This is part two of our series on content curation, see part one: “5 Reasons content curation is getting difficult.” In this post, we talk about the solutions.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen a lot of end of year blog predictions on existing problems to be solved in workplace learning and knowledge management for the coming year. Almost without exception these posts bring in AI as the “deus ex machina“; or as defined from Merriam-Webster: “as a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story is suddenly and abruptly resolved by an unexpected and seemingly unlikely occurrence, typically so much so that it seems contrived.” So how will AI in practice solve our workplace content curation issues? This week’s post focuses on one of the bigger struggles; workplace content curation. Here are the five specific reasons AI will and is already starting to curate our workplace content:

1. There is simply WAY TOO much content for anyone to directly manage!

In most every industry there is a plethora of workplace content created and then forgotten. It’s all still there though. A few years ago it was accepted to create or buy some 3rd party learning content in the form of a course or micro learning module, assign and send it to your team and that was that. Today not only is the amount of relevant knowledge and content available to us exponentially greater than a few years ago, for many of us our jobs are getting more complicated making it difficult for any one person to keep track of all the useful materials to do our jobs. Also, as we’ve mentioned in other posts, the number of authoring mechanisms keeps growing. More people send emails, even texts in addition to the tidal wave of pdfs, MS Power Points, Word docs, Google docs, videos and not to mention Slack messages which all contain key job knowledge.

2. It’s already done now.

As we’ve mentioned before, TikTok seems to have this locked up. It’s only recently been seen as a learning tool. It’s short, punchy videos getting right to the point of a subject. Even though companies are just beginning to use it, TikTok succeeds in continually curating vast amounts of content in the form of short videos. Their algorithm for bubbling content up is based entirely on engagement but it clearly works. Their billion users glued to mobile phone proves this. We should question the addictiveness but not that it works.

3. AI based search is here.

Until fairly recently, searching for the right document was haphazard, keyword search dominated which didn’t really understand context of found terms and answers so the results varied in accuracy. This meant if you searched for a particular document or learning course you were likely to find it, but not specific answers. Now that content has gotten easy to securely access and save such as in Sharepoint, OneDrive, Box, Dropbox or Google Drive – accessibility was not a problem. The missing element was applying natural language understanding (NLU). (See our blog, Feathercap now has AI driven search and curation on how we do this). It’s the idea of being able to understand the context of a given paragraph, page or even document to understand its meaning of any question and matched to similarly understood meaning of a text segment within any accessible content. Then the correct page or citation as well as video segment with the answer can be pulled up. Further enhancements come from tracking all content viewed and by whom. This drives determine relevance and freshness based on an employees behavior with the content and the search posited correlated to seniority and role in the organization. This can now be the basis for assertions of “personalized” content delivery and adaptive learning. We’re seeing more and more vendors offering this as a service such as: Moveworks, Coveo, Lucidworks along with more well known players as Microsoft, Google and AWS.

4. LMS, LXP, Knowledge Management and micro learning vendors will start to track with greater fidelity the content viewed, when, how long…the current tracking approaches but on steroids.

This is something we and many others are starting to do; track every interaction of every piece of content. Currently many learning and knowledge management vendors offer authoring tools which traditionally allow authors to build animated video and text slide multimedia experiences which are tracked both in time spent on each page as well as whether the user passed the minimum credentials of the learning content by assessment. We now can see how all content can be tracked using standards like xAPI and recently CMI5. So not just tracking the first viewing or time spent to “pass” the content but every time its viewed or experienced. This provides exponentially more data surrounding all of our content and further drives curation and search capabilities. As search  behavior is added by who, when and how a question was asked will be as important as assessments have been to training programs; we’ll use search behavior to better understand the state and capacity of the employee and in relation to others like them.

5. In a quest to drive recruiting, promotion and turnover metrics, newer recruiting systems combined with existing learning systems are going all in on AI. 

Most LMS (Learning Management System), LXP (Learning Experience Platforms), knowledge platforms and micro learning vendors tout their reporting capabilities to visualize what skill gaps are present from their users and act accordingly. Combine this with companies such as eightfold.ai that automatically pull people’s names for hiring based on the above learning results with LinkedIn, employee data, performance reports makes things interesting. Suddenly, employees can apply instantly to new jobs or within or outside of their company without long applications. These combined systems themselves can reach out to preferred candidates automatically to remove much of the friction of finding the right candidate for a role. All of this is powered by vast amounts of data and applied AI. Challenges remain but what we believe begins this process is for every employee to receive the right content and answer they need to most effectively do their current job and excel.  

See our primer on “How to keep your employees from joining competitors” on how employees engaged with the right answers to their jobs are less likely to leave.

About Feathercap 

Feathercap connects people to the right job answers. We help everyone grow their curiosity, happiness and success so they are less likely to leave. Companies like Amgen, CVS Health, Old Spaghetti Factory have found using Feathercap has boosted their team’s productivity, retention and reduce’s everyone’s stress.  For more:

https://feathercap.ai