What does the explosion of AI tools in the last few months mean for your role, your company, and your industry? The tech sector loves to talk about ‘disruption’. They’ve certainly outdone themselves with the latest slew of artificial intelligence applications hitting the market. Everyone, including training professionals, is wondering how much will have to change to accommodate and leverage AI.
For L&D professionals, there’s an exciting number of speculative use cases for AI in corporate training and development. Some of them might be revolutionary. Others might be more in the category of boring-but-helpful when it comes to simplifying the day-to-day management of training. Let’s take a look at where AI tools stand today and how training teams can utilize them.
Generative AI Tools In Training
ChatGPT was the fastest-growing consumer software application in history when it launched. Its explosive arrival and the rapid development of its competition introduced the world to a whole genre of AI. Large Language Models, or LLMs, are powerful tools for generating unique text outputs, but they have their limitations. Keeping those limitations in mind is important when we’re imagining how we could use these AIs in training contexts.
For example, it’s not clear that an LLM “understands” what it’s saying. It’s also well-documented that an LLM sometimes “hallucinates” by simply making up facts.
For now, we should be wary about putting these tools directly in front of learners with no human to fact-check their outputs. The last thing anyone wants is learners being given factually incorrect information in a compliance or safety course, for example.
These issues should be resolved in the future (hopefully). But for now, we should stick to applications where that risk isn’t so prevalent. And there are plenty.
Potential Applications In Corporate Training And Development
Generative AI tools that currently exist have a lot of potential, and that’s only going to increase as these tools continue to evolve and develop. Here are a few ideas for use cases that avoid or minimize the issue of potentially sending incorrect information to learners:
- Grading and Feedback: For simpler assignments, a generative AI tool could probably grade and provide limited feedback without much issue. This would free up course instructors to focus on more complex assignments or preparing other materials.
- Drafting/Brainstorming course content: Generative AI tools have proven to be great sounding boards for realizing an idea. They can also quickly create drafts that a human content creator can edit for accuracy and desired tone.
- Customer/learner Service and Support: just as we can probably trust generative AI to handle simple grading, many companies are already experimenting with allowing it to provide first-touch customer service. This can filter out common and simple issues to let the support team focus on more complex cases.
- Content curation/recommendation: generative AI tools could be the basis, if given the right data, for algorithms that recommend courses or training materials to learners on the basis of what they’ve already seen.
These are just a few obvious use cases. Innovative corporate training and development leaders are all but guaranteed to continue exploiting these tools to the fullest and uncovering new ways they can be used. As they become more dependable to deliver factually correct results, we can also expect more reliable learner-facing use cases, as well.
Back-End Management AI Tools In Training
Generative AI may be the main subject of attention, but don’t let it’s popularly distract from other kinds of AI tools in training contexts. Specialized, management-oriented AI tools are less popular, because there isn’t much of a use case for the general public. Very few people would download, much less pay for, specialized AI data management tools developed for enterprise L&D. But if you happen to be on a corporate training and developement team, that’s exactly what you might need to maximize your efficiency.
For example, training data is a largely untapped treasure trove of useful information about learners, operations, and resources. AI tools designed to leverage training data to the fullest are being designed at an increasingly rapid pace. The result is a kind of application-specific business AI that can bring enormous optimizations to specific tasks.
Building for the needs of specific industries and business functions is exactly why Administrate has developed our own AI-powered scheduling tool, Scheduler, designed to maximize the impact of AI in training. By isolating a time-consuming but important task like scheduling and resource management in training operations, specialized AI tools like Scheduler are able to deliver enormous efficiency gains to training teams. That kind of development is less likely to make the news – but also more likely to become an integral part of your learning tech stack.
The Future of AI in Training Contexts
Remember one thing: necessity is the mother of invention. Flashy, popular AI applications might come and go, and the current boom in AI innovation might well turn out to be a bubble, as some have predicted. But if there’s a business function that could truly be optimized by the use of AI, sooner or later, an AI tool will be developed to fill that niche. In the next few years, we’re all going to be learning an enormous amount about the best areas for training teams and whole organizations to invest in AI.
Administrate is on the cutting edge of developing tools that fill those niches. Built specifically for enterprise training teams’ needs, our platform, and its AI-powered Scheduler feature, represent the next step forward for reinventing the training tech stack for efficiency and ROI. To learn more about Administrate’s commitment to simplifying and empowering training management, take a look at our page on Scheduler, where you can see a demonstration of Administrate’s training AI tools in action.
