How to Use AI for Learning and Development Success

The benefits of using AI technologies in employee education and training are extensive, from attracting talent and improving performance, to enabling better succession planning and enhancing innovation.

As organizations across all sectors begin to witness these benefits for themselves, learning and development (L&D) teams are increasingly looking for opportunities to incorporate the latest AI technologies into their educational programs and reap the substantial rewards. However, with the field of AI in corporate learning evolving fast, knowing which technology is right for you and your team can feel like a bit of a minefield. 

If this sounds like you, then you’re in the right place. In this article, we outline five simple ways you can use AI technology in your learning and development workflow, from creating personalized learning paths to optimizing multilingual course content, and more.

By the end, you’ll have a clear picture of the AI tools and technologies you can incorporate into your corporate training program that will boost employee engagement, streamline processes, reduce costs, and attract and retain talent.

The creation of personalized learning paths is one of the most impactful ways that AI tools can assist learning and development (L&D) teams. And most L&D professionals agree. In fact, 77% of those working in L&D teams feel that when incorporated into learning processes, personalized content and training boost employee engagement significantly. 

The reason for this is simple. When employees are given the opportunity to learn from materials and resources that align with their interests and professional goals, learning outcomes soar. These factors not only boost a learner’s motivation and engagement, they also create an environment in which employees feel seen, heard, and valued by their employers.

From the employer's side, personalized learning paths are a cost-effective, flexible, and convenient employee training approach that facilitates a culture of learning within an organization, boosting employee retention levels, filling gaps in knowledge, and guaranteeing exceptional outcomes. 

Thanks to AI, personalized learning paths can be created for employees at every stage in their training or education. By collecting and analyzing data on an individual’s learning behavior and preferences, AI technologies are able to discern which course materials an individual will learn from most effectively and which resources or teaching style elicit the best results.

Generative AI can then create specific pieces of content that address each employee’s needs and deliver it in that individual’s preferred format or style. 

There are numerous AI tools that can help you here. Here are a few of our favorites: 

EdApp

EdApp is a powerful learning management system (LMS) that utilizes AI technology to offer personalized and curated online courses, quizzes, polls, videos, and assessments with interactive and dynamic elements to keep employees engaged. The tool’s AI Create feature is particularly impressive as it enables an L&D team to design an entire course, including graphics, from a single prompt. 

Adaptemy

Creating intelligent and highly adaptive learning products, Adaptemy’s standout feature is its ability to integrate with existing systems, enabling L&D managers to plan comprehensive and adaptive learning roadmaps for their teams. 

Axonify

Offering personalized and gamified educational and training content, Axonify uses machine learning algorithms to review each employee’s knowledge gaps, preferences, and behavior–all in real time. From this starting point, the tool provides active support to L&D teams in the creation of targeted and personalized training materials that match employee needs and lead to significantly improved outcomes. 

AI tools can provide learning and development teams with extensive support when it comes to streamlining, refining, and speeding up the production of multilingual course content. When L&D teams integrate this technology into their workflows, learning resources become accessible to a broader spectrum of employees. Companies can also ensure the consistency of their branding in multiple languages across their educational output. 

There are gains to be made in terms of costs and productivity, too. When AI is able to produce multilingual resources and materials, organizations can save money on hiring external translators. Additionally, teams, which might otherwise be tasked to translate or proofread content in different languages, are freed up to focus on higher-level, strategic activities. 

From a company reputation perspective, utilizing AI translation technology is a chance for brands to boost their reputations as great employers, too. This is because providing access to multilingual course content demonstrates to potential employees an organization’s desire to reach individuals of different backgrounds and cultures, promoting inclusivity and diversity. The adoption of this technology also showcases a company’s agile approach to content production, which is likely to attract top candidates to the company and help retain talented employees.  

Smartcat’s Language AI platform offers L&D teams the technological support they need to reap the wide-ranging benefits of producing fast, accurate, multilingual training content. Generative AI translation customization enables L&D teams to create custom prompts which can contextualize translations for factors such as length or tone of voice which supports companies in creating consistent and compelling learning resources. 

By supporting XLIFF file formats for popular course authoring tools, such as Articulate 360  Rise and Storyline, Smartcat’s Language AI platform allows you to translate course content with AI. The machine learning algorithms learn from existing content as well as from the edits made by your team’s local specialists or hired linguists while reviewing translations in the collaborative Smartcat Editor.

Companies can dynamically source new linguists via Smartcat AI-matching algorithms, which pair subject-matter-expert linguists to teams, ensuring each project is matched to a specialized supplier  with the specific language skills and industry knowledge required for the task. 

Other valued features of the language platform include project monitoring, easy AI video translation, and translation project management, which streamlines end-to-end workflows and speeds up multilingual content production. 

Finally, the easy integration of existing content production and translation workflows into the tool makes this a compelling choice for curriculum designers and L&D project managers. 

When time and resources have been invested in creating high-quality learning materials, getting the most out of each piece of content is often high on the agenda. Repurposing existing content saves your team time, ensures consistency of voice, tone, and terminology across all assets, and enables the swift implementation of content updates without the need to start from scratch every time. 

The main advantage of repurposing existing educational content, however, is that it opens up an opportunity for L&D teams to create more dynamic and personalized learning assets. By uploading existing content into different learning formats and using new presentation styles that are more effective and appealing than older versions, L&D teams can further increase employee engagement.

With Smartcat’s AI Content Generator, L&D teams can use existing content to create dynamic, new, and engaging assets in more than 280 languages. The tool requires a simple prompt which informs its searches through the company’s existing archives for relevant indexed content which can be repurposed.Smartcat generates brand new, on-brand content and assets. New learning materials might range from voice over scripts and white papers to press releases and blog posts. 

Understanding the effectiveness of course content and its learning impact is crucial for L&D teams continually improving their educational offerings. Data on this helps the team build up a picture of successful and unsuccessful assets, employee pain points, and employee attitudes towards the resources on offer.

When assessing the impact of course content becomes a priority for the L&D team, students can offer valuable feedback. When this feedback is both requested and taken on board, employee morale is also significantly boosted. 

AI-driven tools offer seamless and effective ways to analyze this valuable data. From AI-powered learning and sentiment analytics through to performance data analysis and the creation and distribution of user surveys, AI is able to collect and analyze the data needed to inform content improvements.

Adaptive learning platforms can also dynamically adjust content based on employee performance, further tailoring the learning experience and boosting outcomes. 

Here are some of our favorite tools for assessing the effectiveness and impact of course content: 

Axonify

The aforementioned Axonify supports employers in providing personalized, gamified educational materials and content that increases engagement and overall learning outcomes. The tool harnesses learning algorithms to produce a picture of employees’ knowledge gaps and responds with targeted content and training that is enjoyable, goal-oriented and effective.  

Docebo 

Driving employee engagement, productivity and retention, cloud-based educational platform, Docebo, utilizes AI-driven machine learning to craft personalized learning materials for employee training programs. It does this through the customization of learning paths, offering real-time feedback, and recommending relevant materials to optimize each learner’s experience. 

EdCast 

EdCast seeks to identify and harness the skills and strengths of individual employees by curating learning initiatives which track learning patterns and provide relevant skill-focused recommendations. Educators and employers can create their own content on the platform, get expert advice, and dive into the details of their employees’ progress and performance with the program. 

Keeping employees engaged throughout their training programs can be a lot of work. Offering on-going support and feedback is a key part of this process. When guidance is offered in a timely and authentic manner, employees feel acknowledged and supported by their employer in overcoming challenges.

Real-time student support can also help teams quickly resolve problems and prevent issues from escalating, reduce employee anxiety, and enable instructional designers to quickly adapt to feedback.  

By incorporating artificial intelligence in corporate learning, L&D teams can provide guidance in real-time that is specific, personalized, and actionable. Chatbots can respond to employees’ concerns instantly while natural language processing (NLP) understands and responds to text or voice input. 

With these tools, L&D teams can respond authentically to employee concerns, leaving learners feeling more supported and better informed. AI can also power the analysis of different patterns in behavior and response such as employee engagement patterns and sentiment patterns, which can help L&D teams learn how effectively employees are engaging with the assistance on offer. 

Some examples of AI-driven learner support include Khan Academy’s Khanmigo which uses AI to review learners’ assignments and offer immediate feedback, while NovoEd actively facilitates and tracks mentorship programs.

Zavvy AI is another frontrunner in the space with its AI Skills Coach; a tool that works directly in Slack, providing writing feedback, learning materials, and real-time coaching and advice to employees as they go through their courses. 

There are already many outstanding ways in which L&D teams can take advantage of the benefits of AI. In areas as wide-ranging as content production, personalized learning, multilingual asset creation, and real-time learner assistance, AI can offer teams substantial support. Organizations can streamline their internal processes and achieve much more on shorter time scales and without sacrificing budget. As a result, they can fundamentally accelerate and improve the learning experience of employees, in any language.

For Articulate course translations, check out Smartcat’s language AI platform. Smartcat translates into more than 280 languages to exceptionally high AI translation quality. Moreover, it learns from the content you provide with smart AI translation assets, such as translation memory and glossary, which generates ever-improving quality with each new translation.

Read how Smith + Nephew's L&D and translation team transformed their workflow with Smartcat