel or an individual, I would validate their bona fides. I would look for have they published the book? Are they certified through something? In the past, it used to be so easy because oh, I've got the Harvard degree. Oh, well, then you must be the expert. And it almost sounds like what you're suggesting is that rather than the institutional credibility, it now need you you need to now investigate the individual credibility. And another thing that you said that I think is very important is this idea of if I'm interested in a subject, I can go and look it up, right? However, there's a distinction between what I'm able to self-discover through a prompt as compared to me sitting in a room and all of the varied experiences that exist, or a virtual room or whatever, but the varied experiences that exist amongst the other learners, they're going to have a lens on the world that will prompt them to ask certain questions to the instructor. The LLM wouldn't say, hey, and somebody who has this experience might look at it this way. Somebody who has this experience, it's almost like it's it's very sterile, uh, the information that we get from the LLM. It's not really that holistic experience. It doesn't have the nuance because I'm not sitting in the room with others who are saying, My profession is this, how does it apply to me? And me being able to translate that person's question into, oh, I can use it for here.

SPEAKER_01 34:00

I I I totally I totally agree. Because when when I'm sitting on my own in front of an LLM, I'm missing so many things. And this is where you mentioned these skills that are that are uh going you know are uh uh becoming atrophic because I'm missing all these things. Uh it's just myself, it's my own individual, my my own individual experience. An LLM can very well emulate also the contrarian view. If I ask you, if I know how to do it, but if I don't know how to do it, or if I don't care, then I'm just sitting in front of a mirror. So what do I learn? And also to the to the thing that you mentioned before, uh the the individual authority, it was always there to a certain extent, and it will not uh it will not uh replace totally the the institutional uh I guess uh validation, but it's becoming both now are becoming more uh more important. And so again, our doctor and our pilot, we want them to get, you know, to have this degree, but there are so many more things that are happening, and it's great because we are learning so many more things now. We are we are learning things for self-improvement, we are learning things because we have hobbies, we we pick up things as we as we go. Everyone now on the planet can know something that somebody else on the planet probably needs to know, and now they are able to teach it. You know, you can you can you can learn great things from the top individuals uh everywhere for everything that you uh that you that you like, but this also needs a place to happen. It needs the interaction, it needs the friction, it needs the competition with the fellow person, it needs the encouragement when you're down, it needs all these things are part of the of the learning uh process. Just swimming within some perfectly crafted, like uh great-looking content is not going to do it. It's it's uh uh we we need the we need to train the muscle, we need to go in and do the difficult stuff. Learning is overcoming adversity, is is going through the the mental blocks, is uh challenging challenging yourself. So this will not change. Whatever AI, and I'm I'm sure that we will see more incredible stuff coming from AI, our brain is still the same and it learns the same way. So we we need to feed it like that. We need to keep feeding this with the with the things that we uh that that that makes us grow.

SPEAKER_00 36:30

You know, I I came into this episode with a uh I don't know, a bias for sure. We all have those. Um, but this is opening my eyes to a whole different way of looking at things. We produce a lot of content, the chief AI officer, right? Even though it's LLM augmented, I don't necessarily think about the veracity or the uh applicability of it because I'm doing the thing, right? I know that I'm the expert, I'm self-identified, but I I feel that I have achieved a level of mastery with this thing. So I don't really look at it through that way, but I don't necessarily look at that, I don't use that same bias when I'm exploring other people's stuff. I just assume that if it's out there and they've put the effort out, oh, they must know more than I do, but the reality is not the case. You know, you mentioned, and totally agree, I wouldn't want the pilot who was able to pass the written test because they studied LLM to say, hey guys, buckle in. It's my first flight. And it you mentioned doctors as well. It and it I realize it doesn't just apply to the white collar stuff. Would you want the electrician who had only studied LLM wiring up your house? Would you want the carpenter who had seen the images and everything, but they had never picked up a saw before? Do they know the theory and skill? Yes, can they apply that skill? So as a as a listener of this podcast, start to introduce some level of filtering before you go and invest in the hour-long YouTube video. Now, I I know with with Learn Worlds, you've got individuals that they've got a skill set that they've been recognized as uh that distinguishes them from other others in that industry. I'm good at this, therefore, I want to start to codify and uh productize my life experience into something that will help accelerate others. One of the first things that I know, like I've been mentoring entrepreneurs for 30 years. I do a lot of business development, and one of the things that I always get a reaction from with people is could I go and get this information from the LLM and regurgitate it? Yes. However, I have all these like heuristics and all these rules of thumb and all these sayings that I've heard, little quotes that instantly summarize the entire experience into one thought thing. I don't see that happening with the LLMs. They're giving me gross, like gross information as compared to fine information.

SPEAKER_01 38:57

I I think they are uh masters in uh generalizations and uh and patterns. And if uh you know if you have uh if you know the meaning, the substance of your of your saying of what you want to pass to the other person, they might help you create an amazing quote because they can give you 20 different uh you know views and 20 different cases and and and you can choose. But you are the owner of the meaning. You you need to to to you know to to help them create that. If you don't have the meaning, and if you just go you uh you just go to that for the answers, you will end up with something that is average, that is mediocre, perfectly well crafted, but definitely it could be you know shallow or contradicting or not genuine enough, not authentic enough, uh some not something that can uh that can that can uh help you. So uh it's and this is by design because they have consumed all the content that is out there, everything. That we have ever produced and written and uh and read, and because it's too much, they have to generalize, they have to come up with average. You have to ask the pointed questions yourself so they you can start getting pointed answers from the you have to be opinionated in the things that you're asking, you have to to to uh to ask difficult questions so that we can get meaningful answers as well.

SPEAKER_00 40:24

So I want to switch gears a little bit because I'm I'm certain that in your industry you've seen this, but there are a couple of people that are like, oh, it can never do it as good as I can. And I would imagine that when when the content creation element of a large language model was introduced into your industry of you know productizing and presenting information and expertise so that others could learn it, that's translatable to a lot of other industries. So for those of you listening, I would imagine that the finance person in your company is probably saying, Oh, it can never do it as good as I am. I can. Therefore, I'm not going to embrace it, I'm not going to leverage it. What was that experience like for Learn Worlds when all of a sudden it had AI capabilities? How was that um received by your uh both your users, I mean you like your creators and also their customers?

SPEAKER_01 41:16

We found this by working with them. We started initially when uh even in the early, in the early days, uh 2023, February, March, you know, when it was just three or four months after uh after the first version of GPT was out in the in the public, and we started doing prompt engineering with them and try to understand where they're really struggling, what are the things where they can get the help. So we try to uh to be very careful from the beginning that guys, we're not trying to replace you. You are the directors, but we're trying to enhance you. So let's see what are the boring things, what are the um uh what are the uh where you can get more value. It's clear that as an instructor, you can create some, you you know, here's here's an example. One of the most boring things for uh every every teacher everywhere, wherever you ask them, is to create tests, uh questions for a test, especially a multiple choice uh test. So you you have to go in and create 100 multiple choice uh uh questions of uh you know on a particular topic, trigonometry or uh biology or or whatever. Uh every teacher, if they spend three days or you know, a few hours, they can create some great uh some great content. But if you have your uh LLM by your side, you can ask it to create based on your content and your knowledge, to create for you 100 multiple choice questions, you know, of varying difficulty based on the bloom tax coffee, and you get this in three minutes. Yeah, what does it mean? Would would you be able to do it better? You would. But now you are freeing up two days of your time. Uh if you're going out for a coffee, it's not a good investment of your time. If you're using this time to go back to your students and provide personalized feedback based on the individual mistakes that they made, and you give them, you know, the the you you do the extra steps, this is a good usage of your of your time. So uh could you do it better? Yes. What how can you scale up your business though? In terms of the creation of the content, in terms of being able to serve, to better serve uh more people, and also scale up uh our customers are running businesses. In some cases, they're running multi-billion dollar businesses just by creating and selling online courses. So you want to be efficient. In some cases, these are small teams or or or small businesses, so you need to be as efficient as possible. You will you can use AI in the content creation, you can use AI in the feedback, you can use AI on the marketing or the or the personalization or the automation of your business. So that doesn't take uh anything away from you as a creator, as long as you validate the content, you direct the content, you are responsible, you know, you sign off for everything that you put out there, and then you save time to do the important stuff, the things that you are only good at uh at doing.

SPEAKER_00 44:12

What I like about what you've done here is you've created uh a platform for the content of all these different sources that of your clients that you've got. However, you guys are looking at it through a way to where you're not allowing the AI slop to be the product that their customers are able to buy, right? So this sounds like Learn Worlds has now created an environment where me, as somebody who's interested in learning a topic, I can trust that the content that I'm getting there is possibly augmented and encouraged to be augmented, but it's not going to be the AI slop. What is the distinction with Learn Worlds from perhaps other platforms where I can go and learn stuff, like a YouTube, like a Wikipedia? What's making the difference?

SPEAKER_01 44:59

Just to clarify here that LearnWolds is not a marketplace or an online big platform where people can go in and find all sorts of different uh uh different uh courses uh published from from anyone. Uh LearnWorlds is a white-labeled platform, which means that we give to you, Chris, the tools to create your own online school. So at the end of the day, you are responsible. You are bringing in your content, you are bringing in your your audience, and you are responsible for the content that you uh that you that you upload. So we we cannot police uh you know or enforce uh what kind of content goes there, but it would be a very short-sighted, you know, uh self-defeating strategy. Just go into your school, you are an expert, uh, you you know, you have your personal brand, you're doing your podcast, you are a you are a consultant and you are working with entrepreneurs, you would never put your name under something that is you know of bad uh of bad quality. So we are not enforcing it, but this is these are the schools that thrive. The schools that are original, they bring high quality content with a strong personal brand next to them with validation of the content. These are the schools that usually uh thrive. So this is our model. There was uh uh a white label platform. Anyone can go to our website, they can start a free trial, then they bring in their own content, we give them the tools to create the best possible version of their online course. So in the past, everything had to be manual, uh, you know, handcrafted, every word and every video and every script. Now all these work can be augmented, and we are working with them not just for the wordsmithing part, but also for bringing in the pedagogy and having them think about how they want to structure their advice, how they can create novel, interactive, interesting, engaging experiences for their audience. So high quality content that sells at a premium price, and also people, the the end learners are happy with what they've learned, are super happy with the experience, and they can come back to buy more. When you are selling online courses as a creator, you're judged every time by every customer because people pay for that. So it then, you know, you have to uh you have to do it, uh you have to do it the the right uh the right way. So we are bringing them the tools, they bring in the audience, we augment the content, and they're bringing so they're bringing the content, we augment it, they bring in the audience, and they create a thriving, uh a thriving community that not just includes the consumption of the courses, every learnable school has its own private built-in community of learners where people interact with each other, they interact with the content. And it's not just consuming self-paced courses because people can also do live classes. So it can be a hybrid environment where you can just uh go through some videos or some e-books if you are, you know, if you are late at night uh sitting at your sofa, or uh, you know, once per week you can go in online, interact with the expert, learn from them, have these kinds of office hours or anything else. So it can be a really hybrid and dynamic experience. And in fact, everyone can customize it based on their own community, on their own niche, uh, build their own business model on top of the content that they that they publish, whether it's for self-improvement, professional skills, or something that is highly regulated and leads to a very specific degree that is uh uh you know uh certified uh from uh from a board or a commission or or a or or some kind of uh other entity.

SPEAKER_00 48:36

Obviously, Panos understands the the learning experience, especially in the the the age of AI, let's say. But if you're a listener and you think, hey, I'm pretty good at what I do, this might be an opportunity for you to leverage that expertise into a high-leverage environment of AI supported in a Learn Worlds platform where all of a sudden, especially if you're recognized in your industry for being good at something, I can tell you that, and as he mentioned, they've got uh uh clients that are earning millions of dollars from product-tized knowledge. Some of you listening to this could be creating that retirement path or early retirement path, or there's my vacation home, I just paid for that by me sitting down over a weekend in an environment that Learn Worlds provides for me to be able to say, oh, if I was going to do this job from start, from scratch, here's where I'd start. I wouldn't do this, I'd do this, I'd make sure I did this, here's how I do it based on my experiences and that sort of thing. So I think it's, you know, we we've had an interesting conversation today about what is what is learning in the age of AI look like. But I think what's what's kind of coming to me as we're wrapping up this episode is that this is going to be so easy for so many of these listeners. What is a product creation, what does a course creation process look like using Learn Worlds as far as maybe time investment and that sort of thing?

SPEAKER_01 50:04

For somebody who already knows their subject and they start from somewhere where there are some notes, uh teaching notes, a book that they've written, a bug of articles that they've written in the past, the transcripts of their podcasts, you know, if you start from a body of knowledge, it in some cases it can be a weekend. It can be a weekend. You know, in the past, this content creation was the number one blogger. We we over the years, especially in the beginning, we're talking with people who were top experts in their field, professors with uh 30 years of experience, and it was extremely difficult for them to move into the online medium and you know create the online videos. People in the beginning, they were starting to create these 45-minute long videos that are you know dead by PowerPoint, purely emulating the classroom experience. But that's not how it works in the online space. You you can create all these little videos, five-minute videos, little snippets that you can just uh you know exchange, replace, uh, repurpose, and you can create your content very, very easily. Um also in the past, people used to have this kind of perfectionism uh uh problem. Uh all the courses, like they had to be, I don't know, Hollywood level productions with multiple cameras. COVID cured us of this. Uh that's one of the few things that happened, you know, that were positive out of this, cured us of this thing. Anyone now with their with their smartphone, an iPhone, they can sit in front of it and they can record the perfect video uh just by sharing their experience, sharing the things that they know. So I've seen amazing courses uh being launched over over a weekend, uh literally. So the the the path now to creating the content is uh the the barrier is so much lower. It's so much easier to uh to create the content. And then what you mean is the content. And in some cases, people already start from somewhere. They have an online presence, they might be running a LinkedIn group, they might be running a Facebook community, they might be known in their neighborhood, in their industry, in a conference, you know, where whether they have a public forum or not. This could be the root of an amazing uh online business that can bring you revenue, you know, for years to come. 24-7, you know, passive income, the things that people are are really hoping to get on, or something like this.

SPEAKER_00 52:32

So if you've ever thought about doing this, if you're listening to this podcast and you've you've thought about it but thought it was too hard, I would submit that is no longer the case with tools like this. Panos, thank you so much for taking the time. I I have uh a saying that I love is once expanded, the mind can never contract to its original state, right? This is certainly broadened my thinking about thinking, my thinking about learning, because as a as an educator and and somebody who's lecturing regularly on this stuff, would just do the thing, right? I just show up and and share stuff. You know, on the surface, I'm competing with uh the 20-something who's like, write me a book, you know, goes to the models and says write a book on XYZ because they see it as a business opportunity, not necessarily as a passion. And that is a big point of distinction. So, Panis, is there anything that you think that the listeners need to be taking away from this as they go into 2026 with you know AI only accelerating and introducing more, I don't know, pressure to know more?

SPEAKER_01 53:37

I I think first of all, these are fascinating times and and scary times. So uh I I I would like to keep you know the positive side of it, that now for the first time, anyone here listening to that podcast, every professional can have uh a super powerful partner, cognitive partner next to them that can help them do their stuff. We cannot be lazy, become lazy, and just outsource things to it. We need to keep we need to keep working with it. We need to keep the things, and we cannot definitely cannot compete on the things that AI is best at speed, memory, pattern recognition. We need to bring in our own unique characteristics. Uh, like the same as I said before, we are not competing with cars on speed, we drive them. This is how we need to think about it, and and we need to bring in our own judgment, creativity, empathy, our unique characteristics, and the things that keep us human. Any kind of business, any kind of learning happens when humans interact with humans. So, so and all the rest are just tools for us. That's how we should think about it.

SPEAKER_00 54:47

I find that very encouraging that you suggest that humans are still needed in this process. So, again, Pedos, thank you again for taking the time. Everybody, we'll catch you on the next episode. Uh, we're gonna have some links in the show notes to go and learn more about Learn Worlds. Thanks, everybody. Thanks for tuning in to Using AI at Work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work. And a special thank you to our sponsor, Chief AI Officer, for empowering businesses with AI education and training. Visit their website for free AI readiness assessment and AI strategy guide to help you get started using AI at work. That's www.chiefaiofficer.com. Follow us on Twitter at the handle UsingAI at work and visit www.usingai at work.com for free resources to help you harness AI in your role.