The biggest social challenge of our lifetime: Accenture LearnVantage's Tim Toomey on keeping people at the center of AI

Welcome to the skilled podcast from Growth Space, the place where we share stories and strategies from leaders who've turned growth and development into a competitive advantage. Our host is Omer Glass, co-founder and CEO at Growth Space. We're also hosted by Elyssa Mahendra, Executive Advisor and HR Transformation and Talent Leader and Founder of the Human ROI. Let's dig in. Hello and welcome, today we're joined by Tim Tumi, Managing Director and America's lead for Accenture Learn Vantage. He's also the former CEO of Ascendant Learning, welcome Tim. Thank you. Great to be here. We always like to start every episode with a origin story and you have quite an interesting path. So I'm just going to follow your path kind of breadcrumbs because it's really interesting. Our path to the largest enterprise learning businesses in the world isn't conventional because you started as a Marine Infantry Officer, then went on to training within the Marines, then found your way to Wharton and Harvard, then Bane and Company, a PE-backed CEO, and now inside Accenture. So tell us a little bit about that kind of journey and what are the themes throughout your career path? Well, it's definitely not something that I could have planned and Omer, I know that you have a similar background so I would love to compare notes at some point, but I think going into the Marine Corps, there's a lot of kind of mission-driven values that most people share. And I found that the thing that I wanted to do the most was continue to make an impact on people's lives in a positive way. First, as an officer in charge of a lot of folks that didn't have the same opportunities as me growing up, that I think we're outstanding members of society that needed more opportunity. And so I think really the path started with me with my first platoon, coaching a lot of people, thinking about actually getting out of the military, going to school, finding ways to advance their lives and their careers. And when I became an instructor, part of the reason why I wanted that role was because I really enjoyed that teaching aspect of being a leader. And then I got to really dive more into the pedagogy of adult learner theory of how you are able to influence people, how you're able to give feedback. For me, that part of the mission was strengthening people that were going to lead my Marines in the future. And so I took that very seriously, but I also really enjoyed, again, doing that fulton, being able to shape people, help them learn, help them uncover their own strengths, figure out areas that they can improve in, and then continue to follow them as they move on in their careers in the Marines. When I transitioned out, I never thought I was going to have an opportunity to come back to them. I had met my wife at that point. We'd had our first child. And as we know, the Marine Corps and the military in general is great for a lot of things, but it's not great for raising a family. And so we made the decision at that point that we wanted to do something different. And so I kind of applied blind into school, throughout a couple of applications, started off at the Harvard Kennedy School, getting my Masters in Public Administration, really focused on trying to do some sort of development work, because I was very interested in that. And then I realized quickly that that lifestyle looks a lot like the Marine Corps. And so I started to pivot towards trying to do something similar, but from a corporate setting, which is why I applied to Wharton, gotten to the dual degree program, and then completed that. And then, like every veteran we were just talking about that doesn't know what they want to do when they grew up. I joined a consulting firm, was fortunate enough to get recruited into Baining Company to try to figure out just what was out there. And while I was there, I had a friend of mine from business school who had gone to Alpine investors, was at part of a holding group called Alpine X, and he called me one day and said, "Hey, I think you'd be a great candidate for this job. It's taking over a technical training company, and it kind of fits your background in your profile." And as a former, they call the Marine Infantry Grunts. My knowledge of computers at the time was like extremely little. Like I knew how to turn it on, and how to use Excel, basically. But I figured I had a background in instructor-led training. I could kind of understand enough of the job that I could learn the rest. And so I jumped in about two weeks before they acquired the first founder-led company Colblobate Solutions back in 2022. Things went well. At that point, I was learning a lot. We ended up acquiring two other companies over the next two years that was accelerate and exit certified. And then we combined those three companies into Accenture Learning by the end of 2023. And then ended up exiting to learn Vantage into Accenture in May of last year. At that point, I started to look at other opportunities. I had other private equity opportunities at that point that I could go to. But I really enjoyed, again, the mission of what we were getting behind, which is really the same thing that I did in the Marines, right? Equipping people with the skills that they needed to be successful and helping them unlock future prosperity for themselves and their families. And so when I saw what they were building at Accenture, when I was given the opportunity to take a leadership role within that, it was continuing that kind of mission-driven focus that let me kind of join the Marines in the first place. I'd like to hold on that thread a little bit, Tim, because you talked a couple of times about the mission and you took that mission of kind of adult education and helping people be better and learn more and do better for their families. So you mentioned that a couple of different times. Can you talk about how that followed you through your career path? So what lessons did you learn about developing people and how you continued to build on that as you went from the grunt in the infantry to being an instructor, the war fighting instructor, to university, to vain, to acquiring through some pretty turbulent, as you described it, private equity-backed opportunities to where you sit now. I think that our listeners would love to hear more about that. Sure. I think some of the consistent themes that have seen throughout all those experiences have been that by and large, most people want to become better versions of themselves and most people know that they have blind spots but don't know how to address them. And so I think there's a lot of fear in number one admitting that you don't know something because people feel like they will look less confident or less capable. And people are also scared of putting themselves in a position where maybe they're uncomfortable and they don't want to take a shot at something that they don't think they're qualified for. And I've seen this theme repeatedly across transitioning veterans who think that they have nothing to offer in the civilian sector, you know, I've been a Marine for 20 years. What do I know about operating outside of that environment? I've seen that now with people who are looking at AI being a huge disruption within their job, saying, I've done this for my entire life, what do I do with myself now? And so there's always skills that are applicable within whatever role they're going to. They often just need to translate it and then they need that path laid out for them of how do you fill in the gap, right? And so it's a question of being able to, number one, measure what a person is able to do from a very objective standpoint, breaking that into the different skills that are both applicable to the new roles that they're looking to move into, but also the ones that they need to change and then creating that roadmap. And when you're able to give that visibility and objective non-biased and also not confrontational way, people, I think, are motivated to make that change and they feel a lot more confident about the future generally. And so there's a mindset component to it that needs to be addressed. There's a visibility component that most people struggle with. And both of those things combined give them the confidence that they need to not just recognize that that change is possible, but then actually takes steps to address it. It's interesting because you're talking about other people, basically, the skill-based economy. And we had a lot of, like, Fortune 5, like Fortune 100 executives on this show. And with a lot of them, you see a pattern that's more and more people are just hiring people according to their skills, not exactly their experience. And I think it's funny that you're talking about, like, other people as kind of like thing because this was your thing, right? Because basically what you learned how to do is, like, in the Marines, you get the grid, you're not afraid to fail and to try it and you get it, right? That's kind of like the philosophy. And in vain, you basically learn how to, like, think. And if you learn how to think and have the power to execute, kind of like, the grid together, then you can be a CEO. You can, like, do a, or, but I think your personal journey, career, there, is connected to actually what you're doing for others today. And I would like, it's maybe a good day, like, follow through to probably my next question, which is tell us a little bit about learn vantage, like, what do you do there? Sure. So learn vantage is, as I said, a new investment within Accenture to focus on that skill-based economy that, Omri, you were talking about, you know, emerging right now. The investment initially started back when, I think, two or three years ago, when Julie Sweet, our CEO, was at Davos and talking to a lot of their clients about the changes that they were seeing already coming before the AI revolution. And then the things that Accenture was doing to be able to meet that moment in history. And a lot of the clients were asking her, how do you prepare your people to be prepared for that? How do you always stay at the bleeding edge of technology? Can we get some of that as a surface? Accenture has made a billion dollar investment into this space. That's the commitment from the firm. And we have the ambition to grow into a $3 billion company within the next three to four years. Now, the services that we provide run the gamut of what you would consider to be a traditional training company. So we do have asynchronous content. we haven't seen. structure-led training. We do certifications for major OEM partners. We also partner with a lot of academic institutions to help them build the future curriculum that they're gonna need, and we can talk a lot more about how we see the four-year degree of allving. We also do sovereign skilling with governments, and we also have a very close relationship with a lot of our ecosystem partners, like AWS, Microsoft, Google, all of the major technology players, to help them also think about how their training is gonna be changing and how their certification should change and how it fits into this overall, really revolution that we're seeing within the ways of working that people are moving through. So I think, in a lot of ways, it's an incredible place to be at this time in history. I think it is one of the few institutions that really does touch everything, from government to, like I said, the major technology players to the clients that are trying to figure out these problems on the ground. And so I consider myself to be incredibly fortunate to be here at this time, to be able to help engender the change that we need, because, you know, one of the things that I talked to a lot of people about is I think that this is probably going to be the biggest social challenge of our lifetime, is trying to work through this evolution in work, and if we don't get it right, it will create enormous social unrest, right? And I think we have the blueprint to try to solve that for people. And so being able to be at a platform where you can truly have that kind of an impact is incredible. - And how do you use AI? Because basically AI kind of is the core of the revolution. And as the more, like I would imagine you, as you mentioned, like training companies, so you have a lot of trainers, a lot of basically sound tremendous experts who did ever get training, all right? And what is the role of AI in this human-led training that needs to generate the transformation within a lot of companies and governments? - I mean, we try to use AI in the same way that we recommend our clients use AI, which is, you know, there I think are good ways to use the technology and then there are ways that are harmful to you in the long run. And so we see this as something that can help accelerate the pace at which we do things like develop content or we research clients or we do, you know, general research into the future of technology, but it should never be a replacement for human decision-making or discernment. Julie has a phrase that we use a lot called human in the lead, not human in the loop. And I think that's important because we want to create an accountability structure where there's always a person making the critical decisions and AI is there as an assistant to help inform them to help them move faster, but never to replace that human judgment and that human decision-making that needs to be the central piece of any piece of work that's being done. So, you know, that's really how we use it. So I'll give you a more tactical example, right, for content generation. We will use AI potentially to do the first draft, but there always needs to be a human review to go through and make sure that that is exactly what we need. And the information that's feeding that animal on this also created by human experts. So we're not having it scrape the internet and then come up with the AI slop that we're all familiar with. We want the AI to distill the human knowledge that we've gathered over the 60 combined years of Ascendia's operating history as well as, you know, the additional expertise we bring from Accenture writ large to distill that into its core components and then have a person go through and figure out how all those pieces come together. And then do the edits to make sure that, you know, the boxes look right, right, the text looks right. It's not completely there, but there's always a human that all those critical checkpoints to say, yes, this is the correct information. You know, this is to still be expert opinions that we've gathered into its critical components and it is accurate. And then this is the final product that I feel confident putting in front of a client. - That's a great kind of tactical example. And you started off sharing. It can do really well. And there are ways that you use AI that isn't great either. So can we talk about the opposite side of that coin and what you're seeing out in the market around kind of what you called earlier in one of the prep calls, death spiral of AI investment and how companies are making big bets on the tools. But in your example, you talked about the human and the lead, which I love that language and I may borrow it, but it's this move from the popularization of digitization as the goal. So people are being light off in the name of AI, but you're seeing the success in the reinvention, not the digitization. So can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing when organizations don't get it right? - Absolutely. And I love to talk about two specific things. I think number one, the ways that companies are getting it wrong in the number two, I think the societal impact of that and maybe the way that the government's getting it wrong too. 'Cause I think they're two distinct parts of the same problem. With our clients, we talk about the urge to digitize versus reinvent and reinvention is obviously a theme with an accenture right now. But here's a scenario that we often see where a company, because of all the pressure and all the hype, starts to make a big investment with an AI. And this is something that is very common. They don't necessarily know how that's supposed to be used. They don't know what tool is the best fit for their organization. And so I was on a panel on Monday where I heard a lot of people say, we just opened up the tool to, like as many tools as possible to everybody possible and just let them use it, right? And we're just hoping to drive adoption. And what happens is that because there's not a strategy, you know, linking how the tool is supposed to be used because there are no limits or guard rails or responsible AI practices put into place. And because people aren't trained on how to use it, it turns into actually a huge cost center, right? Like the token use goes through the roof. There's not the return that they're looking for. And all of a sudden the CEO is having to come in front of the board and say, you know, how we were supposed to make this investment to save money and now we're spending a lot more money, where's the return that you promised us? And then that frustration and that short-term pressure from the board causes the CEO to look and say, what are the quick ones I can show them? And so they start to digitize processes and let go of people. They say, here's the head count reduction that's going to lead to the short-term results that I need to show the board. And what that does in turn for the employees that are using on the ground is create more resistance to adoption because if I can do my job in five minutes with AI, they can do it without me. It leads to resentment from the leadership team, right? And generally across society, the negative views of this technology start to grow. And it creates the spiral where the more the people resist using the tools, the more processes are automated, the more people are let go or not hired. And so it creates this death spiral that I think really starts to reduce, you know, the company's long-term chances of success. And I think something that's very interesting that Professor Maj, who's our chief research officer at Accenture, has said multiple times is all of these models are converging in terms of capability. And so the assumption that you have to have going into a planning session here is that everybody will have access in the future to the best AI model that's out there. And if we look at a company's competitive advantage as being a combination of its technology and its people, and if we assume that the technology is going to be almost undifferentiated in the future, then the people are going to be the thing that lets you succeed or fail. And so rather than looking at this as a way to save head count and save cost, what we should be doing is looking at ways in which AI can empower the humans to be able to be more effective. And that has to start at the top. It has to start with a very clear view of, this is what we want the technology to do for us. And once we have that view and say, you know, how do we want the human to be in the lead on all the critical processes? How do we want this to save labor in times that they can be more creative and more effective? And then it needs to be communicated to the entire organization, which is also missing a missing piece. You know, most employees, if you survey them, don't know why I think 44% of employees at companies right now don't know why there are changes happening at the company. And for a company that's implementing AI, that's terrifying. We're making a multimillion dollar investment and we don't know why it's happening. And on top of that, you know, 63% of survey employees or 65% are also not getting any training on how to use these tools. So all of a sudden, they're reading all of these, these do articles online. These tools appear. They don't know how to use them effectively. They don't know how to use them safely. And they know that if they can't figure out how to do six times the amount of work, you know, with the same amount of time that they're going to get fired. And so it's a really toxic environment. But if you have that clear communication, you have that clear enablement, now people start to see this is a way that they can actually become more productive and spend time doing things that they want to do and not formatting boxes like I used to do as a consultant or trying to figure out how to make all the text match across everything, which, you know, I wasted enormous amounts of time as a junior consultant doing. And so that's where we need to move as a society and that's where we need to move as an industry as we start to look at implementing these tools as being very strategic about how we communicate those decisions down to employees and having that enablement there to allow people to achieve the outcome that we're looking for. And in a lot of ways, it's the same kind of planning principles we use in the military, right? You have to start with the end state in mind. And then back plan how am I going to get there rather than just starting to kind of shotgun, you know, different solutions and hope that something sticks. And I think, you know, the societal impact of this, I briefly mentioned was partially the, you know, the negative view of AI that's been gathering here. But as AI started to be used in things like employment, it's also, you know, creating this, I think, despair for a lot of people that are seeing job opportunities dry up that they don't know what they need to do in order to be able to solve that. So I'll share a personal example. One of my old Marines reached out to me, you know, not more than a week ago talking about trying to, you know, he's a sales guy and he's trying to move into a different industry because he thinks that, you know, the job that he's has right now is not the one that he wants to keep going in and he might get laid off. And so he wants to move into it into a different career, but selling something similar. And this is a guy that served four years Thanks for watching. infantry, when became a police officer, you know, met his wife, had his first child decided he wanted to provide a better life. So in a lot of ways, like the American story that we all want to believe in. And I'll quickly kind of read you the text here because I think it's impactful. And I read this out loud at a conference the other day. But he was telling me about his struggles applying for a job. And what he said to me was, I do need some professional help because we were kind of catching up over text. And he said, you know, I'm only a dinosaur. He said, I became a marine because you have to have them to win wars. And I became a sales rep because you have to have them to sell. And now it seems like times are changing so rapidly in the world of AI that you either get on board or you get left behind. And he said, the thing that's blowing my mind is how it's used in the hiring process. I'm constantly tweaking my resume right to try to get the right keywords because if it doesn't hit those keywords, I'm weeded out before I even get a chance to talk to a human. It's wild. And when I called him, he said, look, I know I can do the job. I just can't, I can't get my foot in the door. And I feel like there's no hope for me to be able to do that. And what I told, you know, the panel that I was talking on was like, that's the death of the American dream in real time. And if he's experiencing that as somebody that had the resources and the benefit of training and all this background, then that a lot of Americans are feeling the same way. And I think when we look at the adverse reaction that people are having to AI, it's because of that. They can't see how this technology is going to help them continue to move forward. They can't see how their kids' lives are going to get better because of that. And that's a huge problem. Thank you for sharing the personal message because I think it illustrates what we're hearing from our colleagues, from our friends, from our family, people that I've spoken with are on the market for 18, 24 months, not because they can't do the job, but because they can't get to the human in the lead, because they're, there's the barrier. You talked about there being a confidence gap in people's ability to say, I know what I've done but I don't know how to translate that in the new world. You've also talked about the trust gap and it being three-sided. And I think that has a lot to do with what you're talking about in terms of the change management and the adoption is we're spending so much money on the tools, but we're not preparing the humans to do the work and to change the organization. But you're doing some good work as I understand at Learn Advantage, so I'd love for you to share with us that kind of three-sided triangle that is closing both the trust and the confidence gap between the employee, the employer, and the technology providers. Absolutely. And again, this is where I feel fortunate to be at a place like Accenture that has these connections because I think it is a solvable problem, but it requires in a lot of ways the industry to come together and to align on a new way of working. To quickly break down the issue, there's three different individuals that we're talking about in this kind of a scenario. There's the person who is making the technology, and they want people to get trained on the technology because obviously the more that they are trained, the more that they'll use it, and that's beneficial to the technology provider. But they don't know how to create value, like create a unit of value out of that training experience and how to make sure that that person, if they get that credential or they take that training, that value is recognized by an employer. So they're having that verification issue. Then there's the employee themselves or the worker who doesn't know what they're currently capable of. They don't know what the new jobs actually require, and they don't know how to get there. And then on the other side, there's the employer. And the employer is now faced with number one, a rapidly changing flow of work where I will write a set of job description in two weeks later. It's completely irrelevant to the actual work that person's doing. And I put that resume or that job description online, and I get five million AI-generated resumes that I can't validate. And so what do I do? I go back to the old way of hiring, which is who do I know, which creates this horrific kind of imbalance within the economy where it's all about connections and people. And I've heard this from people yesterday. Some of my wife's students were talking about it's all about who you know now because you can't get an objective look. And so to solve that problem, what we're doing is a couple of different things. Number one, we're spending a lot of time and investment with leading institutions like Carnegie Mellon University to develop that future vision on what roles are going to look like. So if I look at all of the different profiles of jobs that are going to exist in the future, what is the skill taxonomy of an AI-enabled software engineer? What are the different things that those people are going to have to learn? So that's kind of creating that future state. And we want to educate our employers, the clients that we work with on that. We want to help them map out what those future visions look like. And then we want to break it down into his component skills. Because as we said, the static job description is not going to be relevant in the future. It's going to change so quickly. We want to move away from looking at a person as you are one person assigned to this head count. And that is your job family. And that's where you live forever. Towards this idea of let's look at their skill density and their skill fluidity. How many skills does this person have? How current are they? And how can we reassemble those skills to match different needs as the nature of the work continues to change? So a lot more like the way that a traditional consulting firm would staff somebody versus a larger employer where maybe those things were more static in the past. And so we're trying to educate employers on this is the new way you have to look. You have to post relevant skills. You can't post job description and then you have to find a way to validate those skills. And to help them do that, we've developed a solution with entity to come up called the universal wallet project, which is the idea that you can get a certification from any institution from credley from a university from advantage. And I can all be hosted on this universal wallet that will take all of those credentials and then kind of put them all in one place and it's owned by the individual and not by a major ecosystem partner. And as an employer, then what I can do is I can request those credentials from the student. The student could maybe go out and get all 15 or 16 of those credentials from five or six different vendors, combine them all into one place and then grant the issue, you know, the verification of that to the employer. So now as an employer, instead of guessing, I can actually see this is where those people are in those skills from. This is how current they are on those skills. And you know, that's an enormous time save just in terms of validation for the first round of interviews and helps the best qualified candidates actually get into the pipeline. Now, from the individual's perspective, what does also would allow them to do is instead of seeing the so-paked job description and trying to guess what keywords they need to get in there. Now, I know exactly what 16 skills I need to be hired for this job. And what we're also doing for the individual is developing AI-driven learning assessments that help them identify what skills do you actually have. You know, not something that we're taking at face value, but let's go through the assessments and see how good you actually are at the skills you think you have. And now let's start to match you with the different jobs that, you know, you might be qualified for. And if you have a gap between that new job and where you are currently, we can help you fill those gaps and get those credentials to be able to become employed. And then finally, on the ecosystem side, right, we can help them start to identify these are the skills that are being hired within the workplace, right. These are what employers need. Let's talk about the way that you're currently used looking at the technology and training for that technology and make sure that the training is bundled in a way that useful to the employer because often, right, they are developing the training for that technology, whether it be anthropic or Gemini or whatever other tool in isolation, right. This is a product manager. This is how you use the tool. They don't necessarily have the visibility into that rural application. And so by tying all those things together, what we learned vantage wants to do is give the ecosystem partner a better understanding of how the technologies being used. They can develop better training. We're helping the student game better visibility into what kind of jobs they are qualified for and how they can actually become more qualified for those roles. And then from the employer standpoint, we're creating a more equitable, hiring process that allows better qualified candidates to get in there without the need for personal connections and networking. So that's what we're building right now. So it's fascinating. My only thing that pops up with brain is, are you solving the right problem? Because I understand, I understand problems and understand the story of your friend. But I think there is a bigger question of whether you really need less people because of AI. Just genuinely and honestly, I was in a panel in the San Diego. There were two four to ten presentations and they were like, yeah, we just need less seniors, right. And today, because you write co-related events, reality, and both of us, sentence, I spent my first year probably doing things that day, I will do all the time. Clearly, I had more product, I worked with the Turkish company because part of the Aqfem, who built them, the Ataturk Airport and so on and so forth. And the love work was just around mining Turkish databases. So I had to hire like a student to understand Turkish so he could translate it. And I'm data, I'm putting it in Excel and like I would spend months just doing this comes to found work for consulting, but this was my like a basic training like in consulting. Today, we do not need it. So it goes for like due to positions in a lot of places because now you can really scale masteries. So if you're like super experienced content provider, now with AI, you can do much more and you can become a content machine. Thanks to AI and you for your great program there, now you can become an architect, basically, and I have an army of agent who write code for you, but today, basically, you need less people like in the industry. So my, again, I made, I'm going to have a different perspective, yeah. So I have a slightly different perspective and I'm going to push back on the assertion because the key thing in both of those was I'm a really good software engineer and so now I can do more. Or I'm a really good consultant and so now I don't need the junior consultants to do all the slides for me. My question is how do you get to that place? Maybe that's good for the next five or 10 years, right? But if I'm a company and I'm betting on that and I automate 90% of my, you know, my inbound or my entry-level positions, you know, what I'm doing is I'm eating my seat, right? Like I'm not able to plant the seeds that I need to grow the future leadership of the company. I'm losing the tribal knowledge and all the expertise that comes with experience. And so when those folks eventually retire, I'm left with either trying to hire from competitors or we're going back to the drawing board. And I think that's the other piece that companies are missing as they start to automate these positions is it's not just a matter of saving time, right? You need to be able to grow your talent. And in order to become that expert opinion that's able to have the discernment and know that the AI is putting out the right tool, you have to do the job yourself. So I'll use a military example again, right? Like as an officer, I probably was never going to dig, you know, a trench myself or dig a machine gun position that's something that my Marines did. But if I didn't know what right looked like and I hadn't done it myself, you know, how was I going to know how to lead that unit into doing the right thing? It's very much the same thing for software engineers. You're right, we don't eat somebody with hands on keyboard, hammering through every line of code. But if you look at where the trend in the industry is going, all of the people that they were laying off for those software engineers and are hiring back as testers, the output's gone up 10 times, but still has the amount of bugs. And if you can't have somebody that has done this before and understands where to look for those different issues, you're going to have huge quality control issues in the future. - I agree, and this was exactly my point to just end one more thing. I think we're saying the same thing. I'm talking about rungs in a letter, right? And what you're saying is yes, in order to get to the fourth rank, you need to go to the first one and second one and third. What I'm trying to say is the reality today in the workforce is that AI makes a lot of the first, the second, third rungs redundant. And you need the fourth and fifth and sixth in every organization with AI because I'm with you. Like humans will make the decisions. Humans, sellers will sell to human prospects because I think at least our agents will talk to each other. Like, I really do not see it happening. But how do you overcome, I think that the problem that we have in our industry is these first ones based on missing. And a hundred people from college or from like graduating as a marine corpse and jumping directly into the fourth rank. - So I think where I was going with that, I agree with you that that's the issue. I wanted the number one say, it is important to focus on that problem. You know, either it's a corporation or it's a government entity or whoever because that is the future workforce that you're trying to train. And I think I don't have a perfect answer, but it's something along the lines of an apprenticeship program. You know, there's some blur between, I think the academic institutions and the industry where somebody needs to be trained within those roles that don't necessarily need a human but should have a human training on those pieces. Maybe not for as long as you would have spent as an intraditional job path, but at least a couple of years doing it the manual ways, you understand how it works before you start being given the AI tool is to be able to do it. So it's almost, again, I come back to that idea of military training, right? I had a year where I went through training before I ever stood in front of Marines where I had to do things without all of the bells and whistles that I was going to get eventually in the fleet because it's important to learn how to do it the hard way before you do it the easy way, right? You have to navigate with a compass and a map before you're being able to have a GPS. And a lot of ways the software development community is going to have to go through that same realization. I'm going to have to sink some time and energy and investment into somebody to learn how to do this the manual way before I give them co-pilot to be able to help them write code because if they don't know the problems to look at and they don't know how this stuff actually works, how can I trust them to validate that it's ready to shift to a client? And so I think that is the way in which those one, two, and three layer rungs that you were talking about going to evolve is that instead of being directly value added to the business, they will be like an apprenticeship program that people will go through before they can hit level four. And the idea for a company should be rather than saying I can do a lot more with less. It's like maybe I can do a lot more with more, right? Maybe I can continue to have the head count that I've traditionally had but people are doing more impactful jobs. And if they're not there, I can upskill them to those positions because regardless of whether or not that person's role necessarily is still adding the value it used to, they come with decades of experience with the clients with understanding the industry, with the context that you can't easily replace. And I want to find a way to leverage that to continue to be more productive rather than just saying, you know, it's a head count that I can delete and I save some money in the short term, but in the long term, I don't have the benefit of that experience anymore. - I agree with both of you. There's a lot of conversations I'm having now can privately even around the talent pipeline over the next decade. Because the floor is falling out of that kind of talent pipeline and there aren't yet opportunities for those, you know, folks coming out of college or in the entry level rungs to be able to learn the discernment, learn the context, having been through when it didn't go right to be able to make the judgment call that they need to make at the higher levels. But I want to dig into how we're doing that. - How are we giving those early career folks that experience because we all know the 70, 2010 rule, right? Where 70% is the experience. And so I love the analogy that you gave for the military and also the apprenticeship piece. And what we're seeing in the market now is this move towards again, digital first digitization. And I know you have strong opinions around really the reinvention versus the digitization but still so many companies are over rotated on the digital first way of teaching, way of training, way of preparing in like the self-paced modules. How are you balancing that? I know that you were doing kind of that with Ascendient with the instructor led training is kind of how it started. But how are you balancing the need for instructor led with the scalization, if that's a word, to the digital first training model in the future work? - So I think first of all, the view of traditional asynchronous training, right? The digital first training, that is changing very quickly. I think the year in which you could just rely on having the biggest content library, probably had it's moment like three or four years ago. And it's now moving much more towards the curated experience you're able to deliver to the learner that's exactly what they need and creating a more hands-on experiential learning, right? And so I think that the future modality that we're looking at is really a mix of instructor led and asynchronous training. And it's identifying one of the most impactful parts of this experience that you need to have a live instructor, you need to hold someone's attention, have the engagement, have that human connection to help reinforce. And what are pieces where somebody can consume this in their own time in their own format, right? Because not everybody, we all kind of remember being back in school, being into our lecture and about 30 minutes in, you're like, I'm not retaining any of this information. And that should be something that you can do on your own time. And again, it should be in the format in which you can consume it. So just because it's asynchronous doesn't mean it has to be a video that I'm saying they're watching. It could be a podcast, it could be a series of questions. It could be an agent that's secretically leading you through an experience. And we believe in the future as we start to get more data and the tools become more sophisticated, that really should be something that is based on the user's own personal profile, right? Like how do I learn myself as a kinesthetic, as an auditory, as a visual, et cetera. And so that's what the asynchronous experience will be. There's a bunch of content you're just gonna have to learn. It should be tailored to you and it doesn't have to be during time that's valuable, right? During work where we have to take that time away. At the same time, there's gonna be those hands-on experiences that you want to have a human mentor in the room. Not just because it allows you to provide more context in the moment, but because having a human being grabs people's attention better and makes sure that they're more engaged and it actually makes sure that the investment the company's making in the training is paying off, right? If you don't physically set people in room sometimes, they're just never gonna pay attention, they're never gonna engage with it. And so there's the accountability piece, there's the engagement piece, and then there's just the reinforcement of learning. And so the way that, again, that we're looking at it is we look at a skill, there should always be a hands-on component and that should be the validation that they can do the skill. Can you actually do it, right? We wanna see you do it. And now we can say that yes, you've learned the training. There's always gonna be a piece that it's gonna be better and more effective for that person to take on their own time. Again, learning kind of the rogue memorization or the basic concepts. And there's always gonna be elements where having that social group setting, talking about the impact of the learning is gonna be important. And that's how we're designing the future courses. We're trying to identify the parts that people can have outside of the classroom, the parts that people need to be in the classroom for. And then that hands-on experiential component always needs to be a huge element of the validation and actually testing that the student knows how to do the thing. So that's what we're seeing is really a blend of all three of those. And what's been interesting is coming from the instructor-led training business for a while. It was very passé to kind of have instructor-led training. Like, oh, we can do this in our own. It's cheaper, it's more effective. people can soak. working. And now it's become like the premium product. Right. As AI starts to eat a lot of these other major content providers, having an instructor in person, especially in a virtual environment too, like having an in-person experience that people has now become like the new thing that everyone wants to do. And so having that be the capstone or having that be the thing that ties all those other asynchronous experiences together I think is very important. I mean, I'm a fan of blended learning and we've talked about blended learning for some time. But in the age of AI, I think it's interesting that the human is the premium. I think it's similar to what kind of Omer and his team are building with precision skill development. You've talked about skills being the future. So I'd like to ask you one more. If you were to think about what people need to know in the next 10 years, but drawing from your experience over the last 10 or 20, what would you leave our listeners with as something they should be focused on in the next year? I think it is going to be a major change for for every aspect of society and everyone's going to have to learn how to live with this technology. And I think that too often we look at AI as either being good or bad and we're signing value to it, it's just the thing. It's like any other tool it can be used for good things, it can be used for bad things. And as my dad used to say when I had to do something I didn't want to do, he said we can either do it the easy way or the hard way. And so the hard way is to bury your head in the sand and wait for the change to happen. And then and that's that's true for both society and for and for individuals. Like we have to learn how to live with this because you can't put the genie back in the box. And either we can get ahead of it and we can design regulations and guardrails in education that allows us to harness its technology or we can wait for you know the train to fully stop right and then realize that we're in a really bad situation and and have to dig ourselves out of it. And so that's again from from a societal perspective we we have to get ahead of learning how to manage life with this and realize the implications in terms of develop the kind of guardrails we need. For individuals it reminds me a lot of transitioning out of the military. It's terrifying it's like a new world that I don't know anything about and I felt you know completely unqualified for every job that was out there. I mean if you if you told me what I was going to be doing today I would have laughed in your face because I just didn't know any better right and that's what a lot of people are second they don't know what the future looks like they don't know what the different tools are they probably use chat GPT like a search engine and that's about the limit of their technology and they're terrified that this is going to take over their jobs and so you know when you're scared of something you naturally just don't want to learn anymore about it but I would tell folks to have confidence in the fact that you were successful up to this point for a reason and everybody has the experience and the ability like again I'm a grunt if I can figure this technology out like I promise you you can and so have confidence in the fact that you were successful up to this point for a reason you're being employed by this company for a reason and you have value that you can continue to drive and all you have to do is figure out how to best leverage these tools I mean this is what I told my friend right like if I can figure it out if I can get here you can figure it out too but the first step in that is educating yourself on what this is and what the future is going to be and and having confidence that you can adapt and survive in this new environment and even thrive and so don't be scared of this and then she shy away from it and try to not learn it like you have to jump in with both feet and then figure out how to adapt to this new kind of changing way of work but for better or for worse it's a one-way door that was open about two years ago and now we have to figure out how to how to live with it so you know the best way to mean a challenge is head-on you know have confidence in yourself and raise your hand and ask for help and then you know we can manage through this process together you know that's what I would tell folks great sage advice and I too was a child of we can do with the easy way or the hard way so I think can resonate with that Tim thank you so much for joining us for the great conversation we look forward to following along on all that you'll do with learn bandage so we'd love to stay connected and and again for our listeners to stay connected as well wonderful thank you so much for having me it was a great conversation