← Using AI at Work: AI in the Workplace & Generative AI for Business Leaders
Using AI at Work: AI in the Workplace & Generative AI for Business Leaders
86: Using AI at Work to Rethink How We Learn and Build Expertise
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- [00:00]
A
Nobody will be replaced by AI, but everyone can be replaced by a competitor who is using AI better than us.
- [00:07]
B
I would imagine that the finance person in your company is probably saying, oh, it can never do it as good as I can, therefore I'm not going to embrace it, I'm not going to leverage it. What was that experience like for Learn Worlds when all of a sudden it had AI capability?
- [00:21]
A
So we tried to be very careful from the beginning that guys, we're not trying to replace you, you are the directors, but we're trying to enhance you.
- [00:28]
B
For professionals that are listening to this, how would you recommend that they not just consume the content, watch the video, listen to the podcast, but that they actually internalize this information about AI specifically in their industry, so that they can not just know about it, but actually do something with it?
- [00:45]
A
I guess using it every day and embedding it into your workflows and directing it, it's the best thing that we can do right now.
- [00:53]
B
Panos Ciozos is a pioneer in online education and co founder of Learn Worlds. And with a PhD in educational tech and decades of hands on experience, he's reshaping how we learn in the age of AI, turning deep expertise into powerful digital learning experiences. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Daigle. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. Right now, every business leader is asking the same question, what are we going to do about AI? If this is you, chiefaiofficer.com has the answer. We give you a simple path forward where we provide executive and team training so your people know exactly how to safely use generative AI in their day to day. We also manage the deployment and implementation to make sure tools actually get adopted and deliver results. And we'll also guide company wide transformation so AI becomes part of your operating system, not just another shiny object. The companies that act now will increase productivity, cut costs and grow faster than their competitors. Those that wait will get left behind. So if you want to make AI work in your business, visit chiefaiofficer.com and see how we're helping companies of all sizes finally get results from AI. Hi everybody and welcome to the next episode of the Using AI at Work podcast. And our guest today is Panos Siozos, the CEO and founder of Learn Worlds. This is an interesting topic for us because one of the things that I hear a lot in social channels and in conversations is this impact of AI being able to generate content and training and what does that mean for the traditional way of learning and developing skills and becoming a master of something? And this is a topic that Panos and his team have been focused on for since 2014, I guess when they founded and now I think they've kind of cracked the code on this. So Panos, before we get started and talking about the, I guess the future of education really as an AI enabled or an AI augmented, augmented activity, give us a little bit of background on the founder side of things. I know that you started this in 2014 and that you guys were bootstrapped. That's a long journey.
- [03:02]
A
First of all, hi Chris, thanks for having me on your show. Of course, it's, it's longer, much longer than 2014 with my two co founders. We started working on the educational technology space back in 1999. So that's when we first built our very first learning management system. It was part of an academic project within, within a university. Our first lms. We pretty much didn't know what we were doing back then, but we were very enthusiastic. We were doing our postgraduate studies in educational technologies and we've been working on this space ever since. So we launched our platform in 2014. We were already working a couple of years before that in, in stealth mode, as you said, Bootstrap company. So a grueling journey to the first customer, to the second customer, 10 customer. So that was the way that we were taking. And in the beginning, obviously we had to put the scientists in the backseat at some point and we started learning fast from the market, adapting to market needs, bringing in some cases releasing features even overnight to keep up with the very fast pace of innovation that we were seeing in education space. And as you can imagine, when Covid came along, this speed multiplied even more. And we see that again with AI, which is again another, another Covid level event when it comes at least to education, how we learn and how people will keep learning and working and even existing in the, in the years that are coming. So definitely interesting times.
- [04:33]
B
Yeah, for sure. And the entrepreneur's journey is. It's one of persistence, for sure, as demonstrated by the 1999 timeline. Like, I saw a tweet or an, I don't know what they call a post this morning about somebody saying, I got rid of my Duolingo account and Grok taught me, you know, Spanish in 39 days. The, the ability and the access that we have now to information has certainly shifted. One of the things that we kind of teach as a principal in our chief AI Officer program is that the old paradigm of learning meant, you know, you got your, you graduated from high school, then you went off and got a degree and then maybe you got an advanced degree and then you worked under a mentor and those sorts of things. Because the expectation with learning was that, you know, oh, I'm the self identified expert or my credentials, you know, make me the expert. And in an environment where my subject matter was needed, I was expected to be able to recall this information on demand. And now with AI, I don't need to know about marine construction, I don't need to know about geology, if, if I'm a good user of the models. How is this paradigm of learning shifting? I mean, because you guys have thousands of clients in your service that are supporting millions of learners. How are you seeing this AI kind of impact this paradigm that you were used to maybe from 2014 on until, you know, the release of generative AI?
- [06:01]
A
Great question, Chris. First of all, to start from the post that you mentioned, I doubt that somebody can learn Spanish in, in, you know, three or four weeks with, with, with Grok and I doubt that they can learn Spanish with duolingo or with any other of these kinds of, you know, gigification where I just. My daughter now believes she's learning Korean. What she does learn with Duolingo is some nice Korean words handy to order a coffee, but that's not how you learn a language. So even though all these tools are changing and we have now, we were having kind of the same discussions a few years ago when people were saying like, why do we need classes or online learning? I can go out to YouTube, I can go out and I can find everything, you know, with a, with a top of at my fingertips. Is this learning and does this change how we learn? The thing is that even though the tools are changing, our mind is the same. It's the same that it was 150 years ago. It's the same that it was a couple thousand years ago. It's probably the same that it was 150,000 years ago. So obviously AI is bringing a huge paradigm change and it's following some of the changes that you already mentioned. The societal and economic conditions were already changing and this is one of the reasons we created LearnWorlds in the first place. Already 10, 15 years ago, people were saying, should I get into a, I don't know, a couple of hundred thousand of student debts and go into a three or four year degree to become a web developer when I Can go online, pick up a few courses, and I could be a junior naive basic web developer in three or four months because I've done some kind of, you know, of a boot camp or something else. I think we need to understand that in this era the metacognitive abilities of learning how to learn are becoming even more important. It was really important until now with all this abundance of information out there, to be very careful about how we choose this information, how we learn, what are the new tools of the trade and how we direct our learning. And this will become even more important in the rest, let's say, of the 21st century. So knowing things, it's not important anymore. We understand everybody can find all sorts of facts. You know, you can ask an LLM and you, you appear as a wise person. It's different to become better at learning. We cannot compete with AIs in the things that they are great. They're pattern recognition, they are great at synthesis, they are great at writing sheets of perfect written prose and the text that, you know, they can go with AI on this. If we do, we will lose the same way that we do not compete with cars on speed. There are other things that we do. We direct technology, we direct. We have to learn how to bring in the creativity, how to bring in the direction, how to bring in the ingenuity, how to bring in the passion, how to bring in the empathy. The things that AI can imitate, very good scaring, really good at some, at some cases. But these are the important things. So what we see from our customers, because indeed our customers are coming to us with the same kinds of questions. Are online courses still relevant? Are online courses dead? Is school or university? Dead will be just learning, picking up stuff by interacting with a GPT or asking an LLM to create for me a very specialized personalized courses course on how to fly a plane can probably do that. Would you like to, to come with me? You know, for, for a ride? Probably, probably not. So we are, we are entering an era where content becomes obsolete very, very fast. It becomes a commodity. Anybody can now create content. You know, if you know a subject, you can easily interact with with an LLM and you can polish it and you can transform it. You can get your notes or your book or your, your presentations and convert them into an online course or whatever vice versa. You can start from an online course and convert it into, into something else. And we believe that in this era of AI, we will need more learning rather than less. Our, our problem is not going to be access to information, it already wasn't there. Now we are talking about obviously LLM being able to create much better synthesized and personalized and content with great presentation. But the need for learning remains the same. And there is a big risk here for, especially for our customers, for creators, content creators, course creators. LLMs can create some perfectly presented text. It's easy to believe that just consuming some of these text you are learning. So the content is great, but it can also be shallow. And we know, we understand that brain is a muscle as well. We learn through friction. We learn when we get confronted with difficult problems that we need to solve. Just consuming content and having access to content, it's not the answer otherwise. Already with our Wikipedias and YouTube channels and masterclass, you know, all our subscriptions, we would be wise. We are not. Why? Because we need this guidance. We need to come into a process of learning. We need to challenge ourselves. We need to engage and interact not just with a bunch of content, but also with peers that are learning along with us, with a director, with an instructor who directs us through this process. No.
- [12:11]
B
And one of the things I failed to mention. So listeners, it's not that Panos knows about this just because he launched a business. You've got a PhD in educational design, like online educational design, right? So you didn't just read a bunch of stuff online about this. You got a PhD in the subject. So.
- [12:28]
A
Yes, and I don't. Sorry to interrupt. And again, we are not here. We understand that big part of the learning will happen through informal means, online courses and the lifelong learning and little seminars and webinars that you are picking along the way. I don't want to. I come from a university, from an academic background. I definitely don't want to, you know, to, to disparage that paradigm. It's still going to be there. We need our pilots to be trained the traditional way. Our doctors are surgeons. But for some types of knowledge, for some types of skills, the. The university path or the four year degree is already too late. We, we see that not just knowledge, but also skills, processes, software. The, the way that all industries are pacing right now, it's extremely fast. So knowledge becomes obsolete even faster. So we need, we. It means we need to be learning 24 7. Just accessing the knowledge is not going to be enough. Just getting access to books and manuals and, and videos, it's not going to be enough. We need to be in this always on learning mode.
- [13:36]
B
So this is interesting. We're starting to identify a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, right? As you mentioned use the word. That doesn't mean that we're wise. And that's a pretty profound distinction there. So for the listeners here, if they're on this, it's because they're on a learning path related to how do I leverage AI? What does AI mean to my career? What does AI mean to my industry, to my, my family and that sort of thing. In that case where the models are changing regularly, like I mean weekly, we're getting major updates and that sort of thing. For professionals that are listening to this, how would you recommend that they not just consume the content, watch the video, listen to the podcast, but that they actually internalize this information about AI specifically in their industry so that they can not just know about it, but actually do something with it.
- [14:26]
A
I guess using it every day and embedding it into your workflows and directing it, it's the best thing that we can do right now. As you said, there are major releases almost every, every other week, which is great for us. All these LLMs, they're competing very fast. They also make mistakes and we've seen that they have released things that are bordering on the, you know, on the irresponsible, irresponsible, dangerous. And I'm sure that we, more of these. I, I, I'm using lately a nice expression that I, I learned, I heard from somebody that we are actually in the dial up era of AI. So what we're seeing now, we are in the very early days. Like we, we sometimes we fail to recognize it, but it's just a couple of years that we are working with this and it already, I know that it feels like 10, 20 years, but imagine what will be possible in five or, or 10 days. So if I were on 10 years and I see this mistake happening, I see it with our employees, I saw it with myself, I'm seeing it with our customers. In some cases you can get a polished, great looking result on your first try and most people stop there and say okay, this is it. Either because it's good enough and in many cases it is good enough for the first try, but many people fail to, when it's not enough, they fail to double down and double click and go inside and, and work prompt, provide context and go deeper and challenge and evaluate and encounter another competing LLM that will judge and evaluate the results that they got first. So many people either get impressed with the first result and say okay, this is it, I'm just setting it out and we tend to become kind of lazy. You know, there is a Kind of a cognitive, a cognitive laziness over, over there or in some cases we, we fail to, to go, to go deeper and we see that and we try to challenge our own customers with some of the content that they create. Because they get the first level output of, of an LLM. It's easy for something that used to take them weeks to create an online course. Now they're happy because they got it in a day. But you shouldn't stop there. Why not go, you know, for excellence? Why not get the strong parts that the are giving to you and add your own direction, meaning tone, sentiment, pedagogy, you know, and work more with, with that. So I think my only answer now again, because these things are racing very fast and sometimes we try even in our company, like with experts and people who use it every day and sometimes we fail to identify a new release or an important feature or something that happened. I guess using it every day, using AI as a force multiplier. Don't become complacent and lazy and just depend on first level results. Keep working, directing, challenging, not just getting dumped, content that has been dumped by AI or sloped, but try to get into a structured output and constantly challenge. And this is where you, you start to understand what good looks like, what bad looks like. This is where you can, you can start becoming better and you can start getting this assistance, this speed that, that these things can, can bring to any profession and to, to any professional. And like I'm sure you've heard it hundreds of times right now, nobody will be replaced by AI, but everyone can be replaced by a competitor who is using AI better than us. It's like declining to use technology or the Internet or anything else. It's a tool, it's a very important tool. It's adapting very fast. So we need to be on top and try to keep it as part of our daily workflows and bring into organization, into our team, even into our family. You know, that's also what I'm doing with my daughter, teaching her, not, not scaring her, but understanding that okay, this is here, it will exist, we better, you know, coming to terms with it and try to control it.
- [18:49]
B
What I'm taking away from that is that I don't know what your profession is or your industry, but if I did, I could go to the LLM and I could get information that to somebody who wasn't familiar with that industry, I could present them with something and they would go, oh, Chris is an expert at it. However, you as the expert who's listening to this now, you know that whatever you get from the LLM, good, but it's not a hundred percent. The knowledge and the wisdom that you've developed in your career or your industry allows you to take that LLM content and enhance it to where it's not LLM content, it's not exclusively synthetic, it's now human that's augmented on speed or quantity of content. But you as the expert still have that obligation for contribution to. Now you mentioned something about this cognitive laziness. And several months ago I saw, I don't know, I didn't dig into the article, but it indicated, particularly in San Francisco, it was an investor. And he was talking about how when I talk to young founders who are on the models all the time, I'm noticing that they're having a harder time communicating with humans, you know, because they're outsourcing a lot of that thought or that, a lot of that cognition. And there is some, some atrophy of that muscle, that brain muscle that you mentioned. Was that anecdotal or is that something that as a power user that we should be thinking about?
- [20:18]
A
Well, it's not the first time that I hear of this and it's also, it's not the first time that this has been recorded or discussed. There is a. I will take you back to ancient Greece, Socrates the philosopher. There is a Socratic dialogue where he laments the discovery of writing because he says all this thing is making us lazy. It's making us lazy. Do you remember all the ancient people who could recite endless epics of tens of thousands of verses? Why? Because they never had to write something down. My mother remembers Something like 200 phone numbers. Yeah, I probably remember. I probably remember too. So where we were we destroyed by this? No, we just shifted, you know, the. Where our focus was. I'm sure that we lost some things. It's clear when you run out of your phone, runs out of battery, you wish that you remember that phone number or that piece of data. Things are moving. Obviously there are not just quantitative but also qualitative differences now with AI because they come so much closer to the unique things that makes us human. Because they can emulate discussions. They can be your partner, your co founder, they can be your boyfriend or your girlfriend. They can emulate all these things. In some cases fairly good. So I understand that some of our other functions might, might atrophy. So I guess we better keep to our stick also and keep close our human friends, our families, our co workers, and make sure that we can also write something from time to time without, without having an LLM next to us. Do I feel threatened by I don't know, the text editor and the autocorrector or anything else? I don't. I guess you don't. Most people who are able to do it on their own and they see a new capacity coming in, they use it as help. I'm also I guess scared and I'm thinking about how the new generation that yeah becomes native. We see this, this space. So this is also why I believe that we should teach them you know again how to keep learning how to learn learning how to be directors and not you know, becoming over reliant on these things. I'm not sure, I'm sure that how. I'm not sure how this goes. I'm sure that some people will lose the, you know, the bet that we will lots of their capacities with wheel atrophy. But I guess we, we need to, to keep. Have people be, be alert and learning how to learn and keeps. People are adapting. We've adapted to a huge amount of change in our, even in our lifetimes technological change. So I think we'll, we'll adapt to this as well.
- [23:32]
B
So you've mentioned metacognition and like thinking about how to think and learning how to learn how to. Is that changing and what are maybe some frameworks or best practices for individuals who have now have access to unlimited content on demand on any topic from any perspective that they want if they're using the models. How are you suggesting we become capable of learning how to learn and thinking about how to think in this age of generative AI with all that access?
- [24:04]
A
I guess I'm not sure if there is like one answer to this. Probably there are multiple angles and it has to do also with, with what people do for a living. You know, what, what's their skill, what's their profession, what they, what they do know? Our, like most of our experience comes with our own customers who are the creators of online courses. The creation of content is something that is time consuming. It's difficult. It's a, it's a, it's a creative job. And obviously these people were also when all these LLM started coming around they felt threatened like, like what will happen? Will we just be flooded with this AI slope And we focus a lot on these people. We worked a lot with them on prompt generation in the beginning like how to start working with these things and how to start to learn how to do this stuff. And we are helping them now to accelerate their time to content creation, to value. And this is working. They understand that they can keep their own things, their own unique qualities, but they can also multiply their efficiency and their effectiveness. So I guess it's a combination of the things that we were doing, what we're good at, the things that we were doing, and using AI as a complementary tool on our side to become much more efficient and much more effective. And this is also our approach with our platform, this is our approach with LearnWorlds, how to do human centric learning and AI that comes as a copilot to help our customers to do better work. I think the same way that we are trying to include AI in the learning profession and in the content generation. People have to think about their own jobs and their own tasks. Definitely we need some kind of formal training, keep access to seminars and webinars and then small formal classes to help us master the tools. But also then we need to think about how we bring them into our everyday practice. What is the job that we are doing? What is in my work? If I'm running a small startup, I'm running a small agency, I'm a contractor or I'm a consultant, what are my jobs to be done? Where do I spend more time? Where, where is something that it's, it's a chore, like it's a pain. I don't want to do it anymore. I would like to pay somebody else to do it. Can I go into these little things, have a co pilot by my side, not to replace me, not to, but to, to augment me and make these things faster? So even in, in our, in our own business, in LearnWorlds, the way we try to approach things, okay, how can we do our job better? How can we do our job easier? How we can bring better quality? What are the pains that we have? We have these people here who are working on, I don't know, whatever support tickets, creating content, doing graphics. What is the way that we can keep their powers and we can enhance them and convert them into superhumans that can be 30%, 50%, 200% more efficient, more effective and more satisfied with their work. So I'm not sure if that, that can be as a framework, this is obviously a very live problem and we're also trying to figure out the solutions ourselves.
- [27:30]
B
Was all these content creators that are on the platform of learn worlds, they're, they're translating their lived experience and their knowledge into a format that somebody who is new to that subject can ingest and accelerate their learning curve. Right. But also on the same token, somebody who doesn't know that subject can create that, the AI slop, let's call it, as a listener who wants to better understand a subject, what are some of the things that we should be looking out for so that we can recognize, hey, this is authentic. This is from somebody who's pushed the buttons, who's dug the ditch, whatever that work is. Because again, I don't have that. If I don't know the subject matter, I don't have the discretion to be able to say, this is good and real, this is synthetic. How can we tell?
- [28:19]
A
I totally agree that this is a problem and it will become even more of a problem with all this content that, that is going to be created. So the validation and the confirmation of knowledge becomes even more, even more important. Yes. Of all, when I learn myself, how I, like we say about us, metacognitive abilities and being able to direct our learning. But when do I know if I'm on the right path in my, if I'm learning the right stuff and if I'm learning them to the, you know, to the, to the level that is required so that I can, you know, fly that plane or use that software or do these kinds of things? So this validation, we see that from our, from our customers and their learners is even more important right now. You want this certificate, you want this test, you need this. So anything that doesn't bring this structure and doesn't bring this kind of, you know, and validation, like some kind of validation, I, I think it will, it will leave people uncertain about what, what they've learned. And this is usually the problem with, you know, going out on Wikipedia or going out on something like YouTube. When it's enough, you just hop from one to the other. But you don't know whether you've achieved mastery or just, you're just on the surface, splashing on the, on the surface. Another thing that we see is becoming more important now is this kind of authority that comes from a person who knows their stuff. Because in the past we used to get that from the traditional, you know, from the academia, because we know that this is like a school that, you know, it's running for 300 years or it's validated, it's certified, it's board certified, state certified, or, or whatever. This. Now in the era of AI, with all this content being created, again, it's going to become even more important. So just learning on your own, on the side doesn't mean much. At some point, you will need to verify that so this verification with connecting content with some kind of master, but also in some cases this might not be an institution, it might be a person of authority. Because if you know that, okay, Greece Chris is the top guy to talk to you about how to use AI in your day to day work, you will follow Chris. Chris is the new authority. Not the school, the university, the college or anything else. These are the people who know their stuff, they have been successful. And it's like just a couple of years ago, until now becoming, being a published authority, we follow authority which now can be expressed in even more ways. So if you see a court out there that you, from somebody that you've never heard that doesn't include any kind of validation, is not connected to any kind of measurable outcomes at the end or some kind of validation, it might be great for your self improvement, but you will not be able to translate it connected with the reality or to translate it to something that you know where you are standing. For us, for every learner, for every person, it's very important to know where we're standing, you know, in this pecking order of, of learning, of status, to know where we are and what we need to do next. This is why we believe that it's not just the content is the safe space where we learn, it's the social content. Because learning is not a, it's a team sport. We do it better when we, when we learn together. And you also need this director, this coach, this, this person who will show you the way, help you along the way. And now he or she has so many more tools because we say or she can create all these personalized, very guided plans for you. But at the end of the day you have somebody who can verify that you're on the right path and that you've achieved some kind of mastery on that, on that field.
- [32:28]
B
This is, this is very helpful. So my takeaway from this would be for anybody listening, before you invest the time into learning from a certain channel or an individual, I would validate their bona fides. I would look for have they published the book? Are they certified through something? In the past it used to be so easy because, oh, I've got the Harvard degree. Oh, well then you must be the expert. And it almost sounds like what you're suggesting is that rather than the institutional credibility it now you need to now investigate the individual credibility. And another thing that you said that I think is very important is this idea of if I'm interested in a subject, I can go and look it up. Right. However, there's a distinction between what I'm able to self discover through a prompt as compared to me sitting in a room and all of the, the varied experiences that exist or virtual room or whatever. But the varied experiences that exist amongst the other learners, they're going to have a lens on the world that will prompt them to ask certain questions to the instructor. The LLM wouldn't say, hey, and somebody who has this experience might look at it this way. Somebody who has this experience, it's almost like it's, it's very sterile. The information that we get from the LLM, it's not really that holistic experience. It doesn't have the nuance because I'm not sitting in the room with others who are saying my profession is this. How does it apply to me? And me being able to translate that person's question into oh, I can use it for here.
- [34:00]
A
I totally, I totally agree because when I'm sitting on my own in front of an LLM, I'm missing so many things. And this is where you mentioned these skills that are, that are going, you know, are trophic because I'm missing all these things. It's just myself, it's my own individual, my own individual experience. And LLM can very well emulate also the contrarian view if I ask you if I know how to do it, but if I don't know how to do it or if I don't care, then I'm just sitting in front of a mirror. So what do I learn? And also to the thing that you mentioned before, the individual authority, it was always there to a certain extent and it will not, it will not replace totally the institutional, I guess, validation. But it's becoming, both now are becoming more and more important again our doctor and our pilot, we want them to get, you know, to have this degree. But there are so many more things that are happening and it's great because we are learning so many more things now. We are learning things for self improvement. We're learning things because we have hobbies, we pick up things as we, as we go. Everyone now on the planet can know something that somebody else on the planet probably needs to know and now they are able to teach it. You can learn great things from the top individuals everywhere for everything that you like. But this also needs a place to happen. It needs the interaction, it needs the friction, it needs the competition with a fellow person. It needs the encouragement when you are down. It needs. All these things are part of the learning process, just swimming within some Perfectly crafted, like great looking content is not going to do it. We need the, we need to train the muscle. We need to go in and do the difficult stuff. Learning is overcoming adversity is, is going through the, the mental blocks, is challenging, challenging yourself. So this will not change whatever AI And I'm sure that we will see more incredible stuff coming from AI. Our brain is still the same and it learns the same way. So we, we need to, to feed it like that. We need to keep feeding these with the, with the things that we, that, that, that makes us grow.
- [36:30]
B
You know, I came into this episode with a, I don't know, a bias for sure, we all have those. But this is opening my eyes to a whole different way of looking at things. We produce a lot of content. The chief AI officer, right. Even though it's LLM augmented, I don't necessarily think about the veracity or the applicability of it because I'm doing the thing right. I know that I'm the expert, I'm self identified, but I feel that I have achieved a level of mastery with this thing. So I don't really look at it through that way, but I don't necessarily look at that. I don't use that same bias when I'm exploring other people's stuff. I just assume that if it's out there and they've put the effort out, oh, they must know more than I do. But the reality is not the case. You know, you mentioned, and totally agree, I wouldn't want the pilot who was able to pass the written test because they studied LLM to say, hey guys, buckle in, it's my first flight. And you mentioned doctors as well. It, and it realized it doesn't just apply to the white collar stuff. Would you want the electrician who had only studied LLM wiring up your house, would you want the carpenter who had seen the images and everything, but they had never picked up a saw before? Do they know the theory and skill? Yes. Can they apply that skill? So as a, as a listener of this podcast, start to introduce some level of filtering before you go and invest in the hour long YouTube video. Now I know with, with LearnWorlds you've got individuals that they've got a skill set that they've been recognized as that distinguishes them from other others in that industry. I'm good at this. Therefore, I want to start to codify and productize my life experience into something that will help accelerate others. One of the first things that I know, like I've been mentoring entrepreneurs for 30 years. I do a lot of business development and one of the things that I always get a reaction from with people is, could I go and get this information from the LLM and regurgitate it? Yes. However, I have all these, like, heuristics and all these rules of thumb and all these sayings that I've heard, little quotes that instantly summarize the entire experience into one thought thing. I don't see that happening with the LLMs. They're giving me gross, like, gross information as compared to fine information.
- [38:58]
A
I think they are masters in generalizations and patterns. And if, you know, if you have, if you know the meaning, the substance of your, of your saying, of what you want to pass to the other person, they might help you create an amazing quote because they can give you 20 different, you know, views and 20 different cases and you can choose, but you are the owner of the meaning. You need to help them create that. If you don't have the meaning and if you just go, you, you just go to that for the answers, you will end up with something that is average, that is mediocre, perfectly well crafted, but definitely it could be, you know, shallow or contradicting or not genuine enough, not authentic enough, not something that can, that can, that can help you. So it's, and this is by design because they have consumed all the content that is out there, everything that we have ever produced and written and read. And because it's too much, they have to generalize, they have to come up with average. You have to ask the pointed questions yourself so you can start getting pointed answers from. You have to be opinionated in the things that you're asking. You have to do, to ask difficult questions so that we can get meaningful answers as well.
- [40:25]
B
So I want to switch gears a little bit because I'm certain that in your industry you've seen this. But there are a couple of people that are like, oh, it can never do it as good as I can. And I would imagine that when, when the content creation element of, of a large language model was introduced into your industry of, you know, productizing and presenting information and expertise so that others could learn it, that's translatable to a lot of other industries. So for those of you listening, I would imagine that the finance person in your company is probably saying, oh, it can never do it as good as I am, I can, therefore, I'm not going to embrace it, I'm not going to leverage it. What was that experience like for Learn Worlds when all of a sudden it had AI capabilities? How Was that received by your, both your users, I mean like your creators and also their customers.
- [41:17]
A
We found this by working with them. We started initially when, even in the early, in the early days, 2023, February, March, when, you know, when it was just three or four after the first version of GPT was out in the, in the public and we started doing prompt engineering with them and try to understand where they're really struggling, what are the things where they can get the help. So we try to be very careful from the beginning that guys, we're not trying to replace you, you are the directors, but we're trying to enhance you. So let's see, what are the boring things? What are the. Where you can get more value. It's clear that as an instructor you can create some. You know, here's an example. One of the most boring things for every teacher, everywhere, wherever you ask them, is to create questions for a test, especially a multiple choice test. So you have to go in and create 100 multiple choice questions on a particular topic, trigonometry or biology or whatever. Every teacher, if they spend three days or you know, a few hours, they can create some great, some great content. But if you have your LLM by your side, you can ask it to create based on your content and your knowledge to create for you 100 multiple choice questions. You know, varying difficulty based on the Bloom taxpayer. And you get this in three minutes. Yeah. What does it. Would, would you be able to do it better? You would, but now you are freeing up two days of your time. If you're going out for a coffee, it's not a good investment of your time. If you are using this time to go back to your students and provide personalized feedback based on the individual mistakes that they made and you give them, you know, the, that you do the extra steps. This is a good usage of your, of your time. So could you do it better? Yes. What. How can you scale up your business though in terms of the creation of the content, in terms of being able to serve better, serve more people and also scale up. Our customers are running businesses. In some cases they're running multimillion dollar businesses just by creating and selling online courses. So you want to be efficient. In some cases these are small teams or small businesses. So you need to be as efficient as possible. You will. You can use AI in the content creation, you can use AI in the feedback. You can use AI on the marketing order or the personalization or the automation of your, of your business. So that doesn't take anything away from you as a creator, as long as you validate the content, you direct the content, you are responsible, you know, you sign off for everything that you put out there and then you save time to do the important stuff, the things that you are only good at doing.
- [44:12]
B
What I like about what you've done here is you've created a platform for the content of all these different sources, that of your clients that you've got. However, you guys are looking at it through a way to where you're not allowing the AI slop to be the product that their customers are able to buy. Right? So this sounds like Learn Worlds has now created an environment where people, me as somebody who's interested in learning a topic, I can trust that the content that I'm getting there is possibly augmented and encouraged to be augmented, but it's not going to be the AI slop. What is the distinction with LearnWorlds from perhaps other platforms where I can go and learn stuff like a YouTube, like a Wikipedia? What's making the difference?
- [45:00]
A
Just to Clarify here that LearnWorlds is not a marketplace or an online big platform where people can go in and find also sorts of different, different courses published from, from anyone. LearnWorlds is a white label platform, which means that we give to you, Chris, the tools to create your own online school. So at the end of the day, you are responsible, you are bringing in your content, you are bringing in your, your audience and you are responsible for the content that you, that you, that you upload. So we, we cannot police, you know, or enforce what kind of content goes there, but it would be a very short sighted, you know, self defeating strategy. Just going to your school, you are an expert, you know, you have your personal brand, you're doing your podcast, you are, you are a consultant and you are working with entrepreneurs. You would never put your name under something that is, you know, of bad, of bad quality. So we are not enforcing it, but this is, these are the schools that thrive. The schools that are original, they bring high quality content with a strong personal brand next to them with validation of the content. These are the schools that usually thrive. So this is our model Learn what is a white label platform. Anyone can go to our website, they can start a free trial, then they bring in their own content. We give them the tools to create the best possible version of their online course. So in the past, everything had to be manual, handcrafted, every word and every video and every script. Now all these work can be augmented and we are working with them not just for the wordsmithing Part, but also for bringing in the pedagogy and having them think about how they want to structure their advice, how they can create novel, interactive, interesting, engaging experiences for their audience. So high quality content that sells at a premium price. And also people, the end learners are happy with what they've learned, are super happy with the experience and they can come back to buy more. When you are selling online courses as a creator, you're judged every day by every customer because people pay for that. So you know, you have to, you have to do it, you have to do it the right, the right way. So we are bringing them the tools, they bring in the audience, we augment the content and they're bringing the, bringing the content we augmented, they bring in the audience and they create a thriving, thriving community that not just includes the consumption of the courses. Every learnable school has its own private, built in community of learners where people interact with each other, they interact with the content. And it's not just consuming self paced courses because people can also do live classes. So it can be a hybrid environment where you can just go through some videos or some ebooks if you are, you know, if you are late at night sitting at your sofa or once per week you can go in online, interact with the expert, learn from them, have these kinds of office hours or anything else. So it can be a really hybrid and dynamic experience and in fact everyone can customize it based on their own community, on their own niche, build their own business model on top of the content that they publish, whether it's for self improvement, professional skills or something that is highly regulated and leads to a very specific degree that is, you know, certified from, from a board or a commissioner or some kind of other entity.
- [48:36]
B
Obviously Panos understands the, the learning experience, especially in the, the, the, the age of AI, let's say. But if you're a listener and you think, hey, I'm pretty good at what I do, this might be an opportunity for you to leverage that expertise into a high leverage environment of AI supported in a, a Learn Worlds platform where all of a sudden, especially if you're recognized in your industry for being good at something, I can tell you that as he mentioned, they've got clients that are earning millions of dollars from productized knowledge. Some of you listening to this could be creating that, that retirement path or early retirement path, or there's my vacation home, I just paid for that by me sitting down over a weekend in an environment that LearnWorlds provides for me to be able to say, oh, if I was going to do this job from, start from scratch. Here's where I'd start. I wouldn't do this. I'd do this. I'd make sure I did this. Here's how I do it based on my experiences and that sort of thing. So I think it's, you know, we've had an interesting conversation today about what is, what does learning in the age of AI look like? But I think what's, what's kind of coming to me as we're wrapping up this episode is that this is going to be so easy for so many of these listeners. What is a product creation? What does a course creation process look like using learn worlds as far as maybe time investment and that sort of.
- [50:04]
A
Thing for somebody who already knows their subject? And they start from somewhere where there are some notes, teaching notes, a book that they've written about, articles that they've written in the past, the transcript of their podcasts. You know, if you start from the body of knowledge, in some cases, it can be a weekend. It can be a weekend. You know, in the past this content creation was the number one blocker. We over the years, especially in the beginning, we were talking with people who were top experts in their field, professors with 30 years of experience, and it was extremely difficult for them to move into the online medium and you know, create the online videos. People in the beginning, they were starting to create these 45 minute long videos that are, you know, by PowerPoint, purely emulating the classroom experience. But that's not how it works in the online space. You can create all these little videos, five minute videos, little snippets that you can just, you know, exchange, replace, repurpose and you can create your content very, very easily. Also in the past, people used to have this kind of perfectionism problem. All the courses like they had to be, I don't know, Hollywood level productions with multiple cameras cured us of this. That's one of the few things that happened, you know, that were positive out of this, cured us of this thing. Anyone now with their, with their smartphone and iPhone, they can see the of it and they can record the perfect video just by sharing their experience, sharing the things that they know. So I've seen amazing courses being launched over, over a weekend literally. So the, the path now to creating the content is the, the barrier is so much lower. It's so much easy to, to create, to create the content. And then what you mean is the content. And in some cases people already start from somewhere. They have an online presence. They might be running a LinkedIn group, they might be running a Facebook community. They might be known in their neighborhood, in their industry, in a conference, you know, whether they have a public forum or not. This could be the root of an amazing online business that can bring you revenue, you know, for years to come. 24, seven, you know, passive income, the things that people are really hoping to get out of something like this.
- [52:32]
B
So if you've ever thought about doing this, if you're listening to this podcast and you've thought about it but thought it was too hard, I would submit that is no longer the case with tools like this panels. Thank you so much for taking the time. I. I have a saying that I love is once expanded, the mind can never contract to its original state. Right. This is sweet.
- [52:52]
A
I love it.
- [52:54]
B
Broadened my thinking about thinking, my thinking about learning. Because as an educator and somebody who's lecturing regularly on this stuff would just do the thing, right? I just show up and share stuff. You know, on the surface, I'm competing with the 20something who's like, write me a book. You know, goes to the models and says, write a book on xyz. Because they see it as a business opportunity, not necessarily as a passion. And that is a big point of distinction. So, Pan, is, is there anything that you think that the listeners need to be taking away from this as they go into 2026 with, you know, I only accelerating and introducing more, I don't know, pressure to, to know more.
- [53:38]
A
I think first of all, these are fascinating times and scary times. So I would like to keep, you know, the positive side of it that now, for the first time, anyone here listening podcast, every professional can have a super powerful part, their cognitive partner next to them that can help them do their stuff. We cannot be lazy, become lazy and just outsource things to it. We need to keep working with it. We need to keep the things. And we cannot, definitely cannot compete on the things that AI is best at. Speed, memory, pattern recognition. We need to bring in our own unique characteristics. Like, same as I said before, we are not competing with cars on speed. We drive them. This is how we need to think about it. And we need to bring in our own judgment, creativity, empathy, our unique characteristics and the things that keep us human. Every kind of business, any kind of learning happens when humans interact with, with humans. So, so, and all the rest are just tools for us. That's how we should think about it.
- [54:47]
B
I find that very encouraging that you suggest that humans are still needed in this process. So again, Panos, thank you again for taking the time, everybody. We'll catch you on the next episode. We're going to have some links in the show notes to go and learn more about Learn Worlds. Thanks everybody. Thanks for tuning in to Using AI at Work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work and a special thank you to our sponsor, Chief AI Officer for Empowering Businesses with AI Education and Training. Visit their website for a free AI Readiness Assessment and AI Strategy Guide to help you get started using AI at Work. That's www.chiefai officer.com. follow us on Twitter at the handle Using AI at Work and visit www.usingaiatwork.com for free resources to help you harness AI in your role.