Autonomous Corporate Learning Platforms: Arriving Now, Powered by AIJosh Bersin 的文章通过人工智能驱动的自主平台介绍了企业学习的变革浪潮，标志着从传统学习系统到动态、个性化学习体验的重大转变。他重点介绍了 Sana、Docebo、Uplimit 和 Arist 等供应商的出现，它们利用人工智能动态生成和个性化内容，满足了企业培训不断变化的需求。Bersin 讨论了跟上多样化学习需求所面临的挑战，以及人工智能解决方案如何提供可扩展的高效方法来管理知识和提高学习效果，并预测了人工智能将从根本上改变教学设计和内容交付的未来。推荐给大家：
Thanks to Generative AI, we’re about to see the biggest revolution in corporate learning since the invention of the internet. And this new world, which will bring together personalization, knowledge management, and a delightful user experience, is long overdue.
I’ve been working in the corporate learning market since 1998, when the term “e-learning” was invented. And every innovation since that time has been an attempt to make training easier to build, easier to consume, and more personalized. Many of the innovations were well intentioned, but often they didn’t work as planned.
First came role based learning, then competency-driven training and career-driven programs. These worked great, but they couldn’t adapt fast enough. So people resorted to short video, YouTube-style platforms, and then user-authored content. We then added mobile tools, highly collaborative systems, MOOCs, and more recently Learning Experience Platforms. Now everyone is focused on skills-based training, and we’re trying to take all our content and organize it around a skills taxonomy.
Well I’m here to tell you all this is about to change. While none of these important innovations will go away, a new breed of AI-powered dynamic content systems is going to change everything. And as a long student of this space, I’d like to explain why. And in this conversation I will discuss four new vendors, each of which prove my point (Sana, Docebo, Uplimit, and Arist).
The Dynamic Content Problem: Instructional Design By Machine
Let’s start with the problem. Companies have thousands of topics, professional skills, technical skills, and business strategies to teach. Employees need to learn about tools, business strategies, how to do their job, and how to manage others. And every company’s corpus of knowledge is different.
Rolls Royce, a company now starting to use Galileo, has 120 years of engineering, technology, and manufacturing expertise embedded in its products, documentation, support systems, and people. How can the company possibly impart this expertise into new engineers? It’s a daunting problem.
Every company has this issue. When I worked at Exxon we had hundreds of manuals explaining how to design pumps, pressure vessels, and various refinery systems. Shell built a massive simulation to teach production engineers how to understand geology and drilling. Starbucks has to teach each barista how to make thousands of drinks. And even Uber drivers have to learn how to use their app, take care of customers, and stay safe. (They use Arist for this.)
All these challenges are fun to think about. Instructional designers and training managers create fascinating training programs that range from in-class sessions to long courses, simulations, job aids, and podcasts. But as hard as they try and as creative as they are, the “content problem” keeps growing.
Right now, for example, everyone is freaked out about AI skills, human-centered leadership, sustainability strategies, and cloud-based offerings. I’ve never seen a sales organization that does quite enough training, and you can multiply that by 100 when you think about customer service, repair operations, manufacturing, and internal operations.
While I always loved working with instructional designers earlier in my career, their work takes time and effort. Every special course, video, assessment, and learning path takes time and money to build. And once it’s built we want it to be “adaptive” to the learner. Many tools have tried to build adaptive learning (from Axonify to Cisco’s “reusable learning objects“) but the scale and utility of these innovations is limited.
What if we use AI and machine learning to simply build content on the fly? And let employees simply ask questions to find and create the learning experience they want? Well thanks to innovations from the vendors I mentioned above, this kind of personalized experience is available today. (Listen to my conversation with Joel Hellermark from Sana to hear more.)
What Is An Autonomous Learning Platform?
The best analogy I’ve come up with is the “five levels of autonomous driving.” We’re going from “no automation” to “driver assist” to “conditional automation” to “fully automated.” Let me suggest this is precisely what’s happening in corporate training.
If you look at the pace of AI announcements coming (custom GPTs, image and video generation, integrated search), you can see that this reality has now arrived.
How Does This Really Work
Now that I’ve had more than a year to tinker with AI and talk with dozens of vendors, the path is becoming clear. The new generation of learning platforms (and yes, this will eventually replace your LMS), can do many things we need:
First, they can dynamically index and injest content into an LLM, creating an “expert” or “tutor” to answer questions. Galileo, for example, now speaks in my own personal voice and can answer almost any question in HR I typically get in person. And it gives references, examples, and suggests follow-up questions. Companies can take courses, documents, and work rules and simply add them to the corpus.
Second, these systems can dynamically create courses, videos, quizzes, and simulations. Arist’s tool builds world-class instructional pathways from documents (try our free online course on Predictions 2024 for example) and probably eliminates 80% of the design time. Docebo Shape can take sales presentations and build an instructional simulation automatically, enabling sales people to practice and rehearse.
Third, they can give employees interactive tutors and coaches to learn. Uplimit’s new system, which is designed for technical training, automatically gives you an LLM-powered coach to step you through exercises, and it learns who you are and what kind of questions you need help with. No need to “find the instructor” when you get stuck.
Fourth, they can personalize content precisely for you. Sana’s platform, which Joel describes here, can not only dynamically generate content but by understanding your behavior, can actually give you a personalized version of any course you choose to take.
These systems are truly spectacular. The first time you see one it’s kind of shocking, but once you understand how they work you see a whole new world ahead.
Where Is This Going
While the market is young, I see four huge opportunities ahead.
First, companies can now take millions of hours of legacy content and “republish it” in a better form. All those old SCORM or video-based courses, exercises, and simulations can turn into intelligent tutors and knowledge management systems for employees. This won’t be a simple task but I guarantee it’s going to happen. Why would I want to ramble around in the LMS (or even LinkedIn Learning) to find the video, or information I need? I”d just like to ask a system like Galileo to answer a question, and let the platform answer the question and take me to the page or word in the video to watch.
Second, we can liberate instructional design. While there will always be a need for great designers, we can now democratize this process, enabling sales operations people, and other “non-designers” to build content and courses faster. Projects like video authoring and video journalism (which we do a lot in our academy) can be greatly accelerated. And soon we’ll have “generated VR” as well.
Third, we can finally integrate live learning with self-directed study. Every live event can be recorded and indexed in the LLM. A two hour webinar now becomes a discoverable learning object, and every minute of explanation can be found and used for learning. Our corpus, for example, includes hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews and case studies with HR leaders. All this information can be brought to life with a simple question.
Fourth, we can really simplify compliance training, operations training, product usage, and customer support. How many training programs are designed to teach someone “what not to do” or “how to avoid breaking something” or “how to assemble or operate” some machine? I’d suggest its millions of hours – and all this can now be embedded in AI, offered via chat (or voice), and turned loose on employees to help them quickly learn how to do their jobs.
Vendors Watch Out
This shift is about as disruptive as Tesla has been to the big three automakers. Old LMS and LXP systems are going to look clunkier than ever. Mobile learning won’t be a specialized space like it has been. And most of the ERP-delivered training systems are going to have to change.
Sana and Uplimit, for example, are both AI-architected systems. These platforms are not “LMSs with Gen AI added,” they are AI at the core. They’re likely to disrupt many traditional systems including Workday Learning, SuccessFactors, Cornerstone, and others.
Consider the content providers. Large players like LinkedIn Learning, Skillsoft, Coursera, and Udemy have the opportunity to rethink their entire strategy, and either put Gen AI on top of their solution or possibly start with a fresh approach. Smaller providers like us (and thousands of others) can take their corpus of knowledge and quickly make it come to life. (There will be a massive market of AI tools to help with this.)
I’m not saying this is easy. If you talk with vendors like Sana, Docebo, Arist, and Uplimit, you see that their AI platforms have to be highly tuned and optimized for the right user experience. This is not as simple as “dumping content into ChatGPT,” believe me.
But the writing is on the wall, Autonomous Learning is coming fast.
As someone who has lived in the L&D market for 25 years, I see this era as the most exciting, high-value time in two decades. I suggest you jump in and learn, we’ll be here to help you along the way.
About These Vendors
Sana (Sana Labs) is a Sweden-based AI company that focuses on transforming how organizations learn and access knowledge. The company provides an AI-based platform to help people manage information at work and use that data as a resource for e-learning within the organization. Sana Labs’ platform combines knowledge management, enterprise search, and e-learning to work together, allowing for the automatic organization of data across different apps used within an organization.
Docebo is a software as a service company that specializes in learning management systems (LMS). It was founded in 2005 and is known for its Docebo Learn LMS and other tools, including Docebo Shape, its AI development system. The company has integrated learning-specific artificial intelligence algorithms into its platform, powered by a combination of machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing. The company went public in 2019 and is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq Global Select Market.
Uplimit is an online learning platform that offers live group courses taught by top experts in the fields of AI, data, engineering, product, and business. The platform is known for its AI-powered teaching assistant and personalized learning approach, which includes real-time feedback, tailored learning plans, and support for learners. Uplimit’s courses cover technical and leadership topics and are designed to help individuals and organizations acquire the skills needed for the future.
Arist is a company that provides a text message learning platform, allowing Fortune 500 companies, governments, and nonprofits to rapidly teach and train employees entirely via text message. The platform is designed to deliver research-backed learning and nudges directly in messaging tools, making learning accessible and effective. Arist’s approach is inspired by Stanford research and aims to create hyper-engaging courses in minutes and enroll learners in seconds via SMS and WhatsApp, without the need for a laptop, LMS, or internet. The company has been recognized for its innovative and science-backed approach to microlearning and training delivery.
BY JOSHBERSIN
Sana
2024年02月18日
Sana
Sana Raises Additional $28M Led by NEA to Build the Universal AI Platform for the EnterpriseSana, a company focused on building a universal AI platform for the enterprise, has secured an additional $28 million in funding, with NEA (New Enterprise Associates) leading the investment round. This infusion of funding will undoubtedly help Sana advance its mission of creating an AI platform that caters specifically to the needs of businesses.
The Swedish-born Sana scaleup becomes one of Europe’s most highly-funded AI companies with $62M in total Series B funding
May 31,2023 Sana, the leading AI-powered learning and knowledge platform, announced today it’s landed another $28m in an opportunistic investment round led by NEA. Workday Ventures also joined the round. With a combined total of $62m in Series B funding, the Swedish-born scaleup is now one of the most highly-funded AI companies.
Sana's mission is to augment human intelligence through artificial intelligence. To that end, the company has built a category-defining product that blends the best of enterprise search, a learning management system, meeting tools, and a knowledge management system into one single platform.
Underpinning this suite of tools is Sana AI, the company's latest release. Sana AI is an omnipresent assistant that can do everything from search across all your company's apps and take actions in response to natural language commands to generating real-time summaries of live meetings and creating entire learning courses from scratch, and writing SQL to query your data. In other words, it's like ChatGPT for your company's knowledge.
By augmenting an organization's ability to capture, organize, and access knowledge at every step through AI, Sana enables any team to move faster and be more productive—from sales and customer support teams to product specialists and software engineers.
"At Sana, we believe every organization's mission depends on the collective intelligence of its employees. That intelligence depends on knowledge, yet most institutional knowledge today is scattered across multiple tools, trapped in people's minds, and lost in verbal conversations. AI is the key to solving this problem at scale. By unlocking knowledge for every employee across any organization, we unlock global progress," said Joel Hellermark, founder and CEO of Sana. "We're thrilled to have the support from NEA and strategic investors like Workday Ventures on this mission."
Sana wasn’t looking for funding when NEA made its proactive offer. The scaleup had a healthy runway having closed a $34m Series B round led by Menlo Ventures last December. One of the reasons for the additional investor interest is commercial performance: Sana has grown its business 3x year over year.
NEA will be represented on Sana's board by CEO Scott Sandell and Managing Director Philip Chopin. Since joining NEA in 1996, Sandell has played a critical role in many industry-transforming businesses, including Robinhood, Salesforce, Tableau Software, and Workday.
"Sana's past track record and current trajectory are exceptional. Thanks to top talent, bold vision, and rare organizational alignment, we believe they've already built a world-class learning and knowledge platform. But what excites us most is where Sana is going next: indexing every form of an organization's functional data through LLMs to become the de-facto AI platform for the enterprise. The use cases for this type of product are endless," said Scott Sandell, CEO at NEA.
In addition to Sana's commercial growth and ambitious team, NEA was impressed by the level of customer advocacy. The platform is used by an impressive client roster of market-leading companies like Merck, Kry/Livi, and Svea Solar—all of whom praise Sana's superior user experience and product velocity.
"Since day one, we've been amazed at Sana's pace of innovation and commitment to addressing customer feedback. The platform is more than a tool—it's become Svea Solar’s home for learning and knowledge. We see the latest iteration of Sana AI as a productivity game-changer, " said Hanna Manberg, CHRO at Svea Solar.
With the additional funding, Sana will continue expanding its product development and commercial teams across Stockholm, London, and New York offices. Sana's headquarters will remain in Stockholm, where founder and CEO Joel Hellermark founded the company aged 19, six years after teaching himself to code in C.
"Joel is an exceptional founder. This Series B extension is a testament to his technical and commercial prowess and visionary leadership. As we enter the new age of artificial intelligence, we believe the Sana team is well positioned to become one of the world's most successful and impactful AI companies," said Philip Chopin, Managing Director at NEA UK.
About Sana
Sana is an AI-powered learning platform that empowers organizations to find, share, and harness the knowledge they need to achieve their missions. Backed by some of the world's leading investors, operators, and founders, Sana has raised more than $85m to date. The company's headquarters are in Stockholm, Sweden, with offices in London and New York. For more information, head to www.sanalabs.com.
About NEA
New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA) is a global venture capital firm focused on helping entrepreneurs build transformational businesses across multiple stages, sectors and geographies. Founded in 1977, NEA has over $25 billion in assets under management, as of March 31, 2023 and invests in technology and healthcare companies at all stages in a company’s lifecycle, from seed stage through IPO. The firm's long track record of investing includes more than 270 portfolio company IPOs and more than 450 mergers and acquisitions. For more information, please visit www.nea.com.
Sana
2023年05月31日
Sana
Sana Raises $34M Series B to Transform the Way Organizations Learn Through AISana has raised $34 million in a Series B funding round to revolutionize the way organizations learn through AI. This funding round was led by Menlo Ventures, a venture capital firm. Existing investor EQT Ventures also joined the round with several founders and operators. This Series B funding round is a significant milestone for Sana, providing them with the necessary resources to scale their platform, refine their AI capabilities, and further drive innovation in the learning space.
Following 7x year-over-year growth, Menlo Ventures leads funding round to accelerate US expansion
Dec.13,2022 Sana, the leading AI-powered learning platform, announced the close of its $34M Series B led by Menlo Ventures. Existing investor EQT Ventures also joined the round with several founders and operators. Menlo Ventures’ partner JP Sanday joins the board as part of this round. This funding follows a 7x year-over-year increase in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR).
Sana was founded with the vision of leveraging artificial intelligence to help organizations learn and share knowledge. To that end, Sana built a category-leading learning platform that enables organizations to consolidate their learning and capture, organize, and personalize all their institutional knowledge.
From personalized learning recommendations to an AI writing assistant that automatically generates content, Sana applies the latest breakthroughs in AI to enhance and optimize the entire learning and knowledge-sharing journey.
Sana's AI-powered semantic search empowers employees to get the knowledge they need from anywhere in their organization. The platform connects and indexes tools like Slack, Salesforce, Notion, LinkedIn Learning, and Google Workplace to provide employees with automatically generated answers in natural language. The result: an end-to-end platform that decreases onboarding time, improves sales efficiency, and grows and retains top talent.
"Now a $30 billion industry, the learning and development market has demanded more sophisticated tools. With a world-class product and incredible team, Sana is uniquely positioned to win the market. They offer two vital benefits to the historically underserved L&D category: the scalability and efficiency of artificial intelligence and the compelling experience of a consumer-grade product,” said JP Sanday, Partner at Menlo Ventures.
"The ambitious customers we serve—pioneers like Alan, Svea Solar, Kry/Livi, and Merck—are on a mission to change the world. Sana’s job is to accelerate their efforts by ensuring every employee has access to the right knowledge at the right time. By leveraging the power of AI, Sana can unlock organizational knowledge with unprecedented scale and speed, supercharging the organizations we serve,” said Joel Hellermark, founder and CEO of Sana.
Sana is now the home for knowledge and learning at digital health company Alan—consolidating a myriad of learning and productivity tools. Today, Alan uses Sana to onboard employees, train sales and customer support reps, and develop their leaders.
"Speed, transparency, and personal growth are key to Alan's culture, and Sana was the only provider able to deliver on all three. Since using the platform, we've decreased our ramp time while boosting learner engagement. We think Sana has set a new standard for what organizations expect from a learning platform. Their tech and UX have leapfrogged the industry," said Filip Lam, Head of People Growth at Alan.
With the new funding, Sana will extend its product development and expand its team across Stockholm, London, and New York offices. The headquarters will remain in Stockholm, where founder and CEO Joel Hellermark founded the company aged 19, six years after teaching himself to code in C.
“Joel’s visionary leadership, and his rare combination of being technically skilled and exceptionally ambitious, has enabled him to assemble a world-class team from some of the foremost tech companies. With learning as the foundation of human progress, we believe team Sana has the potential to play an important role in reimagining learning as we know it,” said Sandra Malmberg, Director at EQT Ventures.
"Our ambition is to build an internet-scale Library of Alexandria, where more than a billion people can learn about anything and share everything they know," said Hellermark. "We're thrilled to have the support of Menlo Ventures and previous backers on this mission."
About Sana
Sana is an AI-powered learning platform that empowers organizations to find, share, and harness the knowledge they need to achieve their missions. Backed by some of the world’s leading investors, operators, and founders, Sana has raised $54M to date. The company's headquarters are in Stockholm, Sweden, with offices in London and New York.
About Menlo Ventures
Menlo Ventures is a venture capital firm that strives to have a positive impact on everything we do. That’s why we support businesses including Benchling, Chime, Carta, Poshmark, Uber, and Roku that are reimagining life and work for the better. Over 43 years, we’ve grown a portfolio that includes more than 70 public companies, over 100 mergers and acquisitions, and $5.5 billion under management. We invest at every stage and in every sector, with expertise in Consumer, Enterprise, and Healthcare. From developing market strategies to creating communities, we provide real impact where entrepreneurs need it most. When we’re in, we’re all in. www.menlovc.com
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