SPEAKER_00 0:00

There is there's so much happening in AI right now that is is fundamentally changing the way that uh content development and customer education work. But the core of what humans do and what value we add, that is that's the part that's remaining constant and becoming more important than ever. So I think sort of like we said, um use use and embrace the tools for what they help you do, but don't sacrifice your own taste.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, wherever you are and wherever you're watching from. Today we're gonna be talking about customer education. There's a lot happening out in the space of world, bigger world learning development. And when you go down into that even subcategory of customer education, there's a ton of change happening, there's a lot going on, and we've got someone who is an expert in the space, who has written a book, and is also just a fantastic person to chat with about all these kind of developments that are happening. So I'd like you to welcome back to the show uh Adam Evermescue.

Adam’s Journey

SPEAKER_01 1:00

So Adam, welcome back to the Visual Lounge.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Hey, thank you so much. It's great to be back. It's been it's been a long time.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

It's it's it's definitely been a while. Uh I I should have looked up the number, which episode number you're on, but it's it's been a little bit. But I'm I'm glad you're here. Uh so I know there's been a lot going on. You've you've made some uh had some opportunities in your life. You're you you left some you've done some leadership stuff. Now you're you're kind of looking at your next opportunities. Uh seems like things are going well though.

SPEAKER_00 1:30

Yeah, absolutely. I uh since the last time I was on the show, and I actually now I also need to look. I don't know where I was working when when I was on the show, but I had a few a few uh big, let's say, uh software companies. I was working at Slack, and we had just gotten acquired by by Salesforce uh at that point. And that's when I uh got reached out to for an opportunity that brought me to Amsterdam, which is working at a company called Personio, as the then it was the VP of customer education, but over time that evolved into uh what we called scaled customer experience. So kind of reflecting, let's say, a broader, a broader set of activities than traditionally what we would say is part of customer education, even. And was able to build a lot of uh cool things with uh my team there and they're still rocking and rolling. But yeah, for me, uh after four years at Personio, I uh am taking a little bit of a break to both to cultivate some things in my personal life and uh frankly uh just need a little bit of rest and reflection. But um also yeah, to spend some time uh doing some consulting and fractional work and yeah, seeing what's out there in the industry. So that's where I am.

SPEAKER_01 2:44

Awesome. That that is great. And I and I I I I love that journey, right? That you you've you've you've gone through a lot of different stages in customer education roles,

Scaled Customer Experience (Scaled CEX)

SPEAKER_01 2:53

and I and I'm really curious about this the scaled, what was the word you said, scaled.

SPEAKER_00 2:58

Scaled customer experience or scaled CX, we would say.

SPEAKER_01 3:01

Scaled CX. Okay. I I I love this because I I'm curious out of the gate, does that does that feel like the natural progression of where customer ed is going, or is customer education still like really a niche subset that should be part of that bigger part? Because I think we've always we you've I think you and I have even talked about this. Is that customer ed kind of doesn't have a home of its own. It's like usually like it's in a marketing department, maybe it's in a uh a support department, maybe it's someplace else in the organization. And I'm wondering, is it starting to evolve into maybe a a place where there's this bigger, kind of bigger vision of what customer ed can do?

SPEAKER_00 3:40

Yeah, it is it is interesting that customer education doesn't have, let's say, uh a super traditionally defined home. Um and often it's it's a combination of whichever department really wants to sponsor it based on alignment to business metrics, um, and also a little bit of what is the product or or service that we need to educate the customer on. So I don't know if this is a reflection necessarily of customer education having found a more permanent home. Although what I will say is, you know, since I started in this world and since I started talking about this, I've seen specifically customer success and customer experience teams become, let's say, the strongest champions of customer education functions. So it's very common, at least in the circles that I roll in, mostly tech companies, uh, that that's where it lives. But I do still see uh every once in a while it sitting in marketing. And I think especially in certain non-tech companies where there isn't, let's say, uh a post-sales motion. I'm doing air quotes for those who are listening. Uh yeah, exactly. Um to live in marketing, because that's still the the place where you encounter customers and customers need to learn things.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

So, Adam, you talked about that customer success is often championing customer education. People who are close to the customers is uh, and that makes a lot of sense, right? We want our customers to be successful.

“Skinny” VS “Broad” Customer Education

SPEAKER_01 5:01

Um, but do you think this is again, is it a bigger shift that way, or is there, you know, is this maybe a more nuanced kind of refinement of what customer has been doing?

SPEAKER_00 5:12

Yeah, I would look at it more as related to the scope of what customer education is taking on, especially in the, let's say, the new world. And I originally had this concept of uh skiddy customer education and broad customer education, where, you know, in the past, if you were doing customer education, you might have started doing a lot of uh very tactical activities, but your maturity path was almost growing into this education services organization. So your home usually was going to sit in a professional services team delivering trainings, delivering paid certifications, things like that. But over the time that I've been in the industry, that's really started to shift, where there are still a lot of organizations that do that, but that's no longer, say, the gold standard of maturity for customer education. In fact, now where I see customer education teams evolving is they're taking on a lot of other activities, surfaces that basically create an ecosystem for customers to be able to learn and to get better at using products. So that's where I see, let's say, broad customer education or what I'm now uh calling more scaled CX, digital customer success are all coming together. So that if you in the past might have been creating courses, certifications, ILTs, things like that, now you're still creating uh a lot of formats like that, but you're also probably owning something more in the sphere of documentation or communities and advocacy programs or in app education, or uh, I'm trying to think of other things. At Personio, this all came into our scaled CX team. Uh even certain email uh triggered email campaigns with with our customers that allow us to meet them where they are. And that's reflecting that customers learn in in new and different ways, and that education, more than just being a program that gets delivered these days, is now almost, let's say, a knowledge layer for the entire company because it's not just the infra the content that uh customers are gonna get, but also that AI is gonna consume.

SPEAKER_01 7:22

Yeah, I I I love that view. And uh, I think my my world view has of experience has been that as someone who's worked in customer education and also in a variety of different departments, that that it's funny, I've done a lot of those things and it makes sense to me. Like to me, that doesn't seem like a big shift as other than like, yeah, thank you for bringing that together, makes the life a little bit easier. Um, but I'm I'm curious then for because there are so many more kind of unique opportunities and challenges there of things, skills that you uh a typical customer education person may not have. You know, they might be someone who's like maybe into the learning, but you mentioned like technical documentation, you mentioned maybe like email campaigns and things like that. So from if someone's trying to grow into that skill set, it does seem like there's got to be uh an enhancement of kind of the things that we're able and capable of doing. Uh and

Customer Education Reskilling

SPEAKER_01 8:15

I wonder if you're seeing that shift as well as you know, whether it's job applications or people in the industry talking about these things that are slightly different.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

Yeah, for sure. There's there's a lot of, let's say, reskilling that's going on in in customer education. And I think the career paths are starting to look a little bit different because on one hand, yes, you do still have a lot of the same roles that exist, say, in in LD. Instructional designers and learning experience designers still exist in customer education. I don't think they're going anywhere. Uh, similarly, uh, we still have facilitators and trainers, especially for programs that rely more heavily on ILT or in certification programs or things like that. These these all still exist. But the profile of the customer education leader, I think, is starting to change and is affecting also a lot of practitioners on the team. Where with customer education, I think more so than LD, one one thing that I always notice is being able to meet the customer where they are is pretty fundamentally different than it is in LD. And maybe it feels similar if you work at a super large international company that has tens of thousands of employees and you're you're never going to see the faces of a lot of your learners. But I think in a way it's even more chaotic than that because in customer education, you're often dealing with many different users in many different roles and many different accounts or or companies, right, that we that we serve. And they all have their own ways of using the product or getting their jobs done. And the content that you create has to be able to scale to meet them, not just to serve all of those use cases, but to meet them where they are and get their attention. So a lot of the problems that we're trying to solve are more related to that than even, say, some of the fundamental questions about curriculum design or or learning transfer. Though certainly we have to we have to deal with uh with those old chestnuts as well.

SPEAKER_01 10:19

Yeah. What a and but what a great opportunity for people in the industry to continue to grow. Um of course, underlying all this change and kind of uh the swirling of the things that are are gonna be different for people as we look ahead into the future is obviously AI, right? Um AI is everywhere. It's uh can't go it through it feels like a podcast episode without talking about the impacts AI are having. It does yeah, it seems like that's gonna be an impact here too, is whether you're more traditional, just true customer education, you're going larger CX or or what however you're being kind of positioned to help the customer, which is ultimately the end goal.

The Evolution of AI

SPEAKER_01 10:57

How how have you seen uh AI starting to evolve and shape uh kind of the customer education and now this larger CX area?

SPEAKER_00 11:08

There's a lot of things that we can talk about here, and I'm I'm seeing a range of use cases, some that I some that I like more than others, but I guess what what I like personally is not necessarily uh super relevant here. But I I think we can cover a lot of ground. One is maybe I can start with something that I mentioned in in one of the previous questions that you asked me, which is this whole idea of education becoming the knowledge layer. And that's important to me because in the past, one of the big problems that we had in customer education was distribution. Basically, we can create the best content in the world, but if we can't get it to customers and get them to consume it in a time that feels relevant to them, then well, why are we putting that much effort into creating beautiful content? So I've always like while while not wanting to sacrifice taste, because that is still really important to create content that when when customers do interact with it, it serves the purpose, it reflects the brand really well. Um, to me, that that's still a very important part of the process. Oh, and that it engages them, by the way, to actually learn. But more and more, what I'm seeing is that when you create customer education materials, whether those are more text and documentation based, whether it's video uh or more visual in nature, or whether we're talking about interactive course development, that all of that content is going in to feed other systems and often now AI-based agentic systems that customers are interacting with on a daily basis. So I'll give you an example. When I was at Personio, we were uh taking on a very large ambitious project to make sure that the way the customers could access support was contextual from within the product. So we were doing two things at once. We were on one hand building a Personio assistant, and by we I mean Personio, not my team specifically, our our very talented product team was doing it, uh, that would live in the product and would be able to give you insights into. So Personio is an HR uh system. So it could give you insights into how your employee base is doing, how many hires have you made in this type of period? What is the uh uh the employee uh net promoter score? How is that changing location by location, right? Things that you might want to get from an assistant. But it would stand to reason that also within that assistant, you would want to ask support questions about Personio. And there we should be able to triage you into is this a product functionality question or is this a support question? And we can educate you in both contexts. So the same source knowledge has to be able to pull into basically both of those sources, because if you we were asking a product functionality question, the Personio system would handle that. If we were asking a support question, we were integrating a different tool uh called Fin, which is uh one of the big agentic AI uh support platforms out there, to basically be able to try to solve that support interaction. And if we couldn't uh easily, then still make sure that you, as a customer, get to a human being and uh you know get have a have an appropriate and uh uh fruitful support interaction, right? Um but in the end, when we were able to get that standing up, one thing that we saw as a differentiator and in being able to stand fin up quickly was the quality of the documentation that we were able to feed into it. Because with a lot of these agentic AI systems, they can meet the customer where they are. Like they can they can display it for the customer very easily, they can answer questions in natural language, but if they don't have the right source material, then they're gonna do what a lot of AI uh LLM uh uh technology is is is supposed to do, or sorry, not supposed to do, designed to do, which is uh you know, very confidently uh hallucinate an answer, right? Because that's how context windows work, that's how tokens work, um, right? It's just in the architecture of the tool, even if even if we don't like it. So the more specific information that it has to draw from, and the more relevant, up-to-date information that we can provide it, well, that is one way that I see customer education really becoming the source for um for these these uh agentic systems that meet the customer where they are. And from this, uh, this is this is public actually, so uh I don't feel don't feel bad saying it. We were able to, in in the peak month for Personio's seasonality, right? Because it's the beginning of the year. That's when uh all HR teams are dealing with the most things, they're filing the most support tickets. We were still able to reduce the volume of support questions, uh support tickets coming in by uh over 25%. And we were able to resolve uh through AI over 80% of the eligible uh support questions that were coming in. So that's the power of imagine pre-AI, all of these questions either would have been coming in directly to our support team and overwhelming them during peak season, or the customer might have tried to search somewhere in the help center and maybe find it, or maybe don't, and we wouldn't have had the analytics to really know whether that worked or not.

SPEAKER_01 16:24

Holy cow. Those I mean, those are those are incredible results, right? And that's I think the the the hopes and dreams of where all these pieces come together. Because from a kind of purely customer education perspective, you know, I've often been asked about like, hey, how can we reduce the number of training-related support calls, right? Like, could we we're we're doing 50 if 50% of our our workload in our support team is training, how could we reduce that? Now, could you get it down to zero? Maybe not. Some people are gonna always just want to keep pushing the button to get to get to the human. But uh, and not that those are unimportant conversations, but I so I but I love that that's the way it's going. And I love that take that you know, folks who are doing this back-end uh customer education, documentation, tech tech docs kind of work are really the the engine behind making that all happen. Because as we all know, garbage in, garbage out, right? Like your your AI, like you said, it its job is to generate something. It's it doesn't do well when it's like there's nothing it can do. It's like that's like a failure. So it's gonna create something. So um it does give, I think there's probably people, because I, you know, look, I'm not immune to looking out on the internet and seeing what people say about AI. There's there's this there is feelings about AI. Had you noticed that, Adam? Have you heard that? There's a sort of thing.

SPEAKER_00 17:45

I have, I have, yes, I have. Are you saying there might be some sort of AI backlash going on?

SPEAKER_01 17:49

There there seems to be a little bit of backlash going on. And I and I'm curious, um, because it does feel like in this case, like if I'm an HR rep, and and I know this is one of probably many, many experiences out there that people have, and I can get an answer right away to a problem that solves my employee's problem or whatever problem I'm having with the system. Gosh, that feels really good to get that taken care of. Yet I can also understand that people might be upset that maybe you need less support people if the reduction there's a reduction because of you've been so efficient. So we're not here to talk to the politics of AI or or all like the ethics of whether we should or shouldn't. And

How To Balance Efficiency With AI

SPEAKER_01 18:32

but but I'm curious from your perspective, as a leader, how do you balance these challenges of, hey, we need to be more efficient yet at the efficiency might come with this bigger, kind of bigger picture that we need to consider, whatever that might be. And I think that's probably a a lot of things happening in that bigger picture, not just potential job loss or but it's also greater revenue opportunities for a company, right? Because you're a better tool and that might mean better living standards for employees. A lot a lot of we could unpack there, I think. But any any thoughts on uh and and again, uh realizing this is an impossible question, and because I know there's there's a lot of potential answers, and maybe some of them are not the best.

SPEAKER_00 19:17

Uh you know, it's like we're still figuring this all out. No, I mean I'll I'll speak from the heart. We are still figuring a lot of this out. And and frankly, this not just AI specific, but even if you want to broaden that that question of finding that balance between efficiency and reskilling people and making sure that everyone is set up for success, but also still needing to run to uh a top line and and a bottom line. This is, I think, one of the most difficult things about operating at the VP level, and you have to think a lot about this. And and frankly, there is no right answer for this. Um there's a few things that that I want to dig into here. Um, I'll I'll come back to one in a moment, which I think is about responsible AI usage, because I I'm not an uncritical AI booster. That's that's not how I feel about it. I see it as a tool that is allowing us to do a lot of things that we could never have done before. And in fact, um we can get into that a little bit in a moment when we talk about some of the things that AI can do with content production, some of the things that MCPs can do in terms of connecting different systems to be able to report into each other, the ability to automate uh some of the work that would have been completely manual in in the past. And I think from an employee perspective, that that that's a two-sided, uh that's a two-sided coin. From a customer perspective, though, which is where you started, I think one thing that we've seen time and time again is that despite anything related to uh the general sentiment towards AI and knowing that people feel very different, customers usually have a stated preference to talk to a human, but a behavioral preference to get the quickest answer possible. So we we see this, right? In the end, when whenever customers um are actually trying to find help, they will actually self-serve um whenever they can. And our job in customer education has been to make it as easy as possible for them to self-serve with accurate, reliable, accessible materials. And so plugging that into an AI chatbot, for instance, to me is just an extension of that. But I think it's important to balance that with making sure that you know, if we implement a tool like Fin, it has to be very good at escalating things to humans the moment that it knows it can't actually solve an issue. And that's why when we look at something like Fin, we're not looking at pure deflection rates because our gold standard shouldn't be how many. Calls did we deflect, or how many times did customers not talk to us? It's how many times did they resolve an issue without needing to talk to a human. So like I think that's one area from a customer perspective where we still have to be very human-centric and we still have to allow ways for them to talk to humans if they want to. But some of this also comes down to the positioning of us saying, for instance, here's the wait time right now to talk to a human. Here's the wait time if you get an answer for AI. And of course the answer with AI is zero, right? We can provide an answer instantaneously. So there's a little bit of a behavior change aspect there. I'll pause because I I alluded to some things that we could get into, but I've been monologuing. So No, no, no, this is really good.

SPEAKER_01 22:42

I'm I'm actually writing a few things down because I'm like, oh yeah, that's a great way to look at it. Because I do think what you're saying uh is true. There's some behavioral changes, and obviously uh yeah, I think we can be critical of the tools while also looking at them uh because I do think they enable a lot. Um I think one thing that we had talked about prior to our conversation today is looking at like just content creation. Um and I think maybe you were alluding to this a little bit, but when we look at content creation, there's a whole bunch of content that you can create uh that can be can be relatively effective, it can be cheaper and faster to produce, reduce challenges, things like localization challenges and issues, scaling issues. Um but I but I am curious, like, you know, we've talked kind of on the service side of things, like answering those questions, but how do you feel like AI is impacting from a creation standpoint where, you know, I think probably when we met, we were we were both probably making academies and building courses and leading to building large certification programs that, you know, uh for or maybe not not for revenue

How AI Is Changing The Landscape

SPEAKER_01 23:50

purposes. And so um, how how is AI gonna is it changing all this stuff?

SPEAKER_00 23:56

It is, it is. And I think in a couple of ways. One is maybe this is the tie from talking about the the customer service aspect. The the main reason why I was talking about that in the first place is because it means that customer education is becoming more contextual. The main way that we expect customers to learn about the product is shifting from they go through an academy, they earn a certification or a certificate, and they've gone through this linear path to value. All of that is starting to change. And it's not like academies are completely gone. In fact, even the top Frontier AI uh labs have academies that you can go to, and uh you can take really excellent courses on how to use their products and also um learning the fundamentals of AI fluency, for example, from those companies. So let's say on one hand, it's not going away, but we're all preparing for a world where education is becoming increasingly contextual, is going to happen more in the product. And one really interesting prospect with generative AI, although I haven't seen this executed flawlessly yet, is that generative AI itself can start to become more of a just-in-time tutor for customers as they're using a product and as they're trying to learn a skill. So that to me is very emerging technology. That's something that we have to start planning for and experimenting. And just as was the case where in you know 2023 we would try to use LLMs for some basic content creation, and it was very much not there yet. I'm saying with capitals in in all of these uh words. Now we actually can do some of those things fairly reliably. And I think this will be the case with AI tutors and similar technology where it's just gonna take some time for that uh technology to reach a state of maturity. I saw one uh recently where they're basically um, I'm forgetting the name of it right now because I just saw this and I bookmarked it, but they're basically saying we plan to create uh an entire contextual AI tutor product, but uh we're not going to launch it until sometime early 2027. So that's kind of the timeline that I'm looking at these things on.

SPEAKER_01 26:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:03

But in terms of actual content creation, I'll take another pause. Um, but I think that's an area where I'm already seeing some significant leaps forward.

SPEAKER_01 26:11

Yeah, and it's I mean, I it's kind I mean, that's really the opportunity and dream, right? This is uh pr uh personalization of learning, the opportunity to to dig into the areas that you don't know. I mean, I was just I'm I'm taking back to kind of my my master's degree studies, and it's been a while, so I'll probably get something wrong here. So for any of those uh super deep, nerdy learning people who are who are into BF Skinner, uh forgive me if I get this wrong, but he had a learning machine, right? He built this box that basically you give an answer and it would give you instant feedback. And I think that's the kind of the dream that AI is uh potentially bringing forward is this personalization of learning that it's it understands maybe some context that I'm in. It understands the things that I'm doing, why I'm doing it, maybe it has a greater context of the maybe if it, you know, about the organization and its goals and objectives, and it's providing the answers at the point of need. And and you know, I think you're right that we're still not there. Uh, but it is interesting if you look at AI usage, and I'm I'm sure there's a lot of people who are having this kind of one-to-one conversation, if you will, if you can call it that, that is um looking for in-the-moment understanding whether it does a good job at that or not, is kind of to be seen still. But like, hey, I've got this question. I want to learn about this thing. How do I do that? I've I I I'm a 3D printer and doing some 3D printing stuff, and I've I've brought it my problems and asked it to help me learn how to do the thing I wanted to do. So I think I I don't think you're out of the realm there of uh kind of where we're at, and it'll be interesting to see how quickly it this progresses forward. Um, but yeah, let's let's dig in a little bit more about the content. Uh, because there's obviously things out there that have changed, like used to be that voices you would never use a robot voice, and now lots of people are using AI voices or avatars or other kind of mediums that are um being generated that maybe open up some doors. So any thoughts and feelings about where these are going, what what they're good for, when we shouldn't use them, maybe even?

SPEAKER_00 28:17

Yeah, I'm I'm seeing a ton of these companies come to market, and I'm seeing a few of them do this really, really well. I mean, certainly in the AI avatar and AI voice space, there's uh a few. Um I don't necessarily need to name like specific vendor names, but there are there are some really impressive established technologies coming out now where you can pretty reliably, for instance, let's say you're recording a Talking Head video, uh, you can record one of your people, one of your humans, uh, and essentially turn them into an AI avatar where in the future, instead of sitting them down for a recording session, if you're going to do a monthly product update or a weekly product update, or uh a daily product update sounds very excessive, but you know, you you want to do it on on uh more of a timeline than um you can record them as an AI avatar. You can change what they're saying. So let's say um maybe last minute you changed one of how a feature works and now you need to speak to it to type in plain text, uh, a difference in in what you want them to say, they will do it. And for localization, this also becomes really important. Where um if you want to change the language that they're they're appearing to speak or the language that you're you're dubbing them in, uh now that is is much more possible. And AI for localization, again, not perfect, but what I'm seeing now in terms of being able to localize things on the fly into more languages, especially if uh it has resources to draw from, like good examples of your company's writing in those languages, it can do those tasks more reliably. And we did experiment with this quite a bit at Personio. But there are some, let's say, risks, and there there are times not to use AI. This will also come into play. I I want to talk about actual content development for courses in a moment, too. And and there I have I have some strong opinions. But in this case, I think one one thing that that I think about is what is the appropriate amount of disclosure to a customer that something that they're looking at is AI generated. And of course, there's a lot of ethics that go into the idea of taking someone who works at your company, creating an AI avatar of them, and basically now you have the power to make them say whatever you want, right? Like uh we've we've seen we've seen some examples of this with uh with AI before where people have made, you know, Barack Obama say uh whatever, whatever they want. So, you know, first of all, I think it's important to get people's consent in opting into those programs and making sure that they know what you're what you're capturing and they're okay with being an AI avatar that you can potentially change what they're saying and and being clear about what it will or won't be used for. And I also think then disclosing to customers, for example, like this uh this video has been localized uh with AI assistance. That's a that's a good caveat to put on there. Which also, by the way, it's not just an ethical thing, it also helps set customer expectations because let's take uh let's take the German language, for instance, where German customers generally have a preference that everything is word-perfect and sounds completely natural and uh tend to give you a lot of feedback if you don't do that. And Personio uh operating in Europe has a lot of German customers. So we encounter this frequently.

SPEAKER_01 31:42

I I've never noticed that about my German colleagues. I love them, but yes, they have a lot of feedback about things if it's not a good thing.

SPEAKER_00 31:48

A lot of them too are a ton of them. And they will say this about themselves. Yeah, exactly. So I think being able to disclose, for instance, hey, this is the underlying technology being used is important. And I also think there are there are times. Um maybe we're not talking about video that needs to happen on such uh an ongoing cadence. Maybe there's video where you need the brand personality to come through even more than, say, just a talking head, and you really kind of want to go shot by shot, get a little bit more creative. I'm thinking of uh, you know, some some video companies have a lot of personality um in the videos that they create. Well, there you don't just necessarily want to uh slap something into uh you know an AI video creation tool and try to go shot for shot and say, okay, we're we're done. So I think where I would really index on video, uh sorry, AI for video is things that are going to be frequently updated. Things where maybe you're working with AI avatars that are like, let's say, more static in nature, more talking heady, but especially for things like product walkthroughs. Um, and I'm seeing really cool stuff now where um increasingly products have the ability to let you capture workflows in a product itself. You can uh you know collect all the workflows, you can basically walk through, you can give your very unpolished uh voiceover, and then using AI, polish that up and maintain it over time. And that paired with something else that I'm seeing in AI, which is increasingly AI's ability to read a code base and flag what in your documentation or your video might need to change as products update, that is becoming a really cool loop that is saving people a lot of time and is frankly just giving people access to information that they wouldn't have before. So you mentioned earlier job loss, and I want to come back to that for a moment. These these are the types of things that I don't think are actually eliminating people's jobs. This is the type of stuff that's taking away the busy work that they either wouldn't have had time to do earlier, um, so it just never got done, or they may not even have access to some of that information and they find out later and get some nasty surprises. So where where I where I really try to come down on these things is let's not take human taste out of the mix, let's not take human complexity out of the mix. Let's use AI for some of these much more procedural, update, integration-focused, uh, automation type activities. And AI is proving, I think, that it can do a really good job with those while freeing humans up to do the things that require a little bit more judgment and taste.

SPEAKER_01 34:31

Yeah. Uh and a lot, a lot there to unpack. Uh, I I love the idea that, you know, thinking about that governance, right? Because obviously there's lots of challenges when it comes to using people's likenesses, even, you know, like you've left a company. Now what? Does that does that get to persist if someone uh passes away? What happens to their their likeness? You know, I I've only been on one or two videos for Tech Smith in my life. So, like, you know, what's my what happens? Do they have is that is my likeness theirs? Do they own that? Or, you know, what what control do you get? So I do think those are awesome insights. And I and I love that perspective that you know, we're shifting the work. We're the work is changing, but there's still work, right? There's still work that requires you and me and and others to be able to do it. It just might not be the same work and and you know, and there's adjustments there because sometimes, you know, we have niches that we are really good at, and that might mean those niches are less valuable than they once were. But I think that's probably been the case for a long time. Um, I wanna, we do need to start wrapping up, Adam, but I I've appreciated all this conversation. I want to, I want to ask one more question. You've talked a couple times about taste, and

The Question Of Taste

SPEAKER_01 35:38

I think this is such an important piece of this big, broader con conversation that we're having. And because taste is something that I think is is an interesting thing. And I I find I've actually been finding myself talking about taste recently inside my organization as well. Um, because when it comes to video, for instance, uh, I think a lot of people can look at something and say, yep, that's gonna do the job, or they can look at it and they and and they yeah, it's a video, it it talks about the things we wanted to talk about, but there's not necessarily a taste of like, oh yeah, this is good and here's why it's good, right? And so for for you, and you had a lot of opportunities across a lot of companies. What's helped you to develop your taste? Now, I I would say it's probably I think what I know of you, it's good taste. Uh, but I I think how do you go about developing that? Because I I think this is the challenge that we face, right? Because inherently not everyone has good taste, or not everyone even knows how to start to get that taste of for what works and doesn't work. So any any advice you'd give to people out there who are saying, hey, I want to get better, but I know I need to improve that quality or area of what I'm doing.

SPEAKER_00 36:49

Yeah, that's that's a hard question for me. And I'm I'm thinking about it a lot because of something else that we've been talking about in this conversation, where like one of the one of the opinions that that I that's getting stronger and stronger for me is, you know, I'm seeing a lot of tools out there that are basically offering to offload the the thinking of course creation or of content development, where their value proposition is basically, hey, upload these documents, feed us this this content, and we will just create you uh a course. And I'm seeing that in in a lot of different forms of content. And I really I like one piece of advice I guess I would give is a caution to not outsource those types of details completely. Like in the end, it's great if there are tools that can allow you to draft content quicker or create the outline of something from um course material, but you need to know what is good and what is not. And I think the other thing that you need to know is what differentiates the the materials or the product or the video or whatever it is, the content that you're working on. Because you don't need to be good at everything, but I think part of taste is deciding what are the few things that you do want to be really good at. And to me, I guess that's a combination of inspiration and discernment. So inspiration is looking at other things out in the world, whether it's other customer education programs or other types of video that exist outside of customer education, or even looking at, you know, other things that I like in the world, like what, you know, uh movies or uh TV shows or things like that. And I might not be able to 100% translate something that I I saw on uh Game of Thrones into that's becoming an outdated reference, isn't it? Into like I can't think of a uh the bear. Can't translate something that I saw on the bear into uh into uh a customer education video. But being able to analyze and unpack like why do I like what I like? What makes this good, what makes this feel good to me? Maybe there's a principle underlying that that inspires, you know, kind of from one world into the other. And I love the idea of being multi- multidisciplinary and getting inspiration from places that you may never have expected. But then the other part of that is discernment, right? Like being able to say, in the end, okay, then based on all those potential things that we could do, what are the few things that I really want to make sure that every piece of content that we create reflects this? For example, every piece of content that we, every course that we create should start with a realistic, hard problem that creates a challenge for the learner to solve so that we have desirable uh difficulty and a worked example for them. Or uh saying, you know, in our style guide for video creation, you know, we uh want uh the we want to adhere to the brand in these specific ways to make sure that this is a reflection of our overall brand, but we also want to deviate from the brand in these specific ways because these are educational videos that might be different from a product marketing video. So the more I think you can you can understand like what you want to to uh to deliver to your customers, but also what are the underlying mechanics of what make that good. I think in the end that's what taste is, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 40:12

Yeah. I I was just thinking about your your your TV reference, like the bear and game of thrones. I think there's a current Game of Thrones, so I think that's a good reference still. People get it. Uh House of the Dragon, yeah, yeah. House of the Dragon, yeah. So but I but I am thinking about like there is practice there, right? And I don't just mean the act of doing, although there is that, but like there's a practice of saying and being able to become someone who can talk about those things and see how they they filter through to whatever we're doing, right? Um, you know, I just had a great conversation with a gentleman. He's got three Academy Awards, Mike Fasolo, he wrote for Robot Chicken, which is you know Cartoon Networker, uh Adult Swim show. But we're talking about comics, we talked a little bit about comic books, we talked about being in the writer's room for that show, but I'm thinking about like some of the things he talked about and saying, like how does that filter through to the practice, right? The things that you're doing in your your kind of your work role as a customer education person. How does taking something from the bear and saying, like, hey, what's a practice there that they did as maybe as writers, cinematography, um, story, or all those pieces and saying, How could I multidisciplinarily steal that and make it something that works for me without just wholesale saying, I'm gonna take from the bear, right? Like, I I think that's there, that is part of taste because in that taste, you have to have the discernment. Like, that doesn't work, that doesn't work. That could be interesting if we tweak it, but like, but that's a practice you have to go through. You're not gonna get that the first time. You're you're gonna have to try doing things and you're gonna fail along the way. Because some things are gonna be like, oh man, that that really sucked. That was not what I wanted it to be. Um, so I I do love that interesting.

SPEAKER_00 41:59

When it's not just like sorry, sorry, it's yeah, and like to just riff on what you said, it's also not just about lifting things like completely stealing them wholesale. It might also be that something you see somewhere makes you it's it's that spark of connection and creativity. So, for example, in the bear, I was I'm just watching the new season

That Spark Of Connection & Creativity

SPEAKER_00 42:15

right now, and one thing I was reflecting on is the way they write dialogue often on the bear, like characters talk in very natural ways. It's not always like between the very pithy lines that they have, because they certainly do have a unique way of doing that, there are a lot of ums, uhs, very natural sounding language, character stuttering, things like that. And it adds to the effect, the intended effect, that you're watching something real happen between characters. And so I might take that and I might say, okay, what if I want to experiment with uh a customer education video that seems more candid and unadulterated? Could we incorporate some of those same techniques to actually make it feel like you, the customer, have just dropped in on us as we're as we're doing something? I've never actually done that before, but it's something that I might try because I got the inspiration.

SPEAKER_01 43:02

Yeah. I I I and I love that as a really practical example. And and there's a million of those, right? Whether it's from TV or you're looking at other industries. Uh another convers it's it's striking a thought with another conversation with Tim Slade I had about how he where he gets inspiration from. And you know, he would be like, he's like, I was in an airport and I was looking at like a monitor and there's this graphic that came up. And I'm like, he's like, huh, that's kind of cool graphic. I think I could make that graphic, you know. So it is, it is, yeah, that that pulling from, um, which is something AI can't do for us, right? It can't, we still have to give it the the direction. And even if yeah, you can ask it for ideas, it it's still gonna generalize. It's gonna go to the kind of the middle. And so I I I do love this idea and it gives me uh gives me some Adam, this has been a fantastic conversation. Give me a lot of food for thought, and I hope our listeners have some food for thought of things they can take away and try and think about and apply. Uh as always, though, you know, I I know you're into doing a lot of things right now and uh having some opportunities. If people want to connect with you, Adam, where where should they find you and where can

Where to Find Adam

SPEAKER_01 44:06

they hear more from you?

SPEAKER_00 44:07

They can find me on LinkedIn. Uh that's that's always a safe bet. Uh I tend to post a lot about customer education, scaled customer experience, uh, these types of things. Uh, but I also have two podcasts, actually, uh, one that is more active than the other. Uh one is the the long-standing one is called C Lab, the Customer Education Lab, that's C-E-L-A-B. And the second one is called C X Etera, where me and my friend Dee, who is also uh uh a scaled CX leader, uh rap about the whole world of uh customer experience and careers and leadership and other things that are worth rapping about.

SPEAKER_01 44:46

I love it. You're so you're podcasting all the time. I appreciate taking time out of your busy podcast schedule to join us.

SPEAKER_00 44:54

I try I try to keep it manageable because right now in my life I'm also focused on some other things that aren't uh podcasting, uh, one of which is actually doing some uh consulting and and fractional work for customer education and uh digital customer experience programs. So if anyone needs uh some help there, then yeah, reach out to me on LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_01 45:13

Yeah, well, I I hope they do. And uh what a great opportunity that would be. Uh, I'll just put my endorsement if if you guys are like, who's this Adam guy? Is he really worth it? Definitely. Uh, as you heard on the show, good advice, as well as uh would be a pleasure to work with uh on I think most any project. So with that said, Adam, uh again, I want to thank you for being on the show as we end the show. We always like to ask our guests, Adam, what is your final take?

SPEAKER_00 45:40

There is

Adam’s Final Take

SPEAKER_00 45:42

so much happening in AI right now that is is fundamentally changing the way that uh content development and customer education work. But I think the core of what humans do and what value we add, that is that's the part that's remaining constant and becoming more important than ever. So I think sort of like we said, um use use and embrace the tools for what they help you do, but don't sacrifice your own taste.

SPEAKER_01 46:08

Love it. Well, Adam, thank you once again for joining me in the Visual Lounge.

SPEAKER_00 46:13

Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 46:14

It's been a pleasure. You bet. All right, everybody, you heard Adam. First of all, if you seriously, if you need some fractional help, you need some consulting, Adam is your guy. Go go talk to him. But second of all, what a great conversation around the use of AI, but also about these other opportunities that exist within the industry. Like, there are so many things that are changing at such a quick pace it can be overwhelming. But as you continue to put down practice and gain those opportunities, practice those skills, try bringing in developing greater taste, that's where I think you you as a human, as a person, are going to add a lot of value, along with all the other skills and things that you have. But if you can do that well, you're gonna set yourself apart. And I think that is part of what customer education does really well is helps the customer say, like, oh, I understand this. We bring to them some of the taste of what our products, our services, and whatever it is that we're we're helping them to do to do better. So with that said, you know, there's always things to learn, and we hope you take a little bit of time to level up every single day.