The emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has brought with it a new era. One full of possibility and promise—especially for education teams being asked to “do more with less.”
Adoption of generative AI has surged. ChatGPT alone amassed an estimated 100 million monthly active users within just two months of its launch.
But is AI making the transformative difference we thought it would make? Or are we simply gaining minor efficiencies?
Jim Conley, former Director of Partner Education at Twitter Flight School (now X Ads Academy), recently shared with us his perspectives on how to approach AI for education:
“As leaders, we have a two-fold mission: to create programs that drive business outcomes, and to guide our teams in the practical, responsible, and ethical use of AI. That’s no small task! I created the CustomerEd Strategist & Growth Advisor GPT to act as a virtual sidekick for leaders. It includes pre-made prompts to align customer education strategies with business objectives. It can also suggest learning programs and modalities based on learner outcomes, and even brainstorm ways to link the value of learning, including KPIs, back to business objectives.”
And like with anything else we might talk about in education, you need to start with strategy.
Start Your AI Use with Strategy
What are you trying to accomplish with AI? Speeding up content creation? Improving workflows? Capture industry insights to inform content and customer conversations? Personalize learning journeys and experiences?
There are so many ways AI can support your education efforts. Instead of leveraging it for one-off solutions, think about the breadth of efficiencies you could gain.
Potential 1: Use AI to Align Education with Business Objectives
We know that great customer education programs tie directly to business objectives.
But often we’re proving our value in reverse—trying to connect learning outcomes to business impact.
AI can help you identify ways to connect customer education to business objectives.
Here’s an example prompt:
"Generate a strategic blueprint that aligns our customer education efforts with the company's top three business goals for the next quarter. These goals are [GOALS].”
And here’s a prompt Jim recommends to communicate the business value of customer education to other teams:
“How might I communicate the business value of this proposed program for leaders from my company's [MARKETING, SALES, OPERATIONS, ETC.] department?”
Potential 2: Use AI to Identify Business Issues Customer Education Can Address
Education doesn’t (and shouldn’t) exist in a silo. Your work should be collaborative with other teams—and help them solve their problems.
Often, you can connect with other teams to get an idea of what they’re struggling with, then identify ways customer education can help.
But AI can help you prepare a list of ideas to get started.
Here’s an example prompt:
"List specific customer challenges in [YOUR INDUSTRY] that our education programs can resolve, complete with a proposed curriculum outline for each."
Potential 3: Use AI for Recurring Tasks
When done one-off, we create minor efficiencies by using AI as part of our workflow. But if you think about your full content creation workflow—from inception to execution to measuring success—you can create multiple efficiencies that make a much bigger impact.
Here are some places in the average content creation workflow where you can leverage AI:
- Learner persona development
- Training needs analysis
- Outlining content
- Research and deep dives into topics (like with this custom GPT Eric Mistry built)
- Establishing learning objectives
- Generating lesson summaries
- Writing first-draft video and lesson scripts
- Creating quizzes and assessments
- Creating and editing transcripts
What’s amazing about ChatGPT for some of these use cases is you can ask it to reference specific frameworks, like ADDIE or ARCS. So while it won’t replace the need for instructional designers (IDs) and subject-matter experts (SMEs) on your team, it can help do a lot of the heavy lifting—allowing those IDs and SMEs to do what they’re uniquely qualified to do.
Here’s an example prompt for creating a lesson summary:
“Read the following script of an instructional video and create a one-sentence lesson summary. Here’s the script: [Copy and paste the narration part of the script.]”
(H/T to Ovunc Kidder for the prompt.)
Here’s an example prompt for creating quiz or assessment questions:
“Review the content in the lesson below. Create three questions to use as comprehension questions for the end of the lesson with the correct answer identified with an asterisk for each question. Create three distractor answers for each question.
Then create one sample certification question that includes three distractor answers in addition to the correct answer, which should be enclosed in square brackets.
Finally, create a certification question that is different from the sample question, and different from the comprehension questions, that identifies the correct answer in curly braces, and includes three distractor answers.
Here’s the lesson: [Copy & paste the lesson content]”
(H/T to Kristine Kukich for the prompt.)
Potential 4: Use AI to Measure and Communicate Impact
One use case AI is exceptionally good at is synthesizing data and finding trends. You can also use AI tools like Graphmaker.ai to create charts and graphs. (So if you’ve ever wondered if something should be a bar, line, or pie chart, AI has got you covered.)
You can even ask ChatGPT to help you design your metrics dashboard—creating high-level sections with more detailed metrics nestled within.
Try the prompt: "Design a custom dashboard that tracks the engagement and performance metrics of our customer education portal, highlighting areas for strategic improvement." to get a feel for how AI can help you structure your metrics, including visualization recommendations.
Go Forth and Experiment
We’re still in the early days of AI. Even though it feels like everyone is using it, most are using it for those minor efficiency gains. Take a comprehensive look at where and how AI can support your programs—then provide your team with a game plan for creating more significant efficiencies.
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