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Imagine you’re a first-time people manager preparing for year-end reviews and you’re struggling with what to say to a senior leader on your team who has met all his goals, except one — and it's one he hasn’t even come close to reaching. You’re hesitant to ask your boss for advice, especially since it’s Sunday night and you’re preparing for a Monday morning meeting. What do you do?
If you work at Genpact, you turn to AI Guru for advice. AI Guru is an AI-powered learning assistant that is trained on almost 16,000 content assets as well as thousands of questions that employees have been asking Genpact experts over the years.
Genpact isn’t the only company incorporating generative AI into its learning platforms. Many others are tapping into the technology’s capabilities to enhance learning and development for their employees. And the reasons why are obvious.
“AI is going to revolutionize how people learn and train,” said Aneesh Kulkarni, CTO of Strivr, a VR learning platform that uses generative AI to optimize storyline development, animation and asset creation.
Here are some examples of how companies are using the technology to up their L&D game.
How AI Can Enhance L&D
On top of supporting users in their quest for answers, AI algorithms can help organizations analyze individual learning patterns and preferences to provide personalized recommendations for additional upskilling and enrich the training experience.
“Generative AI is proving to be a valuable tool in creating dynamic and engaging learning materials that allow organizations to save time by creating engaging courses in a few minutes,” said Thanos Papangelis, co-founder of TalentLMS, a San Francisco-based firm that creates online learning platforms.
David Smith, co-founder of Methods Meridian, an Austin, Texas-based startup creating an online training curriculum for the CPA industry, said the company is building a training platform that uses the traditional online methods of learning, such as videos and quizzes, but enhances the experience with an opportunity to interact with AI to reinforce or practice a skill.
The company is also working with Portalis.AI to incorporate AI-powered digital avatars into its online learning platform. These avatars will be able to chat with participants and even remember previous conversations, so they can act as a learning coach, Smith said.
While Methods Meridian is just getting started, Genpact has been working on incorporating AI into its learning platform for the past four years. The company’s AI Guru platform catalogs each role in the organization along with a list of skills that need to be mastered for each position. The AI integration allows employees to ask questions around a specific skill they are trying to master and obtain recommendations for additional reading materials or courses.
And according to Shalini Modi, Genpact’s global leader, employee experience and learning, it also provides hyper-personalized coaching. She says the bot can look at an employee’s resume and work history at the company in order to make recommendations for personalized training and advise them on what skills to develop and what careers to consider.
“Employees can use AI Guru to refresh and to learn their concepts or seek some advice on something related to work,” Modi said.
This works whether you’re an employee seeking training in a particular field or if you’re a manager trying to figure out how to accomplish a difficult task. For instance, Modi said, first-time managers tend to ask questions such as “How do I manage remote teams better? How do I manage hybrid teams better? How do I provide feedback to my team?”
Knowing that these are areas where young leaders struggle, Genpact is able to use the technology to help by providing responses, support and tips to move forward.
Related Article: How and Why Companies Are Incorporating Virtual Reality Into L&D
What’s in It for Me?
Aside from the obvious efficiency gains, incorporating AI in learning platforms also provides highly valuable benefits to users.
For instance, Modi said, employees enjoy the immediacy and anonymity of interacting with a bot because many are reluctant to ask their manager how to handle difficult conversations with direct reports or clients. Yet, they feel comfortable asking a bot anonymously.
Employees also like that they can get their questions answered immediately. In the past, experts at Genpact would meet with employees at a scheduled time, and employees would have to sit through an entire session, listening to their colleague’s questions, which might not pertain to their work.
“AI Guru is your personal assistance available to you anytime, anywhere, desktop and mobile,” Modi said.
The platform is also a time saver for Genpact’s 600 experts. “Instead of answering repeat questions, their answers are available to all the 120,000 employees at any time,” she said.
Related Article: Why We Need to Improve the Employee Experience of Our AI Programs
Customizing and Regulating the Use of AI
As companies hear about the benefits of generative AI, they are eager to use it, but it’s important to identify the right uses, Modi said. “AI promises to be magic, and in many cases, it will not turn out to be magic.”
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Still, she believes a learning platform is a good use for generative AI because it allows the company to realize the benefits of AI without getting caught up in a lot of complexity. For instance, a coaching application can be subjective, so answers don't have to be 100% accurate — as they would need to be in a scientific setting.
“You don’t need to give very precise factual answers, and you don’t have to worry that something will change,” she said.
That, of course, doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s important to constantly test and monitor the system to make sure the bot’s responses are accurate and unbiased, Modi added.
It’s also important to have policies in place to make sure employees are using the bot ethically, without violating confidentiality. Genpact trains its employees to not feed any specific client or employee information into the system, and every time they log in, they must read and agree to a safe use policy, Modi said.
What’s more, Genpact tracks all the questions employees are asking, and AI Guru is programmed to only answer questions related to work. That is because initially the company noticed employees were asking random questions about celebrities, Modi said, so Genpact trained the bot to only respond to questions related to work skills.
Companies considering incorporating AI into their internal learning platforms or any other workplace process may want to ensure they provide adequate training on AI tools to reap the full benefits and avert potential dangers, Papangelis said. Employee training should include things like mastering the art of AI prompts, how to avoid potentially biased or incorrect information, how to fact-check answers as well as ethics and privacy best practices.
