New York Trip Report - watching AI and L&D meet

Thanks for Sana and Josh Bersin Company for the view, the dinner, and the great conversations!

Some NYC shots

Thanks to Sana Labs and Josh Bersin I had the opportunity to head to NYC for Q&A and dinner with a interesting group of representatives of a variety of orgs from online gambling to fashion to marketing and more. Full disclosure - I’m not a client of Sana but I have been aware of them (and I mean who hasn’t known Josh Bersin since forever?). The thing that caught my usually skeptical eye about tech advances and how they’re blended into the L&D world, was their tagline that “Sana is an AI company pioneering the next generation of knowledge tools trusted by innovators and market leaders.” The positioning of the company first as an AI company that happens to be focused on knowledge and learning, was a different tack. This seemed to go right past a superficial addition of the latest buzzword to the existing marketing decks and expo hall banners. I also thought their combo of agentic and learning services is interesting as a dual focus on its own, but could get really cool when we look at those two streams coming together (we’ll come back to that later). Here’s where the challenges start though and why I think Sana is really interesting to the overall L&D market.

For as long as I can remember, the LMS sales cycle has been the following: new LMS gets installed. Over the next few months, problems crop up and the technology is blamed. After a number of months of this, a new LMS sales person will drop by and begin the process of convincing the CLO that they’re absolutely right. It’s a tech problem, and wouldn’t you know it, their tech can fix it. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.

Here’s the secret, in the past, it was almost never about the tech. It was almost always about the implementation. Even worse, those implementations were with systems that we already knew or thought we knew and yet we still struggled with making the organizational changes or doing the change management to make the implementation succeed. Bringing in a system like Sana (and here, Sana is an avatar for what I’m sure will be more companies in the L&D space that don’t just employ AI but do it from the genetic level up) carries the potential for huge upside but to get 100% (or really any percent ROI beyond what installing any other LMS would get) of that upside will require some deep thinking about the organizational changes that will need to happen. I know that sounds like extra work but think of it like the extra work that would be required to bend down and pick up a wining lottery ticket. Maybe that’s a little hyperbolic but the fact remains that the orgs that embrace this work first, will be able to get further down this road faster than their competition faster than with other tech advances. Get behind by 6 months now and you’ll be 18 months back. Alright so what does that work look like? My shorthand is that I think we aren’t asking enough questions and we don’t have a clear vision.

I recently learned a hard lesson that should have been evident to me as an anthropologist - that once you remove an artifact from its context, it has the potential to lose a great deal of its meaning. Keeping that caution in mind, one artifact that I picked up at Amazon, has the potential to be effective on these twin fronts of a compelling vision and asking more questions - the PR(press release)FAQ(Frequently Asked Questions). The quick breakdown here is that the Press Release is written 2-3 years in the future when you see the product or service you want to build, is launching. This future-focus is key to get people out of legacy thinking (the opposite of ‘quick wins’ and ‘low-hanging fruit’) and sneak past some of the defensive walls that would instantly go up if you recommended sweeping changes starting next quarter. The real goal of the PR is to present a compelling vision and that’s key right now. Changes in tech, business models, cost, regulations, etc are all changing so fast that trying to keep track of them is kind of like watching a forest from a speeding car and trying to pick out individual trees. We need to pull back a little, come together on a vision of the world we want to create for ourselves and our learners and just assume (for the PR) that the tech will be there. Now we come to the questions.

If the PR is the North Star, then the FAQ is the beach head - the place where we start. The questions are typically broken into External (or customer-facing) questions and Internal questions. The guiding principle for all these questions, is that the answers need to be thoughtful and detailed. If the PR gets everyone who reads it, to buy into the vision, then the FAQ is where you convince them that you know what you’re talking about and can get them to the place where the vision is realized. Customer-facing questions could include questions about pricing, how would they access the product or service, what are the clear benefits, and on. The internal questions will probably be more important to the folks reading this at first - those questions will include answers related to the total addressable market for the product or service, the cost or margin that is expected, any business or technological adjacencies and a general timeline with milestones.

I need to come back to the question of context here for a moment. PRFAQs really only work in environments of psychological safety. People have feel safe bringing forward their ideas and need to know that those ideas may be critically reviewed but that it will be about the idea and not about them. It also helps to make it clear that while not every idea will get through, each attempt will raise the bar on the internal capability to present ideas, to review them and in their deconstruction may be the nuggets of future winners. If this context isn’t there, the ideas that come forward will not be that innovative, will be risk-averse and just won’t have the potential to move the needle.

In the case of AI-focused solutions like Sana, we also need to expand our pool of questions and who might be providing the answers. I think IT and InfoSec will need to contribute - that should be a given. If though, we’re looking at a solution like Sana that not only has an L&D focused side but an agentic one as well, then both the PR and the FAQ will need to have input from Marketing, Sales, etc. L&D should embrace this opportunity to lean close to the lines of business and be seen as representing the interests of all those teams. We also need Finance to evaluate cost and pricing models and definitely need Legal to weigh in on issues like any copyright issues, privacy and data security.

Instead of sighing and thinking about what a massive coordination effort that will be, think about the opportunity for L&D to take the lead in educating the org for the benefits to the entire enterprise. L&D can work with SMEs from each of these teams to develop content reflecting these issues and their answers. Imagine a world in which L&D is seen as a leader in tech for the whole enterprise. I’ll add one more thing - to answer some of these questions - L&D (either itself and/or working with other teams) will have to be experimenting with a variety of AI solutions to become familiar with this new technology. This is not just a re-tread of an old LMS. This is new and we will need to work hard to build our internal expertise with it.