Design+GenAI: Personalized Learning
I am old enough to remember when personalization first appeared. It was cool to be able to pick which modules you wanted on your Yahoo! homepage, or whether your email or horoscope was the first thing on your Netcenter portal. Over time personalization became dominated by e-commerce; machine-learning based recommendation engines selecting products from a catalog just for you. That grew into showing you the clothes on models who matched your demographics. Today GenAI has the ability to completely redefine personalization; Sure, e-commerce will still be a big player, creating just-in-time ads, tailored in tone and voice to increase the appeal and conviction. But the future I see for GenAI is far greater than that, especially in the areas of personalization, two of my favorites will be Personalized Learning and Adaptive UX.
Today the focus on GenAI + learning is primarily chatbots that can answer questions from both customers and employees. Easy enough using RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) to extract the content from documentation, community posts, employee handbooks, on-boarding material, etc, presenting results with a simple chat interface is familiar. However the potential is far greater.
With GenAI we will be able to provide multimodal learning experiences that go beyond text to include video, audio, animations, interactive visualizations, even guided, conversational walk-throughs with real-time feedback. Used in conjunction with behavioral, psychographic, and demographic data, GenAI can assess a user’s current level of competency and create personalized training modules tailored to each of our individual learning styles. Pulling a page from advertising, GenAI would be able to apply all the same models for tailoring content, tone and voice in order to make the material more relatable and ideally increasing both engagement and retention.
The best learning is continual; as users gain deeper understanding of the systems, and become more adept in its use, the nature of their questions will evolve. GenAI can respond by focusing on advanced use cases, tailoring the content to reflect the user’s higher degree of proficiency and ability to extrapolate from knowledge they already have. For true power users, who have a clear understanding of the system, and who’s use of it has become routine, eventually a GenAI system could simply offer to perform the basic tasks for them.
GenAI can take on the role of mentor or coach, providing the user with a range of real-world, scenario-based exercises reflective of the user’s dynamic work conditions, prompting the users to demonstrate their learning. And like a coach, GenAI can make use of motivational language and positive reinforcement during these scenarios as a means of encouragement and support, celebrating small wins, and actively motivating the user to continue developing their skills.
SnapLogic is using the power of GenAI to help companies across industries and geographies to build out learning and on-boarding solutions. Internally we are actively working using this same approach to help our customers and to on-board new employees. Let’s connect if you want to learn more about our journey and how we are helping to unlock the positive impact of GenAI for others.
