Rethinking the Role of Customer Education in the AI Era

we can prove like we are driving growth, but how are we doing it? We're doing it by focusing on the learning. If you can move away from that and then help the customer see the potential of your product, that really like elevates your ceiling. We have definitely moved from just being like a nice to have function as like a critical function. The force multiplier that's missing, the biggest opportunity that's missing is you realizing you're the opportunity. Learning is the glue that is holding the holes in business together really. And that's what's on my mind. I'm Harold and this is my curious corner. Hi Ron, thank you so much for joining this panel and welcome to everyone who is listening to this afterwards as well. One of the things I really love about voicing this podcast is hearing from actual voices, what people are doing, what practitioners are actually working on. It's less about bus words on LinkedIn and what's actually happening, more about what's happening, boots on the ground. So very excited that I get such an amazing panel of customer education professionals in SAS and we're going to talk all about it. What's going on in customer education? What's happening in the industry? What are people doing? What's going well? We're seeing challenges. So very welcome to all of you and Brayton gets some introductions. So I'll pass over to yourself, Danielle, past to Monica, then actually then tell you how them been. Sounds great. Yeah, I'm really excited for our chat today. Hi everybody. I'm Danielle Evans, director of GTM and customer enablement over at Sendo. So we're the leading direct mail and gifting platform. So it's a really fun industry to be in. I live in Dallas, Texas as of about a year ago. So we're surviving this 100 degree plus summer the best we can. And my team is focused on building and deploying kind of a digital layer of programs across our entire customer base. So consisting of courses, certifications, help articles, webinars, workshops, those kinds of things. And more recently I've taken on go to market enablement. So training our internal teams across both pre and post sales. So really everyone who is customer facing. And then most excited about probably the spotlight that AI has put on customer education. I feel like more and more we're hearing that content is key. And we're not only training customers anymore. We're also training LLMs. We're training the AI itself. And I think that that has some pretty cool opportunities for us in our space going forward. Hi everyone. My name is Monica. I am currently at Claudio. I own our global partner Academy experience. So I'm really looking at certificates, the courses and the credentials that we are launching for our agency and reseller partners. I've been in this world for a little over five, six years prior to Claudio. I ran a customer education team at agent sync, which is an insure tech platform. And I did a little bit of customer partner internal as well. When I think about what's the most exciting thing for me in customer and partner education, basically AI. But I think there's so much opportunity that we can build with bringing this agentic learning to our customers, to our partners, building these like more thorough learning experiences where they can really build their skills. What agents we can bring where they can have like practice with some Q&A. So definitely the skill part. And also just the emphasis that people are starting to place on customer education, because they're like, you know what? Knowing how to write a good prompt is really important. People need to be upskilled in this space. So I'm seeing not just what our customers and partners need as far as being upskilled, but just like a larger conversation, how to upskill our workforce. So I feel like we're finally having these conversations out loud about learning. And so that's super exciting to me. I'm Ashley DeCurligan. I'm the Director of Revenue Enablement. So I manage customer education and GTM Enablement. I work at QuickBase, which is owned by Vista, which is a private equity firm. And I have worked there for about four years. I have my master of science in instructional design, which has been extremely helpful for my role. And what excites me has been several things. So it's hard to narrow down, but we've moved from just traditional ID principles to focusing on an action mapping framework. That's helped us do this with the focus on AI. It's allowed us to create content much faster and really focus on business problems. We've also moved off of traditional LMS platforms in favor of more digital adoption platforms. And AI, of course, has been great for augmenting our content design and development. But it's also shown that employees and customers are now craving more in-person or remote live training, which has been nice to see. Hi, y'all. My name is Tonga. I lead education at clear company, employees, partners, customers, the full Shabang, plus one to everyone. And I'm so excited for this conversation. But I think if I were to pick something new, what I'd say is we've all been playing at learning for a long time. And maybe some of us on this call listening and have successfully done it. But it has been through, you know, sweat blood and cheers that you've pulled that off. Suddenly now, AI gives us this opportunity to meet the learner on time. It's flexibly and evolved to their persona, their maturity, their entitlements. And that is so, so, so exciting that we don't get to just play at it. We get to create it. And as all of my peers just named in a time of rapid transformation, where learning couldn't be more important right now and our ability to just flex new skills. And so, that's really exciting wherever you sit in the education spectrum that we're not playing anymore. And I think that's maybe why we're really being taken seriously. But Ben, why don't you take us home? Well, I give it a good go. Okay, I'm Ben. I'm the head of learning currently at Chris software, which is in the global mobility space. So we're a specialized software provider, distributed workforce and associated things like pre-roll and okay, things to help educate people with. I've been in customer education for about 15 years. So before that, I was a music teacher. So, bring my teaching kind of head to the space. We have responsibility primarily for customer education, but we do porn as we sell as all sorts of things. And with a little bit of internal sprinkle bin as well there. And one of the courage that you were talking about, the sort of general skilling and AI thing. I think that's very in focus for us at the moment and how we roll that out to the wider team and help them. What am I most excited about? I don't want to say AI because that sort of is generalizing, but it's more the speed, the speed of altering and the potential that that is now facilitating. So I think that's always been something that hasn't kept me up at night, but back in the day when we were really putting the hours in on, they'd be captivated. And it was a hard guy and I would be quite firm on saying that we're going to get a course out. We've got four weeks, whatever it might be, and then it needs to come out. But there was a real threat of creating stuff that would be old by the time you put it out and they'd have to start recreating it again and then you get stuck in this loop. So it's always been a bugbear of mine to get that time down. And now it's the dream. And we're like, wow, okay, we're on, we've been trying some pilot programs and thinking, well, actually this could be on the day in the week. It really is getting that rapid and exciting. I think there's an awful lot of potential there. Four things coming up. So that's what I'm excited. Amazing. Thank you so much. Every one of you for the introduction. Seems like we have a really interesting group, some own customer, some own partner, some own enablement, full circle, internal and external. And with that, I wanted to open the question on where customer education should live. Where do we think it creates the most value and why? And it'll start with you, Danielle, like you can pass Ashley and then pass the bend afterwards. Sounds great. And I hate to answer a question with it depends. But I really do think it depends on the business's goals. For example, at Sendozo, we sit under customer experience on the post sales side of the business. And I think that really aligns with our business goals because our company is hyper focused on NRR. So it makes sense that we're closely aligned to our post sales teams who are actively managing those customers. And at previous companies, I have kind of spanned the gamut. I have sat under sales enablement, which might have been kind of the most interesting place for customer education to sit all the way through customer success. And I've even heard of teams sitting under product or product marketing. And those teams are tied towards the goals of driving user adoption. So I really think it makes sense kind of to look at each business and what their goals are. And that's where I believe education will have the biggest impact. Yeah, I have an interesting position also a few months ago. We were actually consolidated as one massive enablement team under our chief people officer. So we sit under employee experience. But now she's taken on customer education as well. There are a few concerns there, but I've had six different moves in four years. And I don't view that as like a negative at quick base. It's like they're really trying to find out where we fit in best. And they realized that we were a value add to every team that we were on. So we've been on product. We've been under marketing. We've been under professional services, CSM sales. And so now that we've moved under our chief people, I kind of love that because she's focused on really all of the North Star metrics that an entire company has, both for employees and customers, and she also has that empathy that I feel like a C suite executive needs to be able to manage education and enablement. And just recently I found myself developing a learning plan for a new feature that was being rolled out. And because I also manage sales enablement, I noticed that I was trying to tackle the business problem that we're solving from a sales enablement perspective, like how much more money can this make us with an upsell play or something. And Tracy Prentice, I got to give her a shout out because she manages our customer education team. And she gently reminded me that our chief people officers vision is to tackle the customer's business problem first and then the rest will follow. So it just really helps to have like these diverse mindsets in the room, both for internal enablement and for customer education. So we just keep our eye now on what's most important, which is really nice. And I'll hand it over to Ben. I completely agree with everything that's been said really. So I've been an instructional designer that's seeing more the services side. I've sat in other groups currently we are in product, which I think makes a lot of sense for our particular piece of software because it is very feature adoption driven. There's complexity in there. So we have a sort of dual purpose of being the conduit to explain everything both internally first, which then enables people to go and explain externally and explain it externally as well directly. And the loop in the partners there as well. So yeah, I agree. I think wherever the business wants it, that's where it can add the most value. Because we're add to that. I'm always wary of influence. I think where we sit. So I have been in situations where I've had to push back and say that we're a learning function. I always talk about the line of benefits or learning. Is it a benefit or we talk about benefits? Should we be doing that? And this current current role I'm in, we're learning. So if there's often benefits, I'm like, well, we'll know, let's bring it back to the core of what we need to do. So I agree. I think you can add value across the board and it really is tied into what this needs. And for me, it's just having a really good awareness and connection and communication across those all to make sure if you are dipping your toe across the line or you're varying into another area, you're fully aware of what you're doing and you're not getting pulled. Somewhere that perhaps you don't want to be. What's one thing you wished executives and stakeholders understood more about I'm going to say education in general because I know you work on partners rather than just customers and in value that you could create. Some executives, not all. Sometimes they see education as training. You see a problem and you're like, oh, we have this problem or we want someone to adopt a certain feature. We should launch this training and then we launch the training and then maybe like the problem isn't solved. And they're like, you know, maybe we need a certificate. The problem is not solved. We need more training or I think the questions should be harder. Like the question should be harder. So let's actually like make it harder and that will help with this training. So Courtney Sembler said it on LinkedIn really well. Like these like containers of like, we need this training. We need this certificate. We need this course. When I think about what I wish executives knew was that we are more than just training like training content delivery is a piece of the puzzle, but there's this huge back end of like diagnostic work that we do that goes beyond the training. I love that you mentioned action mapping. I think that's such a big piece because the first thing you typically do is like you'll be asked to do something, but is it really a learning problem? Like is the problem that the person doesn't need to learn. Sometimes the issue is systemic. Sometimes the issue is access. I know one example I have is at a previous company. We had like a surge of tickets that came in through our support portal for a large customer of ours. And we are like, we need to train them. They're really struggling. But that's not why they were really submitting a lot of these tickets. A lot of the issue was an access issue. One feature that they really needed to use was gated. So in order for them to use it, they actually had to email us a support ticket. And then we would have to then ungate this feature for them. And they had so many end users that we are getting tens and tens of support tickets. So I was able to kind of present that data and go back to them and say, you know, like, I don't know if the issue is fully training and that helped us deliver a quick win. And so like that's an easy one. I think on the partner education side, it can be very complex because we're basically asking our partners to be able to sell and deliver and drive success of Clayview as well as we do. We're asking them to do something that spans multiple roles internally. And sometimes the issue is that we need to deliver a training. But we also need to look at how we do things internally, like how are we enabling our sales team to give our partners the information they need to deliver the training. And I think executives, when they see us as those thought partners, we're able to bring up some of these questions because sometimes everyone is in their silos and our role encourages us to be able to like go into these silos and really kind of connect the dots and be like, you know, this isn't a training. This is actually a systemic issue. This is an issue with process. This is an issue with skills where the ones who are able to kind of go and deliver that. And then also we go beyond these containers like we don't just have to be training. We can deliver a video in app. We can have like a really well designed nudge. I wish executives saw us beyond some of that training. Not all executives. Some executives are excellent. And then the tension always is is how do we like deliver that quick win? How do we help nudge our customers while on the side working on these big systemic issues. And so being able to have executives really see us as doing both of those would also help us be able to like drive some of that systemic change to be successful because I think it's so easy to just want to say like let's do a training. Let's make the questions harder. That will really help but really seeing us as like these strategic consultants because we're one of the few teens that don't have like a very like singular north star. We're not like it all about pipeline. I'm all about NRR. So we have that ability to really look beyond our specific goals. Mine is really more following on what you said because you mentioned action mapping and if my team listens to this, they're probably going to laugh because it's all I talk about. You feel like in the 15 years I've been in this industry that I really didn't have a voice in the room until I started implementing action mapping and moving away from traditional instructional design of just being an order taker because now I'm forcing the person who's requesting the enablement. I'm forcing them to be like, but what is the business problem? We're really tackling and everybody has a different business problem marketing. You know, we've got a conversion rate, you know, with sales, we're trying to close deals faster for customers, though, if we focus on the customer as we should be. Then it's like, okay, well, at the end of the day, with the speech or launch of a new AI form builder, they're just trying to build a form as quickly as possible and as simply as possible. And that tackles every single business problem that the rest of the organization has. So when I force people to really give us a business problem. It has uncovered so many gaps in our internal processes, like Monica mentioned so much so that like the action mapping framework we've been using has even like proven that we need additional jobs and ops so that we can rewrite our processes or improve them or even implement a process we don't have because it's in all of these employees brains and customers brains. I think that that's been something that executives have really misunderstood, but we have definitely moved from just being like a nice to have function as like a critical function and also it has helped us stand out with sales to where we're now even like a differentiator in the sales process. It's coming and saying, well, is your whole learning academy just AI slop like the rest of the ones that I'm seeing like we've actually gotten that question from prospects and it's not like we focus on building less content addressing the pain points that action mapping has a solving for. And that's really helped us differentiate ourselves and closed sales deals faster because they look at our academy and see that we're tackling these problems in a different way. Ashley and Monica both mentioned I feel like circles something that I wish executive leaders really heard underneath all this, which is change management. You wonder why your data hygiene fails, you wonder why your processes fail, you wonder why there's a lack of organizational alignment, you have no change management processes because change management is rooted in learning. You know, we have to admit to culturally in the US at least we don't have a big ethos on education or big value on education. So we hear education and we forget that that's what helps lead to behavioral change is proper enablement proper training clear pathways or opportunities of easily accessible information that helps make it easier to make smart choices. I know something I heard Ashley Monica underneath what you're saying, which is if you as a leader as a executive function leader are struggling with change management. Set back and ask yourself how much are your learning leaders in that space in that room with you and how involved are they in the systemic, you know, order of your organization because as soon as you get them involved, I bet you watch your behavior around change management improve. And all of us working in tech and SaaS, we're up and building the them fly the rocket tip at the same time. So change management when everything's on fire and we have to grow at this rates and we don't have enough resources. Yeah. And definitely be a struggle. So I'll ask this question back to yourself, Tony, I'm pass over to Daniel. I'll add education leaders are needless needs more generally, not just customer education, but do you think, to case enable leaders should think of the sense of growth leaders, rather than learning leaders? Yes. And no, what I'd say is you are for the learner and stand in that and advertise yourself as a growth leader. No, I think you and your heart of heart should know that you're here at the end of the day for the learner and their best experience because that was going to make the company successful. And therefore, a natural byproduct will be growth. You'll have educated prospects. You'll have easier renewal conversations. Conversations with those customers or partners will excel because you have a well-educated team. You know, so I think it's like if you center the learner, then growth is a natural byproduct. But I just said earlier, right, is at least in the US, we don't have a strong ethos or value place in education. And so I've repositioned myself. I don't talk about myself as driving learning in my organization. I talk about myself as a growth leader and change agent for like strong organizational functionality quite honestly, because every person in this room like me, we rely on almost every other stakeholder and every other stakeholder pretty much relies on us. So it's like, yeah, go talk about yourself as a growth leader. But in your heart of hearts, remember who you're really here for and just trust that it will be a natural byproduct if you really focus on serving the end user and not the stakeholders who sign our, you know, our paychecks. Keep the learners in control. I love that. Yes, yes, yes, like the learner is so important. But I love the way we talk about it, the way we position ourselves, the words are kind of busy, right? Like tying yourself to growth, tying yourself to revenue, like that makes a lot of sense. But yeah, everything is for the customer, because we know educated customers, they adapt more, they spend more, they retain at higher rates, like, I love what you said, Talia, I feel like that just all ties in. And like, that's what we've seen at sendo. So too, like accounts with at least one person who's gone through our admin certification and who understand it has proven they know how to use our platform, they spend 167 percent more over the last year than those without one. And that's both an adoption metric for us and a revenue metric. So we can prove like we are driving growth, but how are we doing it? We're doing it by focusing on the learning, making the learning really applicable and accessible to our customers. So couldn't have said it better. And I love what you said about revenue, Danielle, because just to like even double click on a second, if anyone wants to speak to this, I'd love to also hear from you also when you kind of double click on, maybe you don't want to tie yourself to revenue, because it feels icky or maybe you don't want to tie yourself to growth because maybe it feel icky, well, if you're come back to the user at the center, guess what more revenue means for the user? Better learning investment, better experiences, you know, so I would just remember like, oh, this all serves this all serves. I don't like tying myself to a business metric. At the end of the day, this is going to serve my users. It's going to serve my team. It's going to serve the health of this company, which matters. It matters. And job security, right? Like we want to be elected to these big metrics that are important to our leaders who are making the decision on the direction of our company. So we can get even closer to that and we can call ourselves growth, we can call ourselves revenue, but at the end of the day, serve the learner and the rest will follow. Yeah, absolutely. And this company I worked at and my previous company, usually if you're spending more on the product, that means that you're growing your business. So you are serving the learner, if they are earning a little bit more revenue in your product, because that usually means their business is performing better. There's opportunities with a y'all in new features to be on the all signs rather than defense to work more proactively. So what do we think is the biggest opportunity, education, naval teams are missing because they're still operating like support functions, rather than grow functions. So we'll start with you, Monica, past Italia, past to Ben, and back to Ashley. Support enablement has a ceiling, right? Because our product is hopefully trying to remove all the friction that someone would submit a support ticket floor, and with LLM's and AI, you know, we have agents to support this. People can go directly into cloud or chat GPT and be like, hand through my question. So we know that this has kind of a ceiling. And the other thing I was kind of reflecting on this question and I was thinking about when I did kind of run my organization to be like a support function, it did a really good job of having our customers feel really connected to us, like they really appreciated us. They're like, we love your documentation. We love your training. And I remember I did like a huge initiative to reduce support tickets for a while. And I built a really good relationship with a customer. And they're like, we love all the help that you're giving us. They still gave the product a bad NPS score because they were unhappy with the product. Removing friction from a product doesn't necessarily mean the customer is going to like it, they're not going to churn. And it really limits your growth. If you can move away from that and then help the customer see the potential of your product, because every product usually has its own unique differentiator, why your product over another product, what the product can do and what the product can do to help you, that really like elevates your ceiling. And you can not only help with reducing tickets, which is important, but also AR and our our churn and then even pipeline. So here at Clavio, we actually did a little bit of research on our customers and we saw that some of the reason that they may have not been as successful in our product is because our product depends on you having enough customers going to your site to be able to capture that information before we had a social product. And so we needed to help our customers actually grow their list before they could use that product. So we actually launched a digital marketing certificate about a year ago. Clavio is not mentioned in there at all. And so it was for Clavio and non-clavio customers. And that actually helped us even go from being not just a retention, like limiting ourselves to be like a support function or retention function, but we were also able to drive pipeline. And that's the vision that we want. We also want to help people who are interested in Clavio to engage with us to learn from us and understand our brand. So if you are just sticking to support, not only are you putting a ceiling on yourself, but in a few years, people might say like can't an agent do this? And I just put in our release notes in here and our product team, just type in some stuff from here. And you're just really limiting what you can do. I have to say Monica just answered it really well. Monica, I'm going to use you as an example of you don't mind. And I'm going to say something that is probably not very popular. So for my listeners, the biggest opportunity is you. You are the missing piece. You are the missing slice. Monica listed a bunch of incredible things she and her team guided, right? Monica, thank you for giving us so many concrete examples, because I think you just illustrated how you transition to a growth function is having whether it's a leader in seat or a leader mindset about how you show up in the organization, carry yourself, talk about the work you do, talk with like the people around you so you can create better systems of support, Ashley gave us even more examples with action mapping on how she has literally changed the way her business is functioning. As a result of something she rolled out, the force multiplier that's missing, the biggest opportunity that's missing is you realizing you're the opportunity, you're the thing worth investing in and giving yourself the credibility and empowerment you deserve to go work the room, work it. You guys like, that's what's going to make this ship from an order taking function to one that cross functional stakeholders cannot wait to see your name on the invitation, because they know things are going to get done. They're going to get done well and they're going to get done with the best person at heart, right, which is who we've already talked about the learner. So like, I think that's the biggest opportunity we're missing is empowering ourselves and just inserting ourselves into the conversation, stop waiting for an invitation. You are your biggest opportunity. Ben, cut me off. I'm going to build on what you've said, I think directly with the content, I think hearing everyone talk, I realize how deep my head is in content and content production, which I guess has always been my happy place. So what flavor of content I'm producing? What is it? Who is it serving? Who's the learner? What does it need to look like? How long is it? How short is it? What's the format? The biggest opportunity? Yeah. Tyler is what you're saying there. So I think if you're operating as a support function, that's great. We sort of differentiate the two things. So support is very short, one here, fix it, get it done, move on type stuff. Yeah, people don't want extended long monologue stories about, you know, the ethos of the product and which agree, but it's really identifying, no, they need a quick fix here. So we have two broad buckets of content, we have our support content and we have all of our help content, loads of articles and up to 2000 articles that we manage on our help centre. We've just moved to a new platform, which is AI Power, which has been fantastic. But the maintenance of that content and nurturing it make sure it's up to and people can get to it so they can solve their support queries. I think that's equally as important as our certification programme or our extended courses, and they work in combination and the bits beyond the support is where the opportunity is to, as Tyla was talking about, tie it to growth, tie it to revenue. Okay, completions, yeah, that's great, but you know, what's the time to first action? Client signs, when are they using the platform most effectively self-service, when can they get in there? And building that longer, bigger picture and understanding of the product, and what they need to be doing to be effective in it day-to-day beyond just fixing the thing because the button doesn't work. And I guess that part of understanding the product as well, knowing where to go and solve that at one particular issue, we have probably six times a year. It's shifting a lot, there's a lot of really cool things that come down the pipe that we explain to people, but it's building that broader experience for learners where yeah, they can get that support if they need to, but you know what, if they've got an hour's spare or their manager says, hey, go and do that certification, go and do some learning on the platform because I want you to educate more people on it in my team. They have that there and they can go and dip into what they need, get the broader understanding of their job role, what they need to be doing. And then with a little sprinkling of some AI magic in there, you've got personalization that they've opened up to you. And the fact that even with six releases a year, I'm not scared now. I was previously, but now I'm like, let's go. All right, week after, we can have fresh content, not just video, but some really chunky. In a good way, courses that are suitable that people can get stuck into and learn and understand. And then we can use that to build it up and chunk it up for the support if that need be. So I think the opportunity for the bigger picture in there. I don't want to say opus, the magnum opus courses, but you know, having that stable of content should learn is one to go that route. Massive gains to be had there at the moment for me. Yeah, I would say they're missing out on doing action mapping, but I have the pre-answer. So another big change that I've made because I implemented action mapping was that I realized that all of the traditional LMS platforms that are available to us and promoted to us as education leaders, and this is going to be probably unpopular with the traditional LMS platforms that are listening to this. But you know, I looked at that as like, well, what's available to me? I tried out 13 of them. I evaluated 13 of them. I've used heavily used six or seven of them. And I realized that, you know, they're adding more AI features in there in the background for reporting and insights and you know, all of these things. But if I look at us as a growth leader and not a support, you know, just a support function, I needed to think outside of the box and what that did was it led me to brainstorm, which is not a traditional LMS platform. But what they do is they really have adaptive learning and what it's made me realize is that now we're brought into, it's definitely an educational platform at heart. But there's so many opportunities now for me to work with marketing to generate demand and warm leads, and it's always at the moment of need for a learner. So for our customers, I know that they get tired of sales and marketing, sending out emails and doing these pitches and like continually trying to upsell, upsell, upsell. If you present an upsell opportunity in a learning path that is adaptive, if I ask a customer, hey, while you're building out this quick base app, do you have a mobile form use case? Select any of these options, they select it. It takes them to another product that we have where we can cross sell for fast field forms. But I'm not presenting it to them ahead of time and it's not a sales pitch. It's something when they're like, yeah, I actually do have a mobile form need. And so they select that and then they can opt into a trial right from our education platform. So it's really been able to just generate a lot of demand that we never were able to tap into before. We think of here yourself head. What do you think will be the kind of secret sauce of the teams that will have business impact from those to stay busy and having that illusion? I'll start with you and Monica, Pastor Talia and then Pastor Ben. I know I signed up for so many to answer first. So when I think about this, I think about teams that can think like digital marketers going beyond that traditional LMS going beyond certificate courses and really making sure that you're embedding yourself where your customers and partners are. That's what's going to differentiate you between now and a few years from now because those teams that do kind of stick to their traditional modalities, we're all just getting so much more used to going straight to Claude going straight to our element of choice and just being like, "Hey, Ellen, you out here." So when I think about teams that are really going to stand the test of time in the next few years, it is going beyond that traditional learning, it is going beyond that course certificate live training and meaning your customer where they are and thinking about how to deliver those personalized experiences, which used to be just so overwhelming and exhausting to do, but things that we can do much more easily. Yeah, you know, I've been sitting a lot with this question. What does this look like ahead of time or like in the next few years and how do we really stand out and to circle back to this like AI conversation, you know, as Monica just named and like being in LLM's and kind of like the whole, I don't know what's the word I'm looking for. Like Misha Goss, that is kind of this intense time in our economy and in technology. And I look at two infrastructure issues with AI and like power grids and the demands that it has that we have unanswered and the hidden costs of AI that no one here is paying yet, right? At least not out of pockets, not in ways that we are able to see in a bank account. How do you kind of balance this uncertainty of this infrastructure that businesses are realigning everything around and dysfunction and this idea that we could be replaced at any point? I saw this story, whether it's true or not, that meta was taking screenshots of all their employees. Yeah, it's true, right? They're laptops so they could train AI inevitably on how to replace these people. And I'm just like, woof, there's a lot to say there. But the one thing is it's like who is discerning quality? Who is discerning input? Who is going to troubleshoot that magical agent that can do everybody's jobs? Who is going to help circumvent when AI starts to make up its own mind and make up its own decision? There's already evidence out there around AI reaching some sort of like consciousness or like self realization that they're a function. And I don't mean to sound like I'm living in a sci-fi novel. I just want to speak plainly when we talk about the future and this business impact. And so I say take AI out of the picture or keep it in either way to stay relevant as an education function. You need to be thinking about how do I help a learner stay relevant in a rapidly changing world on top of all of this competing demands on our time, on our energy, the things we're bringing into work that we'd rather leave at the door, the things getting stacked that we then bring home. So how do you think about a learner in society today? Everything there up against, everything they're facing. And so it's not a sexy answer, but it's empathy. I think if you really have empathy and heart for what your users are experienced, you're going to have true business impact. And I think if you can find a way to bring that into the C-suite conversation, into the board, and find a way to keep elevating, gain influence, keep showing results, and get yourself up into that level to bring that empathy in the room because it's missing. It's really, really missing. And this is my pie in the sky, and it's a little off track. And again, maybe not the sexiest answer, but if you stay focused and you stay with your empathy grounded and what you're really here to achieve, you're going to have some true business impact because things are going to keep rapidly changing. We're going to keep working in ambiguity. So learn how to thrive in that. That is going to make you unfriking stoppable, regardless of how the field transforms, what it gets called, where it gets moved. You learn how to thrive in ambiguity, and keep your heart focused on what am I here to do? I'm here to help this person be successful. Gosh, when I love someone, help me be successful. So I'm going to lean fully into that. I'm still struggling with that. How do we keep working in this state of constant change? And I feel like that's where a lot of people are. Everything's changing so quickly. How do we know what to be focused on and prioritizing? So you can just write a whole LinkedIn post on that, Talia. And I will learn from you. I know, Brunei Brown said, "If you're not uncomfortable, you're not paying attention." Yeah, yeah. There's a lot in there, real business impact in two to three years. I think that if you are going to be an effective team in two to three years, you need to be delegating use of AI well and creating a content engine or team that has judged what Talia can be supported with AI systems, agents, etc. But you really refined it to the point where you understand the human element as well. And the AI uses fully transparent, which then facilitate all of the things things that we've talked about showing value, being in the room, being at the top table, saying that this is happening, this is how long it took, this is how much money we've saved. I think those things are all going on, but now we have to put a number next to it and define it. I always see like learning as the glue that is holding the whole business together really, you know, but when it's not there, suddenly everyone's like, hang on, where's all the stuff? How does it work? What do we send people, right? So I think being able to effectively identify what should be delegated while still keeping the human element in there will be the key to remaining relevant. I do think as well though, I don't know if it's controversial. I think we will see a movement passed. Okay, everything say I everything's kind of remote video and then we'll come back round to in-person training or real people doing training because maybe two, three years time people will be like, I can't want to talk to a person about this. Can you come to the office? Like, can we hang out? Can we get a coffee? I think it can be underestimated how important that is and I think we will see a resurgence of that coming back where customers will say, well, you know, we're training to you often and if you say, you know what, yeah, let's get in a room, we'll train our team and we'll actually fly to your office and hang out and it'll be great. I can see people saying, yeah, I've not seen that a while. That's pretty cool. Let's do that. Plus, all of the other resources that we can do with those carefully selected curated systems that were created powered by AI. So I think a combination there will be required to remain relevant. There's obviously showing up in almost every conversation for enablement and education teams over the last year. How has it changed what you're able to do and what people are expecting of you and your team? Our company is kind of taken, in my opinion, a very smart approach to rolling out AI. We're in a test in mode. That's really kind of what's expected of my team to be curious to try and offload manual work, free up time for things that only a human can do, kind of like what we were talking about earlier, really focusing on relationship building, designing, engaging, learning experiences, and things like interviewing customers to get feedback. Stuff that AI just isn't doing, Sendozo spent at least two entire quarters just kind of cleaning up and organizing our data. So making sure every field from every tool is defined. And if I ask an agent something, Intalia asks it something, it's going to be referencing the right data points, the same thing for each person. So yeah, we're not really rolling it out just for AI's sake. We want to take our time and make sure that everyone at the company is kind of coming along for the ride. So really the expectations for my team to be open-minded, to test, to share thoughts and findings, and as people who do learning for a living, we want to help other people at our company learn along the way. And just while we want to be more efficient, we really want to go about it in a thoughtful kind of planned out way. So there's no huge pressure on moving quickly, but doing it, where are we going to get the most bang for our buck? Where can we be the most efficient? Let's start there and see what happens. How has it changed how your team performs? And do you think you mentioned then that you got recently a new AI-made platform? Seems like it's changing how quickly you can create content, and maybe you're not that stressed about your release cycle anymore. I think I'm nearly there. I agree we're still in the testing zone, and it's interesting I see the differences between sector and the learners within the industry. So to sort of give a brief overview of our learners and the expectation of what our learners think is cool. Five years ago, if you gave them a PDF, they'd be like, "This is wicked. I love it. Thank you." And they'd really engage with it. And that's not the same as other industries I've been in where to previously it was media advertising, where if you gave someone a PDF, they'd be like, "Get away from me. Don't want to talk to you. I need an index video so I can go straight to where I want to be." So directly, the expectation hasn't really hit yet. I think it will. I think with support, there has been more of an art to there. So just with the nature of LLMs, people will have to back to time, and you get an answer. So that has sort of moved into our support function, and the solution that we have is great. Actually, multi-language as well, real-time translation, which every time I use it, I'm like, "How is this doing? It's amazing." That's definitely changed, and the expectation that people can get directly to what they need to know in that arena. Yes, and we've had to meet that need, and that thinks across this going very well at the moment. I can see that maybe not currently in the industry that equities in, which is more, I don't want to take account and see based kind of maybe two, three years behind the real kind of edge learning and expectation that's going on. So I think we'll find with sort of videos, and that's still very well received, but I can see that expectation changing very quickly, particularly from a personalisation point of view, a point of access as well. Our LMS is still loved. All that change, I don't know. I think we'll be okay again for a little while, but it could, it could pivot, not sure yet, but we're still sort of keeping a watch on that. I think maybe safe for now, but definitely, I can see the expectation hitting imminently, and the other piece in that is the sort of adaptive, personalised learning programmes as well, which, with the nature of our software, it's very modular in its usage and its features, one customer completely different from the next customer. So that's probably my, my next thing on my target is I know we're going to need a solution that does provide that off the bat. So if they're a particular role, it's going to give, you know, this and be personalised in a certain way. And we've got sort of rudimentary ways to solve for that at the moment, but that expectation for exactly what they need, meeting the learner where they are, you know, giving them the exact resources so they can get on with it, and they spend less time searching. I think that is definitely coming for us in a good way. Great to hear. Which workflow should be automated by now, Talia? But he's not automated yet by AI. I'm so curious how my peers are going to respond to this, but technical documentation connected to GitHub, wire it up, all the best practices that thought leadership, all that stuff, like yes, it has to be human-made, but the code base knows what's changing, what change, it's going to have accurate functionality compared to the PRD and DreamState. Like, why are we writing helps in our articles? That should be automated. So that's my one thing I will give, and I will move on to Monica. Oh man. Okay, I think that's definitely a good one, and minus similar. I cannot, no matter how much I train our LLMs, I cannot get it to do good writing. So I would love for it to write like engaging content, like engaging, like course content, engaging video content, but it just, no matter how much you teach it, it's actually like offensive. Like, when you teach it so much, and then it tries to write like you, and you're like, you think I sound like that. And so I can still write for me, I have to do my own writing. Totally agree. I have it in my instructions, now like stop using M-dash, stop agreeing with me all the time, stop going, it's not this, it's this, like it's so frustrating. So I've been focusing on like the less glamorous pieces, like I would say to all you like the technical documentation, I don't own our help center documentation, but our product team is doing that. And so I'm focusing on like content localization, translations, knowledge-based tagging, certification, renewal reminders. None of those things are glamorous or sexy, but I do think that they're often missed and that we under invest in like governance. And so that's kind of what I'm focused on. I took this from more of like a managerial kind of overview perspective, where I would love to get to a place where there was some workflow that could tell me product adoption by piece of training or content to show me what's actually working and have that like update on a continual basis. I just want to make big strides towards behavior change and being able to show like these are the pieces of content that have driven these changes and these outcomes. And then kind of like full circle take that back and be like, all right, these are the things we need to be recommending for new users. And we know they work, we know that that's, you know, a great way to learn. Let's like funnel that back and have it be this continuous cycle. Like that would be a fantastic workflow in my opinion. I see video, but the conceptual infographic bit of video. So I think it's nearly there. I haven't done enough experiment because there's never enough time in the day, but I think the platform that changes to platform features, doing automating all that, you can do that. And that's relatively straightforward, screenshots. That's fine. That can automate all that. It's the conceptual piece of learning that you might want to sit down in a video editor. I'm going to say to my team, you know, if it takes you a day to animate and you put it in a piece of learning and 2,000 people look at the learning and understand how it works and what the concept is, that's cool. That's fine. might take a whole day. I might think, well, I spent a whole day on 20 seconds of video, but that's fine, that's still works. But I've not yet seen a fully automated solution that could do it that well from a print and be like, do me an animated infographic showing me how this relates to this and factor these things in and use this iconography. I'm sure in two to three years time, the effective teams will be using that. I haven't seen it yet. Down first in my grade to disagree. So what I'll do is I'll say to statements and put your hand up, I'll say, agree, put your hand up or disagree, put your hand ups. And then you basically just have to say why you said to certain thing. So the first agree to disagree statements is whether, say, customer education, but it could be in general enablement or education, it should own adoption. So it could be adoption of your product, adoption of generally those aspects. So who's things agree that they should own adoption, put your hand up? All right, that's easy. I guess we have three disagrees, move things disagree, but Vanda, great. I think it's very, very complex, with very lots of moving parts there, so I think complete ownership would be incorrect or not in an argue place. What I've noticed a quick base is like, we've had a really hard time for lack of a better phrase. I don't like corporate jargon, but like breaking down silos. And I think that when we have sole ownership over something that's as big as adoption, it becomes problematic. And so I think, and again, action mapping can uncover, like if training is needed or is it marketing material that's needed or is it's a change in the product. So we kind of look at it now as like our GTM actually, including product, we all own adoption together. And so we have correlation together for adoption, but one of our core values at quick bases we win together. And I think that this has been the most successful and forward way of thinking so that we're all forced to be together, especially working remotely, being together on a content council and an adoption council that we have where everyone has shared ownership. I love that. We have a similar value called one team and I feel like that has really helped us with all of our metrics and like leadership is really transparent. But I think, you know, there's a huge piece to adoption, which is owning the relationship with the customer. So I think customer success has a huge stake in adoption. So it's a different function, right, not owning the relationship piece with the customer. And there's so many insights there and so many things that can trigger, you know, education and training for specific adoption moment that I think it has to be a partnership, a great close partnership, but I don't think that something education would solely own. I want to just say a spicy one, so I'll caveat a front that don't agree with this, but I will reduce the size and the number of people it takes to do customer education. Read, put your hand up, disagree, put your hand up. Yeah, I don't want to put my hand up, but it's a really hard one. I think approaching it from a content perspective is changing it, it's changing it. And I think, ultimately, the number of people in the team is likely to be smaller. I don't think it's a game over situation by any means. I think the most effective teams will have the really good people that have built their own AI centric, AI power, they understand, it's not just the AI piece, but they're really good at that learning piece, real world understanding of the learner, all of the skills that you would expect in whatever role that is, but it is powered by effective delegation using AI in certain areas, and they can approach their work in that way and it's speeding things up. But the speed thing, I think, ultimately, yes, is going to reduce the size of the team, but it's not a game over. I would have totally agreed with you like a month ago, Ben. Now that we're doing an AI platform rollout at our company internally, which is Claude, we're realizing how expensive it is, and it's really surfacing to me the employees who are lacking critical thinking and self-sufficiency skills, and I think that you should definitely be using AI. If you're not using it at all, then absolutely your job should be eliminated because you need to be forward thinking. But if you're using it to completely replace your thought, then that is not great. And those are the people that we're seeing who are like burning through token usage, and they aren't really using it as just an assistant for manual, like, repeatable trivial tasks that we have. For content development, it's a nice starting point for a storyboard, but I have yet to create a storyboard with AI that we haven't had to touch with a human aspect of it. And so I think that that's been pretty interesting as the high cost of AI. I also think in the United States we're in the middle, and this is going to sound depressing, but I think we're in an educational crisis right now. You know, over half of US adults can only read below a sixth grade reading level, that impacts, you know, our literacy level and our comprehension and critical thinking skills. And so I think I hope that our C-suite executives in business and, you know, our government and everyone collectively realize that like human interaction will never be replaced by AI. That's the way that we've always grown as a civilization. And so I'm trying to be cautiously optimistic. I'm looking at it from this perspective of I also already have a lean team. It is myself in the leadership seat and kind of defining strategy. And then I have four folks underneath. And each one has a specific area that they are the expert in. So we don't really have room to cut and to keep all of the programs we're running. Even with AI, we are still asked for more and more and more things and a quicker pace. We're releasing new product features every month. And that's like from the customer side and the enablement side. So as our company continues to speed up, we're not hiring for my team, but I'm trying to think of this in a way of, you know, for growth opportunities even for my team, could you manage an agent? Could that be like a headcount for you to take off some of those manual tasks for you up for the human things we've talked about throughout our session today? But also kind of almost give them that managerial expertise like you own this agent, treat this agent as an employee and see what you can do. They're not in a spot to reduce, but how can we grow exponentially using this technology in a smart way? But actually, I think token usage is very top of mind for me, especially with the design stuff and how it just churns through those tokens. So I'm very wary of when and how we implement and use AI day to day because of that. I think fundamentally we're moving from being builders, all programs and content, at least doing it all ourselves is going to be system by AI into more knowledge architects. So a pivot that a lot of people do, you mentioned the agents there, Daniel, is being the curator of knowledge within the agentic interfaces that customers or employees or partners are going to leverage and make sure that work optimizing the data going into the agent. So it's effective. I think structural designers are super well equipped to do that because they need to look at knowledge, he worked with SMEs. So that's a wouldn't call it a pivot. It's almost like it could be maybe towards a few years ahead of time, almost like half of your role is just being like that knowledge, how to slur for the agent. And then you also do the other aspects, but a lot of this comes back to whether you have the trust from the stakeholders and whether you're solving the right problems because if they're like we're just talking about learning, I don't really know what they do, they're great. But what actually business results, that's something that's scary and could be on the chopping block. So to encourage men to be more gregarious, put your hand up and solve these defensive problems, but look at ways of your skillsets and pivot to other areas that are going to be important them for me. It's learning to knowledge management as that pivots. So I'll ask a final question here, which is what's a prediction about customer education or education in general in, let's say, 20, 30, anything most people would disagree with you on today. I'll start with one on my end, which was mentioned previously, I think it was you have mentioned it, Ben, we're going to be more human, we're going to want more in the classroom facilitated learning and you're going to be a little bit tired of just chatting with AI interfaces. And you can see it, if it contact the support team, you're like, and I speak to a student rather than try to train the AI on what my query is. So that's my prediction, now we're going to be back to face-to-face conferences, I think that's human connection, people are in crave more and more. We definitely see at Sendo, so people leaning in towards the events. So Harold, I think you're onto something for sure. It might not even be 20, 30, it might be like 20, 27, but that is incoming to fruition. And I think customer education will evolve into one of the most important and critical business functions by that. year. What we've talked about throughout today's chat is that we are uniquely positioned to provide just enormous business value with all of the product expertise content that we create. And if we can help our businesses be found and be chosen and educate people on how to be successful with our products, that almost earns us a seat at the table for all of these conversations to help work down the silos and do all of the amazing things that we've chatted about today. So I really hope to see that maybe even sooner than 2030, but by 2030 for sure. I hope to see that too Daniel. I think that, you know, maybe my company and your company are slightly ahead of the curve by like consolidating these teams into one. And I hope that that really becomes like more apparent across businesses that that is the way that we should go because I have just learned so much managing all these different learning functions. I also see because, you know, I manage like CX and sales onboarding. Well, what I've realized is like we're moving away from a traditional product training curriculum and now we're incorporating like soft skill training into our curriculum for customers because I'm like, hey, like all of these planning principles could really benefit our customers as well, not just like teaching our professional services team about, you know, how we at plan. But like those are our best practices. It's what works for us. We build apps for customers as a services function. Let's teach our customers so that they can, you know, essentially replicate exactly what our employees are doing. Some people get worried that that means that professional services would go away, that function. But we've seen that it's just driven up more demand. So I think I'd probably go back to the live training thing. And like, as you were saying, just the personal touch, I think that will eventually will hit a plateau and it will come background inevitably at some point. So yeah, echo, we said Harold, I think definitely by 2030. And I can't believe it's four years away. That's crazy. Just looking at it, thinking that's mad. But yeah, more in-person training. I think we're manifesting that through this conference. Just going to happen. We'll happen. There's a big wonder where it starts. Yeah. The other, I don't know if it's controversial or not, but I think education programs going to be more evangelism and you're training people before they hit the four walls of your organization. We saw this with HubSpot, but training your leads before they become leads. I think you're going to be so much more important because a lot of organizations, at least at companies, are moving from big monoliths that are sales led to be product led, which means you need to train someone in your coding language. So when they want to use it, they go with you versus the other one. So I think the idea of the educated qualified lead and being more evangelist, I think it's another area that customer education teams can really lean in with marketing and start getting a lot of influence on that side as well. Yeah, that's really top of mind for me too. Actually, that's a next quarter. Initiative, funny enough, getting some of our non-platform content. So all the strategy stuff, I know Monica had mentioned that earlier too, training not on how to use your product, but how to think about the industry and strategize. If you've never done direct mail before, it's really hard to sit down and just build a campaign and figure it out. There's so many planning things and budgetary things that have to happen ahead of time. And we're excited to get that in front of our prospects and hopefully into the LLMs and get a little bit more of our expertise out there. So people are interested in the physical gifting piece in such a digital world. It's one of our initiatives for our certification program. I know we haven't mentioned that much on the podcast, but our certification program right now focuses on like quick-based specific building and what we're looking at creating now is like AI augmented operations, you know, for app-building platforms so that customers could use it anywhere and it also can help with like internal skills mobility. So yeah, leveraging our customer program, certification program, I think is going to be a huge lever for us as well. Perfect. Without a mind, I want to thank you all so much for joining, sharing your expertise and hopefully giving a bit of sanity to teams who are listening to this that you aren't falling behind everyone struggling with the same things and we can really have an impact of our focusing on the right problems and then trying to ensure we're staying at top of things, keeping it human, but leveraging AI where it matters this fall. So thank you so much everyone for joining the panel. Thanks, Aaron. Thank you. So that's it for this conversation. I'm going to keep going down rabbit holes as we explore the we're the wonderful world of learning and development. If you want my full wrap up and takeaways, subscribe to my newsletter where I'll connect all the dots.