NextThought | AI-Enhanced Training For L&D

Many learning and development teams and companies are using AI tools to achieve greater productivity, including content creation, generative AI, personalized learning experiences, and workflow automation.

Advancements in artificial intelligence have powered new insights and personalization in corporate training. But they are largely siloed and serve a singular use.

However, there’s now an AI-powered training solution making a substantial impact not just boosting learning and development teams, but benefiting multiple levels of the organization in its use—the business bottom line, the L&D team, managers/trainers, and employees.

The AI-coach by NextThought.

Many learning and development teams and companies are using ai tools to achieve greater productivity, including content creation, generative ai, personalized learning experiences, and workflow automation.

Advancements in artificial intelligence have powered new insights and personalization in corporate training. But they are largely siloed and serve a singular use.

However, there’s now an ai-powered training solution making a substantial impact not just boosting learning and development teams, but benefiting multiple levels of the organization in its use—the business bottom line, the L&D team, managers/trainers, and employees.

Discover AI-Enhanced Training by NextThought.

How the AI-coach works

What's the biggest challenge in scaling great employee training? Personalized practice and expert feedback.

AI-enhanced learning is designed to accelerate learner performance by allowing employees to practice in realistic scenarios and then instantly receive personalized feedback based on company performance standards.

The power is in the AI’s ability to assess, grade, and provide remarkably accurate feedback to each employee. It dramatically speeds up the learning process and gives employees high-quality practice reps without a trainer. No waiting for a trainer/manager to be present. No failing and not knowing why.

Essentially, employees now have an on-demand personal trainer that coaches them toward mastery, 24/7.

And because the AI-driven tech offers voice-driven interactions, employees practice realistic scenarios that simulate their working environment.

The use cases for learning and development teams are numerous, which is why teams are adding AI-enhanced learning to their elearning and corporate learning initiatives.

How the AI-coach impacts the business

One-on-one training is highly effective but expensive. Personalized instruction isn’t scalable. Many businesses experience tremendous “productivity loss” (salaries paid during training). The longer a trainer, top performer, or mentor spends facilitating employee training, the less they produce and earn for the business.

So how can organizations benefit from one-on-one training without hitting the bottom line?

By pairing it with NextThought’s artificial intelligence training solution, the AI-coach. It lets businesses recoup large productivity losses by allowing employees to practice and receive their trainer’s individualized feedback without the trainer present. Experts help when a human touch is truly needed.

Quicker Time to Mastery. When employees build skillsets faster, employees contribute sooner and top trainers spend less time refining employee performance. These add up to huge savings.

How the AI-coach impacts Learning and Development teams

L&D professionals are dedicated to designing learning journeys that produce behavior changes and impact business goals. They identify knowledge gaps, architect learning paths, develop training materials, and orchestrate adaptive learning.

But L&D teams and instructional designers must juggle deploying learning content that improves retention, changes behavior, and empowers employees, but is not too time-consuming and not overly resource-heavy.

So how can the AI-coach help so many of these L&D goals?

Scalability.

Because this training solution is AI-based, it scales a company’s knowledge base. That could be a trainer’s expertise, sales playbooks, customer service scripts, product specs, company policy, standard operating procedures, or manuals. One-on-one training is powerfully effective but is heavily limited by people, time, space, availability, and materials.

With AI-enhanced training, employees can now get many of the benefits, but on demand.

Impact.

Not all training is created equally. Effective training is designed to reach an objective and change behavior. AI-enhanced training improves employee performance faster because it increases the training reps for expert-led practice and feedback. Employees reach mastery faster by presenting them with a realistic scenario, allowing them to respond verbally, providing precise feedback instantly, and then letting them try the scenario again immediately after.

Personalization.

Personalized learning experiences have been prioritized by learning and development teams preferred by learners. AI-enhanced training deepens personalized learning journeys by providing specific, accurate feedback based on exactly how the learner responds in a given scenario. It grades each interaction so the learner knows how close they are to exceptional performance. It’s a gamification that progresses the learner toward mastery.

Also, upskilling is a great use for AI. High-performing team members can practice advanced scenarios and build new skills before stepping into expanded roles. The L&D team simply imagines the right scenarios and determines what excellence looks like. Plus, NextThought’s AI-coach is SCORM and xAPI compatible with learning platforms/learning management systems (lms).

How the AI-coach impacts managers and trainers

NextThought’s AI-enhanced training isn’t designed to replace trainers and mentors to become more efficient and scalable.

Trainers give new employees a base knowledge, set role expectations, demonstrate and model excellent work, provide opportunities to practice, identify skill gaps, and then coach until each employee shows acceptable performance and understanding.

So how can the AI-coach make trainers more efficient and effective?

Coaching is the most challenging, time-consuming, and valuable part of traditional training methods because the trainer must personalize their feedback to each employee, which isn’t scalable. Employees are naturally along a spectrum of performance. Each has individual needs.

With AI-enhanced training, trainers don’t have to spend as long coaching because the training technology accelerates employee performance using the same criteria and feedback the trainers would give themselves, but without them present.

Plus, it’s nearly impossible to train for every situation. But with the AI-coach, trainers can simulate hard-to-replicate scenarios, which exposes employees to critical use cases that can impact the business.

How the AI-coach impacts employees

Now to the end-user. Corporate training has developed a poor reputation for being boring, rote, and inflexible. Depending on the company, training programs can either be neglected or a point of pride and innovation. Regardless, employees want to be trained well. 91% want training and development to be personalized and relevant (Axonify).

So how does the AI-coach give employees what they want from corporate training?

AI-enhanced training delivers individualized feedback based on relevant scenarios. Because it can be accessed on mobile devices, these microlearning sessions serve as realistic simulations of on-the-job situations.

On-demand.

Employees can receive real-time feedback, not wait for a trainer to be available. Because of the accessibility, employees can increase practice repetitions, building their confidence and competence faster.

Private Practice.

Learning can be clumsy. Practicing in front of clients, customers, and even co-workers can be daunting for some. Before putting employees on the frontlines, AI-enhanced learning allows employees to make mistakes early and often, correcting themselves and building confidence privately before performing their role publicly. Where would you rather make your training mistakes?

Realistic.

eLearning makes information and learning digital. But realistic practice has been challenging to scale, especially for remote work. AI-enhanced training strengthens elearning initiatives by adding realistic scenarios and practices to other interactive elements. Many real-world interactions take place with spoken language - which is how we should practice. Now you can!

With the emergence of AI technologies, algorithms, machine learning, and natural language processing can be hard to understand. But NextThought’s AI-powered learning solution elegantly solves a unique challenge for learning and development teams—scaling effective training without adding human expense. And it benefits multiple levels of the organization.