Digital Twins, AI-Native Learning, And Coaching All Collide!

Good morning, everyone. Today I want to talk about digital twins and the revolution in corporate learning as a follow-on to the big webinar last week, this week, where we had almost 5,000 people listening to my wrap-up of AI and trends for next year. A couple of quick comments. One of the reasons I always say good morning on these podcasts is because I record them very early in the morning. So that you can hear them as quickly as possible. And I also want to just comment that it seems to me most podcasts are now about 20 to 25% ads. We are not going to do that because I don't really want to litter your inbox with ads, but occasionally you have to listen to me talk about Galileo and I will try to keep it fairly light, but I will mention Galileo in this podcast. If you go to the replay of the Trends This Week, at the end of the presentation, you will see a coupon for a promotional discount on Galileo for 30 days for those of you that would like to get your hands on it. But anyway, let's move on. So of the many, many things going on in the world of AI, I think the most significant of all is the impact on learning. And the reason I say that is that if you look at the 800 million people a week, it's probably more now who use ChatGPT. OpenAI tells us that about 60 to 65% of them are trying to learn something, find something, understand something, or dig into something. And of course, this essential process goes on in all of our lives all the time. We are essentially learning animals. We humans, we learn from the minute we're born until the minute we die. And every day we pick up the newspaper or read a book or listen to the radio. For whatever, we're seeking information and knowledge to improve our lives or our work or our careers. And in a company, of course, this is much more complex because we have mandatory compliance learning. We have processes, safety procedures, pricing guides, rules, regulations, policies. All these things are essentially informational assets from which we learn. And most of us are learning all the time. I'm learning every day, as are all of you. However, the paradigm or pedagogy of learning has been based on instruction, a teacher, subject matter expert, an instructor teaching you something that you need to know. And so what that did, and I've been doing this now for almost 30 years, is it created a process and a set of infrastructure in companies to design, to build courses or small learning assets, which might be short videos, produce them, and then distribute them in massive quantity. And so we're all flooded with courses and videos and various instructional assets, whether they be simulations or games that we are expected to consume at various points in time during our workday. Nobody has time for this. And so we force you to take it through compliance, or we take you offsite and we do group learning, all of which is great. And I believe most companies need to do more learning, to be honest, because it's probably more important to be learning than doing in most cases. But that being said, the industry is littered with learning management systems, content libraries, massive amounts of content, none of which have ever come even within a tiny fraction of the 800 million users per day on ChatGPT. And that is because we tend to learn in the flow of work by asking questions through inquiry, inquiry through curiosity, through dialogue, through experts, through peers, through mentors. Taking a course, while it might be useful at times, is pretty boring and it requires a fair amount of attention, focus, and time, which we often just don't have in the work environment. Enter AI. AI can create and does create, and this is what Galileo does, dynamic content. You can put a document or process or video or audio into the AI platform like Galileo, and it will create a course, a video, a podcast, a simulation, a game, whatever you want it to create. Now there's a small amount of human time or customization involved in the creation process, but you don't even have to do that because once the content is in the system, The entire system can answer any question and use what we call the Super Tutor, which is the tutor attached to Galileo, to give you a customized answer. So instead of spending millions of dollars and thousands of hours building an LXP or role-based learning or learning by tenure or learning by skill, the system does that. By the way, the system also generates a skills taxonomy for you based on the content. Or you can teach it what skills taxonomy to use. So what this does, as you read about in our revolution paper, is it is a revolution in L&D. It's a completely different paradigm for how we're going to inform and teach our staff. Now, the word learning to me is really the wrong word because this is much, much more than learning. It is in a sense enablement. Because most of the time you're at work, you're looking for something or doing something that might help you complete or finish or improve the work you're doing, but it's not really learning. It might be asking someone a question. It might be looking something up. It might be copying something from something else. And so in some sense, we're moving the L&D function from a corporate training department, many of which got put under talent management and reinventing it as what I would think of as business enablement. Now, next year, we're going to launch our big, massive study of this, and it will be our 5th time producing our Corporate Learning Maturity Model. And you'll see that dynamic business enablement is level 4 in the new learning maturity model. So watch out for that. It'll be coming out next year. But in the meantime, you can start doing this today. Now, in my last little journey to the Middle East and other places, we met with a lot of clients doing this. We have a large electric utility in Saudi who's now going to be using Dynamic Learning with Galileo for their leadership model. We have airlines starting to use Galileo for development of operational learning and leadership development and other customer service learning. This is going to take place in every industry, in every company. And those of you that are in the L&D function or have L&D groups in your company, those groups are going to go through a massive transformation. We've now implemented AI-native learning at one of our large insurance clients, at one of our large pharmaceutical clients and others. And what you find is almost 50%. Of the staff in L&D can be repurposed to do other work. They don't need to go away. They can work on performance consulting. They can work on needs analysis. They can consult with the business. They can turn into business partners, et cetera. So this is a really, really big opportunity for 2026. And I'll be writing more about it and giving you more context in the predictions report that'll come out in about 6 weeks. Now, the second manifestation or implementation of this type of technology is the digital twin. And the reason I bring up the digital twin now is that in some sense, the digital twin is a learning system. What is the digital twin? Well, if you read the article that I discussed a few weeks ago, you can take videos, audios, emails, meeting recordings, and any other artifacts that come from an individual person and put them into an AI. And it turns into a digital representation of that person. We use a digital twin technology from a company called Vivint that essentially takes all of the emails, meetings, and documents from each of our employees, around 45 to 50 people, and allows us to ask other people questions on any topic, even if they're not there. And it will get you up-to-date information based on their emails, calendars, documents, and meetings. For example, what is the status of the contract with so-and-so? Who is the person who last talked to such-and-such a company? How is the project going on so-and-so, et cetera. These kinds of things, which typically take conference calls or face-to-face calls, don't have to be done that way anymore because we can reach and find information that's in one person's corpus transparently. And of course, the system we use has a high degree of security. So any of your private emails, medical appointments, or other things like that are not indexed into the system. Now add to that the opportunity to put a character or avatar onto the system and mimic your voice. By the way, it only takes about 1 or 2 minutes of your voice for AI to mimic it. And now you actually have a digital version of the digital twin, a human-like version. Now we're not doing that, and I'm not sure that's really as useful as you may think, but some people are starting to put that into meetings. Where your digital twin could appear in a meeting and interact with people when you're not there. It's not always completely seamless. The, uh, conversation isn't always as perfect as you might imagine, but it's pretty good. And this touches the learning industry in a big, big way, because what a digital twin really is, is it's a representation of expertise and knowledge and ongoing information. So if you're a new manager, and you want to learn how to deal with a particular team issue or business issue, you might want to ask the digital twin of your leader or your favorite leader, whoever it may be. It's somebody who doesn't even work in your company for advice. And that idea has given birth to all of these digital coaches that are coming out from dozens and dozens of vendors. Almost every leadership development and coaching company now offers digital coaches or digital experts that can essentially become digital versions of their intellectual property or expertise. Now, in the case of coaching, most of the coaching market is psychologists who are experts at diagnosing problems and answering questions. They're not necessarily industry experts or subject matter experts. Some of them are. And so these coaches, these digital coaches which you could think of as digital twins, are sometimes very interesting to talk to. I talked to one the other day that is actually really fun to discuss things with because he is trained on psychology and neuropsychology of the brain. Now, for me, I'm not really that interested in getting psychoanalyzed by a digital coach. I have my own psychologist already to help me with all of the issues in my life. And, but a lot of people like this, and it's very helpful at different points in your career when you're running into troubles. So that's a new learning system. And I expect there will be hundreds of these from all sorts of providers specialized in different things: sales coaches, quality coaches, executive coaches, coaches to help you with your wellbeing, coaches to help with your mental health, coaches to help you with your career, on and on and on. And in some sense, Galileo is one of these because Galileo has every bit of intellectual property we have ever developed or discovered in the areas of HR management and leadership over the last 30 years with no anecdotes that aren't in line with the topics of management, leadership, technology, and HR. So Galileo for Managers, which is the manager manifestation of Galileo, which speaks management language, is actually a digital coach also. So, you know, the reason I bring this up is that these categories are kind of merging. The digital twin that we use from Viven is extremely good for operational stuff. We use it, I use it almost every day to get the status or find a contract or identify a client issue that I don't have time to reach out and talk to somebody about. And it has not yet turned into a coaching agent, but it could, it certainly could. And vice versa, I suppose companies that sell digital coaches could offer the technology for digital twins. So a year from now, when we're talking about the end of 2026, I think we're going to have a lot of these technologies in our work environment. And if I were Microsoft and Zoom and Google trying to sell into the corporate productivity market, I would put a toolkit to do this right into their platform. So that you could do this yourself with the intellectual property you have in your own company. So let me tell you a little story about learning and digital coaches that comes from our experience with Rolls-Royce. Rolls-Royce is a very interesting company. If you look at their stock price, it has been skyrocketing. And this is the part of Rolls-Royce that makes jet engines, nuclear submarines, defense systems. And other proprietary technology that's used by the UK government. They're an engineering powerhouse. They've been around for a long time and they have decades and decades of research and engineering science on aerodynamics, jet engines, noise control, nuclear power, et cetera. Being a mechanical engineer, I find this stuff completely fascinating. It turns out when, uh, when I was there, I haven't been there for a while. They told me that one of the challenges they have, as most companies do, is the retirement of these very, very senior engineers who are involved in the development of all these different engines. And new engineers who come out of college with a master's or PhD have to learn all of the essentially tacit knowledge and expertise that Rolls has developed over the years. And I, I know this myself because I, I am an engineer and I worked as an engineer in an oil refinery. And I used to go through the books on how the refinery works. Just to catch up with all the technology in that business. So anyway, it turns out that they had told me that two interesting statistics. First, it was taking almost 2 years for a new master's or PhD candidate to truly understand the technology of Rolls-Royce, to really contribute in a major way to the engineering expertise. Second, a repair engineer or a service engineer would have to take 200 to 300 years of research and education to understand all of the issues in all of the Rolls-Royce engines around the world. And these things are flying our airplanes, so they do have to be repaired. So in a sense, when you have a plane that needs repair and you call Rolls-Royce, they've got to figure out the model and particular year of the engine you have, probably the very engine itself, and dispatch someone who knows how to fix that particular device. By the way, I had exactly the same scenario from British Telecom many years ago. They have the same problem with the phone system. As do many, many, many companies. Think about Tesla. Think about your car, all sorts of things that need to be fixed and engineered. So what you can do at Rolls-Royce and what they're working on, I haven't talked to them most recently, but they have been working on this, is to digitize these massive knowledge databases that they have. They have a lot of AI expertise internally so that they can build digital learning experiences for new engineers and repair people to get the information they need. Now you can imagine what this would be like. I walk up to a jet engine or a telephone system that I don't quite understand because I maybe wasn't trained on that particular feature or model. I take a photo. The photo understands what model and year it is. It goes into the database and says, okay, I'm ready to answer your questions. You now can have a dialogue with this learning digital expert to ask it questions and understand what you need. It could send you digital diagrams or photos and teach you how to solve the problem. That is a miraculous solution. Think about it at McDonald's. Think about it in your sales organization. Think about it in your customer service organization. Think about it in your repair organization. Think about it in your management team at Starbucks, wherever you are. This type of technology has enormous potential in companies. And I told Sana, and I've also told Workday, that the business opportunity they have in digital learning in all of these directions may be bigger than the revenue they're making in human capital management. Now, I don't think Workday totally understands that or is focused in that direction yet, but the potential to digitize knowledge, tacit knowledge, individual knowledge, personal knowledge, technical knowledge, and make it available to employees and workers and supply chain partners and resellers and business partners is so massive. I can't even possibly compute it. I know that the formal training industry of sort of traditional training is around $350 to $400 billion today, but I have to believe this bigger space, and I'm not going to call it knowledge management, it's more than that, is probably 2 to 3 times that. Maybe even bigger. This is, but, and this is sitting in your lap as an HR professional. You can get your hands on Galileo, which we now sell as the agent and the learning package together into the Galileo Suite. And you can literally start building this type of solution in an hour and have it available within a day because Galileo includes all the tools to develop and author and load content into the system, as well as the deployment tools. Of delivering the content in courses or delivering the content through agents. It's really spectacular. For those of you in L&D, you really have no choice but to get involved in this technology. It may be intimidating. You may be waiting for your LXP vendor to offer something like this. You might be scratching your head whether this is embedded in your LMS. I would venture to say the answer is no. This is a new breed of technology. It is very disruptive. To LMS vendors and LXP vendors. They may have some features that are capable of doing these things, but they will likely not have the AI-native capabilities to do all the things I mentioned earlier. And for those of you that are in the productivity area and thinking about employee experience and employee self-service, think about this idea of the digital twin, because what we've been advising clients to do is they build out new business systems and new learning systems for their various workforce segments is to simply record subject matter experts talking about domains or business practices or policies or strategies or tricks and tips they have learned to create content dynamically. Because what happens in an AI-native learning system like Galileo is every piece of content is connected to everything else. So if you want to know, the best tip for handling a particular situation, you don't need to find the course on that thing. You can go to the Super Tutor and ask it a question, and it will find that content and give you the answer in the context of your question and in the context of the other material you have. Which means, by the way, that if you're using Galileo Learn to build your leadership academy or your sales academy or whatever it may be, you can use the 750 courses that we've already created on management, leadership, hiring, pay, rewards, goal setting, et cetera, in your content library for your leadership academy as well. And that's a really massive offering that we're providing to the market. And we hope many of you will take advantage of it. Now, I first cut my teeth on corporate training back in 1998 when I got into this whole domain, and I've been interested in it and fascinated by it ever since. I really believe this is a renaissance, a rebirth, a redefinition, a revolution of this whole space. And we are really excited to work with you. We can talk to you as individuals. We have a Chief Learning Officer Council that we're running. If any of you would like to be involved in peer-to-peer discussions of this, if you'd like to see Galileo, of course, we'll show it to you. But my suggestion is you just go out there and get it and start using it. And you'll experience what a digital twin and AI-native learning and enablement is really all about. Stay tuned for my predictions coming out early next year., and we have a big body of research coming out in another couple of weeks on the paradoxes of being a CHRO, and I'm really excited to talk about that in the next week or two. Thanks everybody. Have a great weekend.