In corporate education, the quality of your education efforts is paramount to success. This includes your employee learners, whose skills and knowledge need to be up-to-date and diverse to give you a competitive edge. It also includes your customers, who need to be trained on how to best derive value from your products.
While generalized education has a place, it’s not the most effective way to educate these two audiences. Studies show that personalized learning leads to better results. But personalized learning can take lots of time—time that many education teams just don’t have.
Fortunately, the rise of the AI age is creating more opportunities to personalize corporate training. These advanced and data-driven tools tailor both learning journeys and materials to influence positive outcomes.
Let’s explore some keys to leveraging AI for personalized and impactful learning.
Adopt Tools for Relevance
One of the primary benefits of AI-driven personalized learning is its power to tailor curricula for peak relevance. After all, not every learner has the same knowledge gaps, interests, or needs—even when their career trajectories are similar. A recent report on trends in customer and partner education found that 43% of businesses felt that personalizing learning paths across multiple audiences was most important to success, and it’s easy to see why.
AI can impact education in many ways—from content creation to tailored learning paths. Here are some AI tools that work particularly well to personalize learning for employees and customers:
AI Assistants
Many of us have become accustomed to AI assistants in customer service. But did you know they can also be powerful tools for customizing learning experiences? Rather than Learning and Development (L&D) spending time building custom learning profiles, an AI assistant can talk with each learner about their skills, current role, career goals, and learning preferences. It can then use machine learning algorithms to create a personalized learning plan. These plans include tailored course recommendations and materials that provide the most direct route for learners to achieve their ambitions and address skills gaps. (This is how Intellum’s AI-Driven Personalized Learning works.)
Learners can also regularly converse with the AI-driven assistant tool about their progress, changes to their needs and interests, or unexpected hurdles. The systems can then update your learner’s plan accordingly, ensuring they always get the most relevant and efficient educational experience.
Adaptive learning platforms
Adaptive learning platforms that leverage AI are another great resource. These systems track and assess how a learner interacts with training in real-time. Moreover, they utilize a comprehensive understanding of the student’s knowledge level to provide a curriculum that consistently teaches new information.
Based on that interaction, it adapts the materials and curriculum to best suit the learner’s progress and challenges. Not every curriculum works for everyone — there are many learning styles in education. Many benefit stronger using material with an auditory element, while others excel using visual components like videos or graphics. AI ensures that nobody is left out of learning.
In addition, AI can improve accessibility for learners who aren’t usually a good match for materials designed for neurotypical people. For example, if the user is dyslexic and can’t completely understand a question, they can request a new one. AI can rewrite the question almost instantly in more accessible language, allowing the user to gain a better grasp on the content and learn more easily.
Enhance Engagement
AI-driven personalized learning isn’t just a route to more relevant training — it can provide more engaging content, too. Every learner has something that makes them more interested in learning, be it through rewards, unique content, or some other means. Below are a couple of the many ways AI is getting students to pay attention.
Content Generation
Natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms are making AI-driven content generation faster and more interesting. For example, AI can effortlessly stitch together educational videos, which are proven to be more engaging than their textual peers. Avatars and voiceovers can give further depth to video content.
As with any AI tool used for corporate training programs, it’s important to have relevant data about the learner. Alongside their skill levels and educational needs, collect information about the content on your website consumers interact with or your staff shows a preference for. This can be key to teaching your AI platforms to generate the most engaging and impactful learning content.
Gamification
Gamification is one of the most useful elements of personalized learning. It helps motivate users to hit specific goals, particularly when these are associated with rewards or even just achievement levels. AI-driven platforms can use data about your learners’ behavior to more effectively gamify curricula or educational materials. They use data analytics to assess what learners enjoy and what tasks motivate them. As a result, it can make adjustments that encourage learners to keep returning to your educational platform to hit and beat achievement levels.
Mitigate Potential Risks
There’s no doubt personalized learning is in the best interest of your company and all its stakeholders. At the same time, it’s important to recognize the importance of AI risk management, as this burgeoning technology comes with many unknowns. Mitigating the dangers is key to proceeding safely and responsibly.
Firstly, generative AI tools may produce biased or inaccurate information. Humans must review AI-generated content for correctness — AI creates content using language databases, not knowledge databases. It has no way of differentiating truth from falsehood, so it’s up to the users to ensure it is using accurate information in its training material.
Another prevalent risk is the potential for data privacy breaches. By its nature, personalized tools collect and use a lot of often sensitive information about each learner. You’ll need to adopt controls ensuring the AI systems only retain the most essential data about learners, deleting anything unnecessary. For example, some platforms separate training data from sensitive information. It’s also vital to communicate with learners about what data is collected and how it is used, empowering them to opt out. Doing otherwise may be illegal.
Of course, appropriate security measures are essential to keep bad actors from accessing your learners’ information. This includes end-to-end encryption for data shared with your learning tools, strong password practices, and multi-factor authentication.
Accomplish More with AI
Personalized learning can boost learning outcomes. And AI-powered tools are making it easier than ever to personalize learning content and engagement strategies.
This is just the beginning. The AI landscape is constantly developing. Stay on top of advances in this area to further boost the efficacy of your training programs..
