Leveling Up: Advanced AI Modalities And Insights
Our solid AI Strategic Foundation has created a structurally sound base to build upon with our Programmatic Enablement strategies. These include both internal AI competency and skilling and the efficiencies.
As we continue to build our AI pyramid (below), we bring our Strategic Foundation and Programmatic Enablement to life with highly tailored, individualized, impactful AI experiences that help achieve performance objectives and critical business goals.
Here at the pyramid's peak is where we leverage Advanced Modalities and Insights to level up the L&D value-add with highly customized AIs for ever-more-adaptive, personalized learning experiences and pathways, pairing them with immersive learning, speech, and natural language processing (NLP) technologies for maximum impact.
(Want an overview of all three levels of the pyramid? Check out the first article in the series, "AI Adoption: A Tale of Three Organizations—and the L&D Leader's Opportunity.")
Peak AI: Scalable, High-Quality Learning For A Distributed Learner Audience
These powerful technologies can help us scale high-quality, high-touch learning experiences to a broad, globally distributed audience, increasing access to critical skills and future opportunities. Yet despite the global reach, AI helps every experience feel concrete, relevant, and close to home, never generic.
As L&D leaders, where we'll add the most value and prove our ingenuity and ROI is in leveraging AI to amplify our in-house human wisdom and expertise. As we explore life at the summit, we'll discuss how to target interpersonal skills and extend the reach and impact of our in-house experts through targeted AI solutions.
In this article, we'll focus on two types of Advanced Modalities and Insights:
Custom AIs For L&D
We've identified five distinct roles for our custom AI solutions, all of which are designed to meet your specific learning and strategic needs. You might need a role to stand alone in a solution, or we might opt to mix and match features of different roles to customize even further.
Training The AI Trainer: Anatomy Of A Prompt
Like any trainer, your custom AI needs to understand its job description, duties, and limits.
Think of Dynamic AI Prompt Engineering as a digital version of the classic Train the Trainer experience. Here's what this deep human-AI collaboration involves:
- We begin with a prompt detailing the AI's Role and Goal: that is, its perspective and personality as an evaluator, curator, coach, and so on.
- Then, we provide Step-by-Step Instructions that detail the tasks the custom AI is expected to perform.
- Constraints guide its behavior and how to respond to different learner outputs, and
- Pedagogy dictates how it delivers feedback to the learner for growth and reflection.
This iterative, continually human-validated process ensures that the custom AI delivers targeted, effective learning experiences that foster true behavior change and align with business and performance objectives.
Custom AIs: Levels Of Complexity
The modular system shown below depicts several levels of complexity for each AI role. (Of course, roles can be combined to create a truly bespoke custom AI solution!)
Level 1 offers foundational features, for example, automated scoring by an Evaluator or basic content curation from a Curator.
Level 2 features, such as reflective guidance from a Coach or interactive task simulation from a Simulator, are more nuanced.
Level 3 capabilities like skill measurement and behavioral analysis by an Evaluator or Coach, respectively, are more complex and responsive. The Assimilator's legacy knowledge curation function, which allows learners to converse with the collective wisdom of your seasoned in-house experts, is another exciting example of a Level 3 function.
Level 4 represents highly adaptive functionalities with predictive modeling. Our team is engaged in ongoing research and development to configure different levels of adaptability and personalization for uses ranging from individual learning to organization-wide insights.
(Get a firsthand look at roles and complexities in two case studies of real-life custom AIs that offer truly dynamic and responsive learning experiences in our eBook, The AI Blueprint: Actionable Strategies For L&D Leaders To Reduce Risk, Add Value, And Unlock The Benefits Of AI At Scale.)
Voice Interactions And Natural Language Processing (NLP)
In the previous section, we touched on the transformative power of AI to create seamless, authentic experiences that deepen learner engagement and mastery. Now, we'll look under the hood and discover how pairing voice interactions and Natural Language Processing (NLP) power custom AIs that are truly intuitive and conversational.
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
The power of Natural Language Processing (NLP) allows learners to receive personalized, actionable feedback not just on what they say, but critically, on how they say it. This deep, conversational analysis allows for highly nuanced skill development, a core strength of the Advanced Modalities and Insights at the peak of our AI strategic framework.
Sentiment
Learners receive live feedback on their tone, speaking pace, and volume, helping them refine their delivery. A digital listener becomes more attentive or receptive based on the speaker's attitude and vocal expression.
Intent
An NLP engine analyzes learners' vocal responses, interpreting the content of their response against the model. The real-time, responsive interaction adds immediacy, urgency, and authenticity to the practice of nuanced interpersonal skills.
Word Choice
Learners respond vocally and receive real-time coaching on whether the words and phrases they choose are operationally and culturally appropriate.
(Want to see how all three—sentiment, intent, and word choice—play out in an immersive coaching simulation? Download our eBook, The AI Blueprint: Actionable Strategies For L&D Leaders To Reduce Risk, Add Value, And Unlock The Benefits Of AI At Scale.)
Transforming Data Into Actionable Insights
If a skill matters enough to coach, simulate, evaluate, and so on, it's important enough to measure. And thanks to the rich performance data generated in solutions leveraging machine learning and the AI-NLP pairing, in-depth learning analytics are at your fingertips.
Here are just a few of the capabilities these data offer your team:
- Personalize learning: Track progress and tailor content to individual learners' needs and gaps.
- Optimize content: Analyze data to enhance training materials; for example, just-in-time materials to guide them through a simulation where many learners get stuck.
- Map and audit skills: Pinpoint talent gaps and longer-term development needs to address in future learning strategies and roadmapping.
- Demonstrate ROI: Measure the impact of L&D programs and solutions on business objectives.
- Ensure AI quality: Continually analyze AI-generated content for quality and bias.
AI-Powered Content Generation: Challenges And Solutions
A Guideline-Based Approach with the SweetRush Content Generator
The Challenge
Traditional content generation tools rely on iterative chat interfaces where users engage in back-and-forth conversations to shape and refine content. Though this approach works well for one-off content needs, it can be inefficient when you need to generate multiple documents with consistent requirements.
The Solution: Guideline-Driven Content Generation
We've created an internal tool, called the SweetRush Content Generator. This Google Docs add-on is designed to generate precise, measurable content through a streamlined, guideline-based approach. It enhances the Google Docs platform's natural collaboration features while adding powerful AI-driven content generation capabilities.
Thanks to the SweetRush Content Generator, our team can:
- Create reusable guidelines: Establish prompts for structure, style, ethics, validation, audience, tone, accessibility standards, regulatory compliance, and other content requirements.
- Connect documents intelligently: Use Google Doc smart chips to link prompts with guideline documents, making it easy to create multiple documents according to the same guidelines.
- Generate consistent content: Produce multiple documents that follow the same standards of brand consistency and quality with minimal input.
Creating Better Prompts: Test, Tweak, And Maintain With TinyRAG
The Challenge
Wrestling with monolithic, theory-of-everything prompts is exhausting—and so is attempting to maintain, share, and tweak them across projects.
The Solution: A Swiss Army Knife For Prompt Development
TinyRAG is a prompt engineering toolkit that offers a mini-language for building, testing, tweaking, maintaining, and reusing prompts. Think of it as a Swiss Army knife—compact, versatile, and designed to make your life easier.
TinyRAG offers a systematic way to build, test, and reuse quality prompts, enabling you to create tailored QA tools for different projects, maintain data sets, and evaluate results across various characteristics using the same system—all without drastically changing your workflow. It's prompt engineering that actually scales. You can tweak your prompts, reuse pieces across projects, and iterate quickly…without breaking everything.
Ready To Achieve Peak AI At Your Organization?
These exciting examples of advanced modalities in action are just a few ways to create high-quality, high-touch learning experiences that scale to a broader learner audience than ever before.
For more on creating a foundational AI strategy or leveraging AI to boost efficiency, productivity, and a shared sense of responsibility across your organization, download our eBook, The AI Blueprint: Actionable Strategies For L&D Leaders To Reduce Risk, Add Value, And Unlock The Benefits Of AI At Scale. You'll find a comprehensive plan to help you build your AI strategy from secure foundation to peak implementation.
