5 Must-Have AI Capabilities for Customer Education: Customer Ed Nugget 30

Has Customer Education Hit Its AI Stride?

With artificial intelligence buzz everywhere, it’s easy to assume AI already plays a central role in business operations. But is that also true for customer education?

At this point, progress is mixed. According to a recent LearnWorlds report, 37% of organizations rely on AI to support customer education. Yet only 12% have embedded it in most of their workflows.

Meanwhile, nearly 60% still aren’t on board. (About 32% are experimenting, and 13% plan to adopt AI within 6-12 months. However, another 13% don’t use it at all.)

One thing is certain — wherever your team is on this spectrum today, it will soon change. After all, AI innovation continues to accelerate, and there’s plenty of room for adoption to run.

So, this raises a larger question: How can your team keep moving forward through constant disruption? It’s not easy. But a strong foundation helps. That’s why I’m sharing my perspective as a learning tech analyst and consultant.

Over the past year, I’ve reviewed nearly 200 learning platforms. Most are designed to support customer education, and many incorporate new AI features. But which capabilities matter most? Find out as I fly solo on this Customer Ed Nuggets mini-podcast…

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5 Ways AI Adds Value in Customer Education

To stay ahead of the pack, focus on these AI capabilities:

1. Learning Agents

Think of AI agents as personalized chatbots, assisting people as they move through learning activities. All agents function in a similar way, but their tasks are role-based. So, you’ll find agents for customers, instructors, and administrators, as well as managers.

An agent can be attached to a course, so it can ask you relevant questions throughout the learning process, and provide targeted remediation, if needed. Or it can work more broadly, operating as a proactive helper throughout the day, asking questions, suggesting next steps, and recommending content based on where you’re located and what you’re doing.

Agents are especially valuable because they’re constantly learning about you, adapting to your behaviors and past habits, as well as your content preferences such as media format and length. Think of them as seamless sidekicks, offering timely “in the moment” ideas to expand your knowledge and skills.

2. Content Tools

After ChatGPT burst on the scene three years ago, generative AI has been hard to ignore. Now, many customer education teams rely on GenAI as a writing assistant. But its role continues to expand across other content processes. For example, it can help you:

• Map learning objectives, author and edit content, develop titles and descriptions, create assessment questions, build learning scenarios, and design training simulations
• Transcribe and localize content
• Produce source graphics, audio clips, and basic video
• Develop full courses, including modules, lessons, pages, interactive elements, pre-tests, post-tests, study guides, and more.

Because customer education is based on proprietary content about your products and services, speeding up these processes lets you go to market sooner. Plus, faster turnaround time decreases costs, which increases your bottom line.

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3. Learning Administration

As I mentioned above, the value of AI agents also extends to administrative functions. These agents work efficiently with your customer education library to optimize content and improve utilization.

For example, specialized tools can deeply audit and tag all of your content, including SCORM courses, PDFs, transcribed videos, and more. In addition, they can assign content to a skill model, identify the appropriate skill and level, and enhance its descriptive elements.

New AI tools also transform hands-on admin tasks. For example, an LMS may let you schedule ILT and VILT classes. But that’s a lengthy, detailed process, especially when you’re coordinating hundreds of classes or more.

AI simplifies it all with a series of questions: Which classes do you want to run? Where? How often? Instantly, it produces an entire schedule. And if you want to build a full curriculum from these classes, each with different parameters, it does that as well.

In the past, teams locked themselves in a room for weeks or months to build a plan, resolve scheduling conflicts, and ensure the right instructors were assigned to the right places at the right times. Now, much of this is automated through an LMS with AI, or a training management system tied to an LMS.

4. Intelligent Analytics

ROI is necessary to make your team indispensable and keep your seat at the strategic table. But you can’t prove ROI without analytics. How does AI help?

Some LMS platforms include tools that analyze large data sets, so you can identify key trends and isolate critical anomalies. For example, they can help you find content that isn’t connected to skills and add the right linkage.

AI can also look for trends at a broader level. For instance, have you ever needed to make sense of 10,000 survey responses? It’s mind-numbing. Now, AI-based sentiment analysis lets you identify key patterns and trends across many surveys, so you can rapidly reach meaningful conclusions.

In addition, AI tools can look across past trends to determine the most likely future direction. This predictive analytics capability helps figure out where to invest your customer education budget next, so you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck.

I’m also seeing cool advances in natural language processing. For instance, rather than having to build a customized report from one of many pre-configured options in an LMS, you can simply enter prompt. The system immediately creates a report based on your criteria, which you can adjust and refine as needed. It’s incredibly fast, easy, and powerful.

5. Next-Level Flow of Work

You’ve no doubt heard of learning in the flow of work. But AI takes it to a whole new level.

Leading-edge companies are leveraging AI to enrich the customer experience in multiple ways. For example, I’m seeing applications that extend moment of need learning to sales teams, customer support, channel partners, and beyond.

In sales, AI can use your company’s proprietary data along with public data to determine which questions to ask prospects. Then, it helps build a PowerPoint deck based on issues that resonate.

Let’s say AT&T wants to discuss your services. AI will recommend scenarios so you can practice your AT&T pitch in a simulated context. Then when you’re on the call, AI listens, helping you interpret what’s being said, suggesting what to ask next, and framing statements so they tie-in with the customer’s challenges.

AI pulls all this information into the LMS and assists with each step in the sales process, including follow-up communication, proposal writing, presentation development and delivery — even turning terms into a contract.

That may sound like a sales management system to you. Well, it is. But with an AI-based LMS tied-in, it feels like one seamless experience. And that’s what “learning in the flow” should be.

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The Bottom Line on AI in Customer Education

Keeping up with rapid innovation is a struggle. But if you’re not yet leveraging these 5 AI capabilities for customer education, it’s time to push forward.

You don’t need to pursue all of these advances right now. But look around at how quickly things are changing. Customer education teams are in a race to improve business outcomes, and AI innovation is stepping in to close the gap.

Already, first movers are seeing the benefits of transformation. Don’t let them pass you by. If you commit to AI as a strategic priority, your team will become leaner, more efficient, more effective, and ultimately more profitable in the marketplace. So, what are you waiting for?

Watch This Customer Ed Nuggets Episode

Want more details about how AI capabilities are helping customer education organizations level up? Watch the video version of this mini-podcast below…

Or, if you’d rather listen, tune in to the audio version right here at TalentedLearning.com.

Find out how real-world companies are achieving more with learning systems that create business value. Get inspiration from dozens of success stories in our free LMS Case Study Directory →

About Talented Learning Customer Ed Nuggets

Hosted by Talented Learning CEO John Leh, the Customer Ed Nuggets podcast is a trusted source of advice, guidance and best practices for customer education professionals of all types. In this series of brief video and audio “nuggets” (each 10 minutes or less), we explore key topics with numerous guest experts.

Join us anytime here or on our YouTube channel to explore all facets of customer education, from how to build a persuasive business case, to effective strategies, technologies and content that help professionals create, deploy and grow successful customer-centered programs.

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