Everything surfs with the wave of technological advancement, especially in education. ChatGPT and Bard are some of the AI software that come with this advancement. Today, Steve Dineen, the founder of Fuse Universal, delves into the future of education with artificial intelligence and how the learning experience changes with it. He also navigates through the function of AI and how we can leverage it in our learning interactions. Steve also brings the value of generative AI to learn and relive the experience. You may not want to miss this opportunity with Steve Dineen! Tune in to this episode as we dive into the new era of education.

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What Will Education Look Like In The Future? – A Conversation With Steve Dineen

In this episode, we have Steve Dineen, who is a leader in the software and education and learning spaces of particular interest to me because, in the future, we’re going to be learning differently, specifically through the use of software. Steve, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you’re doing, and then we’re going to get into it and talk about how things are changing.

I’ve been involved in both kid and adult education for most of my career. We have run a corporate learning technology company. We are at the forefront of that for both in this company, my previous one, a company called Fuse Universal. At the same time, we also have a YouTube channel, which we give for free. We have around 750,000 subscribers, 10 million kids a year going through our bite-sized animated videos, learning Math and Science. I’m passionate about all levels of education.

One of the things that is the low-hanging fruit of learning is AI. As we learn more about how AI can affect learning, it’s going to be integral to the whole learning, but you’re on the cutting edge. What are you seeing when it comes to the results when AI is introduced into learning programs?

AI is pretty broad. We’ve been involved in it for a number of years, specifically because ChatGPT coming to the marketplace. It’s opened up a new accelerated range of opportunities. No doubt that we’ve seen not just that particular technology and generative AI, but we’ve seen that all the other competitors now rush their products to the marketplace. When we look at it, we probably look at 5 or 6 different buckets of areas where AI can help. One big area is around AI for translation localization, trying to remove language as a barrier to learning. How can anybody learn from anyone in a respective language?

Up until now, there’s been some pretty good use of AI to allow us to go from voice to text, then text-to-text translation. The fact that our YouTube channel was able to go from a pure English language into subtitles in Ukrainian, but then also using AI to go voice into Ukrainian. That was pretty good, but because the quality wasn’t quite there on the accuracy of both transcription and translation, we still had to do some manual intervention for it.

What we’re seeing is the level of transcription and translation being such a level of quality, literally close to 99.9% on most of the content we’re doing. From English to Hindi, we went straight to our first 30 to 40 videos. That’s one bucket area where the use of AI to remove language is tremendously exciting. It’s something we’re right in the heart. Also, doing the same thing with our corporate clients.

The second bucket is around productivity. We’ve been using Google for a long time, “How do we find an answer to a question? How do we accurately trust that’s the best answer?” When I grew up, the best answer we had was my brother, which we figured out that he wasn’t as accurate as we thought we had, but it was the best way. At some point, we realized that Google, with its advent of technology and AI, was able to find answers from the world in a smarter way. That was something we’ve started to introduce into our product with Google’s own AI into the product to now the same type side, but with generative AI, it takes that a step further.

With what Google has and what we have, which is what we call extracted answers of AI, is where it’s finding the best answer that already exists. That’s pretty cool. That’s what we use. ChatGPT and other things like Bard have introduced this next concept, which is all open technology for companies like us to plug into that allows us to generate answers where the answer may exist from multiple places. The best answer may be not just in 1 video and 1 document, but it’s combining those 2 or 3 things together and then synthesizing it into an easier way to understand. For us, that’s something we’re now putting into our technology. Embedded to that is your end user or end person is able to get that answer and be more productive to do their job in a faster, more efficient way, which is exciting.

It then leads you on to probably what comes after that. We started the first version of this, but the same type of technology is used as an AI tutor or coach. What we’ve probably got is the alpha, beta, and some version of that type side. You can see how that’s going to be huge in all aspects towards a 24/7 tutor coach that’s trained on the best knowledge, answers, and information and talking to you either in text, a humanlike voice, or an avatar of your choice.

It is interesting now seeing the use of AI video and the ability to create your own avatar. There is some great technology out there now where I’d rather create an AI version myself, but there are ethical issues around that. It is now literally the ability to say, “I want to create me twenty years ago as a girl in India and so forth.” With AI, I’m typing in text, and it’s changing my persona or my avatar as a live video. I then may want to say, “What’s the perfect coach for that individual?”

That becomes interesting. What’s the right voice? What’s the right video that connects with the students, makes them feel trust, and interacts in a way that’s more engaging and helps them with a problem? There’s a bit of a long introduction. That’s touching on a few of the areas that we are come from thinking about working on.

Some of the things that you talked about are low-hanging fruit and star shots. The low-hanging fruit is the translation, which you’re already doing. I always tell people that I’m talking to that I feel like we’re on the cusp of universal translation because language, in general, is an algorithm for communication. It’s only a certain amount of time before AI figures that out. Are you seeing rapid adoption once you translate something? There are different cultural nuances and subtle intricacies that you can’t tell unless you lived and grew up in that culture. When you have a learning video, you translate it. Is it like automatic mass adoption or does it take a little bit of time?

The first thing you say is, “Why it’s interesting?” We did some surveys years ago where we took some of our content and we gave it to kids in India. We gave it to kids teaching Math but with an English accent. We had it then local by accent. They teach best still in English and they had in Hindi. In the first version, people did not understand what the person was saying. They didn’t understand English and Math. In the second version, they understood the English but the person that had the local accent still didn’t understand the Math. In Hindi, they understood the Math.

You recognize how important mother tongue audio is to be able to process. Your brain isn’t having to do a translation itself and is working less on the language and it’s more working in full capacity on the problem. For us, the jump from simply doing subtitles to audio AI in a way that’s pressing a button, even if you’re getting to 99.8% accuracy, is good enough for the types of 99% of the content that are out there. What you do see is an increase in engagement and increasing adoption but also an increase in the understanding and confidence that the student or learner is going to gain from it.

Language is important. That’s how we originally learned before there was civilization. We were talking to each other. That’s one of the things that AI is going to be a great tutor for because when my daughter speaks to Google, that’s communication. She can do complicated things. She wants to put on her favorite video. For you and I, we have to take the remote out, press YouTube, and find or search for it where she presses a button and says, “Google, play Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” All of a sudden, the music video comes on.

The learning capabilities are A) Available at a younger age in-group language and B) It’s somehow ingrained in us as human beings. I look forward to that day when all of our learning can be through conversation. That’s one of the things that AI has the ability to be effective at is that when my kid has a robot that’s teaching her Math, not only can she see it visually, but she can have a conversation with that. It’s like your own personalized tutor like you were saying. How far away are we from that?

With them, I started to see the first type of versions of that come through overall. That’s more about the investment in the technology or of the companies doing it and us all trying to get ahead around what the experience looks like. I don’t think technology is the barrier anymore towards that. To your point, if you look at large language models, what’s insane is I can now upload a manual in English or a preferred language, and not have to translate it, but because that data is now put into 0s and 1s, it is stored in raw data. I’m able to ask a question of that manual in any language because my language has been translated into numbers. The numbers ask for the numbers in the vector database. That comes back.

That’s pretty amazing when you’re thinking about the collective intelligence of the world of a company, channel, and our ability to interact with that. Therefore the ability to have that AI to coach all those technologies is pretty much there, even to choose the accent or voice we want. We released our first videos on our YouTube channel using AI voice for the first time as the English-American version. When you play it, the new system, the inflection, you wouldn’t know if it’s great. If we want to change the audio, we type a little bit out and it records the whole thing.

Now we’re seeing the video pieces come through as well. The only thing I’d say is that it’s easier to do it in the areas that don’t change too often. Math, Science, and so forth for kids is easier than, let’s say, a car manufacturer whose products are changing every week. There are still some nuances of stuff to that workout, but it’s happening so fast. By the end of 2023, we’ll see much more industry-ready, AI tutoring, and coaching parts where we interact with an expert who’s trained on a company’s expertise. What would their best salesperson say? That’s an AI avatar of their best people. Ethically, you’ve got to make sure that everyone’s comfortable to share their knowledge and that part. There’s some fear and stuff around that as well.

By the end of this year, we’ll see much more industry-ready AI tutoring and AI coaching.

That’s going to be an exciting future, especially for our kids’ generation. I look at learning as a fertilizer for a plant. If you give it at the right times and concentrations, you can have a plant blossom. That changes for different plants. One plant might require less fertilizer than another, and it’s the same with kids. We are on the verge of learning different people’s different skill levels when it comes to learning.

Once we are able to figure that out, that’s going to be interesting. For example, if you have a kid that’s watching one of your videos and he blazes through it and then he goes to the next one, that kid might have different opportunities available to him through the AI versus somebody that you know needs to focus on one. Is that something that you guys are seeing when you’re tracking users? Do you have any real-world data to match up the user on how much they’re using the product?

For example, we get to our corporate side, and it’s fair to even for the kids that we know that frequency of access is the biggest factor in predicting a performance outcome. It is not necessarily a matter of consumption. When we looked at our data and across a number of big brands and said, “What’s the most important thing? Is it the fact that they’ve gone through all these courses, they’ve consumed so many hours or is it the frequency?” what we see, especially on the corporate side, is there is a frequency of people who frequently go back to the platform and interact with it to say, “How do I get access to a quality answer? How do I refresh myself for the best practice of a person who explains the concepts I need to apply right now?”

Those people perform significantly better and get upskilled and reskilled 300% faster than the people who are probably asking somebody next to them, guessing, or still maybe not necessarily adopting but becoming digitally accepting that a digital coach is something that’s always there to help them. Our kids are born in that. This is the age of adults. I thought when my kids are at that age, there was a part where I think, “I don’t have to worry about lockdown. They don’t have to type yet,” then they’re like talking to Google and YouTube. They asked the questions, saying, “Wow.”

To your point, our interactions and how we communicate are radically different. My kids have learned more from school. You learn more from YouTube than you probably have from school in terms of real knowledge but the pure knowledge bits. The same thing even for the kids that are using it for their school. The teachers say, “We can see again.” Access is a big thing.

The way we communicate is radically different. Kids probably learn more from YouTube than they do from school in terms of real knowledge.

The question therefore is how you create that experience so it’s engaging and personalized that the person wants to engage it and it’s a natural place to go to rather than our brains tend to be lazy so we’d always go to the way we think’s easiest. If that’s my brother who happens to be us or if that is a voice search that is about the same length of time, but I trust it to be more accurate, my brain will always go to that place where I believe I’m going to get the best answer in the shortest period of time.

I like what you said about the fact that YouTube has provided your kids with more learning than you think in their actual schooling system because you hear so many bad things about screen time. I wish that I was good enough of a parent to say no screen time, but I’m not. It’s nice to let her watch some YouTube and, hopefully, it’s educational. I’ve realized she is leaps and bounds and has more general knowledge than kids who are not exposed to that stuff. You’re in the industry. How do you feel about that? What do you think the research shows personally? It’s something that I think is a necessary evil, but I want to know your opinion.

It’s a great question. My wife and I often debate the point despite the fact that we have a successful YouTube channel between us. The best thing I can say is that YouTube has two big parts. It works with content creators to create great content. We have a channel manager who manages us. She manages 100 other education channels. The second part of the content creators is the algorithm.

The algorithm has eight million signals or variables looking to say whether it should recommend this content in front of you or our child. The best advice is to screw up the algorithm for our kids. They are not watching. Put a few more educational videos inside that and they watch them. They watch anything that’s on the screen. When it starts also playing the next video, I see them watching some stuff about the world in the universe. I was having questions about 8 or 9 years because they wanted to build their own game.

They said, “We might have a problem.” He is eight years old. I said, “What’s your problem?” He goes, “I think we’ve got a copyright issue.” “You are eight years old. How do you know about copyright?” In my head, I’m saying, “What’s a copyright issue?” “We wanted to build our game, but we saw this other game which we were inspired by it. Because it was inspired by it, we think we might have a copyright issue.” The part is I wish YouTube allowed our kids at an early age to watch it but, at the same time, have a better filtering mechanism that we can filter out certain variables and certain signals that we don’t want to have inside it so we could wait it towards that.

They do have a phenomenally amazing algorithm. It’s getting smarter and smarter. This is interesting now with YouTube, and I do believe now that probably more people are accessing content from the homepage than via search. If you go back years ago, search would’ve been the number one way, either by Google or YouTube, to get YouTube videos. Now, they’re nailing that signaling piece to understand what’s the weighting and boosting to be able to keep us coming back and making it hyper-personalized for ourselves.

The American Academy of Pediatrics says that for most ages, twenty minutes of screen time is the max. Personally, I’m not hitting that because that’s the type of parent I am. I love my kid and stuff, but I don’t think it’s as bad as people think. I did a deep dive into it a while ago. The evidence is a little weak. A lot of it is anecdotal. Certainly, social media and many of these other programs that are available to us on screens have well-documented negative aspects, but for educational videos, I’m not seeing the data match up with what people are scared of. I wondered about your opinion on that.

If you look at the comments on our YouTube channel, it’s insane. I know I emphasize on YouTube channel rather than the corporate part, but it’s a bit where I can interact and I can practice the most. The most common comment is, “I now understand this concept in five minutes. My teacher’s been trying to explain to me for the last few years.” Let’s not forget how most classrooms are massively limited in their ability to convey knowledge in an effective way.

The great educational content on YouTube is that it’s taken time to craft because we’re all competing for attention against each other. I’m not sure that I agree with the negativity around YouTube when it is the level-one learning platform in the world. You say 86% of people are learning on YouTube. There is an amazing set of content creators that are creating high-quality educational content. Even YouTube paid people like us to create. We’re creating a range of videos now on climate change in partnership with YouTube.

YouTube is the number one learning platform in the world. There is a lot of great educational content on the platform. Content creators take time to craft it because they’re all competing against each other for attention.

They’re saying, “We’d love you to start a content. We want to make more content in areas we care about. Let’s create great free educational content in those areas.” Back to the AI a bit, AI is allowing us to make that smarter, better, and faster because there’s so much content you want to create. Also, you need to make sure your content is how you get the right title, description, and thumbnail. All the AI helps us with that. We now take our transcript for our video, put it into LLM, and say to give us the best title and it comes out 9 out of 10 times probably slightly better than we would have spent now thinking about it.

What is LLM?

Large Language Model. All of the generative AI technologies like ChatGPT and Google Bard are based upon this large language model. It is the ability to create titles, thumbnails, descriptions, and even scripts, to be able to take our scripts and say, “How do you make this script slightly more engaging and slightly deeper?” This is back to the personalization stuff I love because I sit now with my kids. We watch the videos, but we’re also using ChatGPT or Bard to help us with questions. We’re saying, “Maybe on this video, you didn’t quite get it. You didn’t nail it.” We asked for an explanation as a ten-year-old using superheroes as a metaphor to help us understand it.

What I love is the ability to personalize the learning experience completely to the individual in front of us. Give me five questions in that superhero type of analogy and let me know if I’ve got stuff going wrong. Starting to put these things together is one of the big things that we’re like, “How do we put our AI coach with our videos with that level of personalization that’s exactly relevant to the level of the child or level of the adult, but also in the context of that’s interesting to them as well?”

Certainly, an older model of a lesson plan, a textbook, and a teacher lecturing in front of you is going to go the way of the dinosaurs. One of the quotes that I always say to people is that the Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones. There are going to be lots of those people that are available, but this is a better, more effective way of doing it in the same way with the plant’s analogy grown from using manure as fertilizers. Now we have like hyper-effective fertilizers.

That’s going to be the same way. I wonder if there is anything that you can see in the metrics that you’re evaluating of any trends that would be interesting from a future perspective that gives you hope for the future. More engagement is great because you have kids that are more engaged in learning. That’s always something that gives you optimism, but what are some metrics that you see on the backend that are exciting to you?

Double down that first one because it goes back to how much screen time, “Is it 1 or 2-hour screen time?” What the data does tell us is the more that we can create these digital habits. When I think about learning, there are probably three main learning interaction moments. One is I’ve got a structured experience because I want to pass an exam or onboard the company. The ability to personalize and prescribe that is now becoming much easier to hyper-personalize that experience. The second one we talked about is around curiosity, “How do I create an environment where it’s understanding me like the YouTube homepage is and is surfacing content that’s interesting educational content in tune with what I find interesting and how I want to learn that’s going to surface that type stuff?”

The third is research. The ability to search used to be, “I wanted to search and find the book or the course,” then it came about a more YouTube style like, “I wanted to find the video.” Within those two things, it’s all relevant. Now we added Google Answers years ago, which is, “I want to be able to find the best paragraph or the best answer from a given text.” Now we’re into generative answers, which is the answer may not exist and it’s going to try and create the answer for me or synthesize a bunch of answers together.

It goes back to the point of saying, “What’s the most important data point that we see?” The most data point isn’t this, “I need to sit in a classroom for eight hours. It’s maybe not that I should be sitting at a PC and consuming two hours of YouTube content,” but it does mean habits of learning and frequency of access that I might be going 5 or 10 minutes a day to consumes content. I’m searching and finding my capability to do that.

It’s now transferring what’s becoming consumer habits and moving those into our adult habits. Companies like us, what we’re now doing is all technologies and surfacing and integrating these different types of concepts. It is integrating your ability to search as an answer like Google, the ability to find your content on YouTube, and the ability to automatically hyper-personalize your experience between it. Data-wise, undoubtedly, the thing that drives us is quite similar to YouTube. We have what we call our engagement funnel. YouTube has an engagement funnel. It is similar to marketing. How do we get you to that in the first place? It is analyzing data to say, “Why is the group of individuals, division, and role dropping off at this level? How do I get people to the ultimate goal, which is returning users?”

What we do know ultimately is returning users are higher performers both at school and at work. We have a thing that we call The Twelve Levers of Engagement, the twelve things that we think impact engagement. Those are things like site design, the content strategy in a work environment, your line manager, or your leader’s involvement inside of it.

There’s a lot of data there to work out, but the end goal for us is that returning users, then beyond that, you’ve got a whole bunch of different parameters to look at to say, “What is working? Why is it working? When it’s not? What do we think because we’re seeing this dropout between active and engaged users?” Active means I’ve gone to the platform, but I haven’t engaged or engaged and I haven’t come back. What are all the different things and the different levers that we can retry that’s going to allow us to increase that number of returning users?

One of the things that we did not highlight, which I want to change gears for, is augmented reality, especially with Apple coming out with this. That’s going to be huge. I’ve been such a big fan of augmented reality because I think about how we learn and interact with such a visual species. I know that’s one of the spaces that you’re in. How are you seeing that that helps and what are you hoping will come from this all-new augmented reality push?

We’d be fed of it for a long time, both AR and VR. The challenge has been scale, and that’s still the issue. I’ve got every headset there is, and you see the amazing potential of it to not just learn about the moon landing but to be part of the experience, not to hear about dinosaurs but to be walking with dinosaurs. The potential of it is amazing, but you still have to get right 2 or 3 aspects. You’ve got to make the accessibility piece a big piece. You’ve got to make sure the content can be created in a way that that’s affordable, and you’ve got to make sure the devices are affordable. It’s brilliant that Apple has come into the marketplace because no one’s going to market it like those guys.

You know every single Apple shop. You’ll be able to walk in there. You’ll be able to try it out. The whole marketing retail engine is toward that. It’s this first serious deck towards mass adoption, not a probably 2,500 or 3,000-pound price range, but that’s going to attract nearly adopted people like you and I am going to be, “How can I not have one?” As soon as it came out, my kids were like, “Daddy’s going to have one of them.” It’s the birth of the new era. The fact they’re taking it in the direction of spatial computing is interesting rather than a pure entertainment device.

If it does seem like a reboot, what Apple feels like is a reboot, which then will start to see. In order to be a master, you do need it to become mobile-friendly. You need it to be as successful as a mobile phone. Some people have £1,000 mobile phones, but you can also get a Chinese smartphone for £20. We were able to buy those and put them into schools years ago. I don’t think it becomes a mess until we get to that. The fact that Apple is still in the marketplace is tremendously exciting for all of us.

I like the fact that Apple has taken this on because, just like everything else, their ideas are going to become the industry standard. For example, gesture technology. Everybody’s going to use that now. Now that’s a standard. When you use an Oculus and an Apple product, it’s going to be the same. That is also going to help adoption because now every single kid is going to know that this changes something. That’s going to be exciting to see. I know that you said you’re going to get one. I’m going to get one myself. Specifically, with regards to learning, what excites you about that?

To be fair, when my kids first said to me, “We know why you want one because it can block us out. You can block out the sounds,” it’s not the number one reason. It’s to create memories. That is insane, not just for family but for work and education to relive experiences. I’m looking enough with my kids every now and then. My kids say to me, “Let’s go watch our baby pictures and videos.” Sometimes, we live better for half an hour. We’d have a laugh and joke about to think we did but to relive those experiences. You are now in a position with your kids that you’re younger and you are going to be able to create experiences you can relive.

The picture is good and the video’s better, but reliving it through that headset to turn up, that’s the insane part. From the educational side, that’s insane. The ability, as I mentioned earlier, to reduce the cost of creating content was what allowed us to make our Fuse channel and our corporate business successful. One of the big things that we were able to crack was how to industrialize the digitization of tacit knowledge. How do you get the knowledge out of people’s heads and make it available so that people go, “I get it easily?”

That’s the best success we’ve had with Fuse and also what we teach our corporate clients to do. It was solving the problem that normally you go through a Hollywood production cycle to make content. There was that cost that it’s not industrialized that you can’t make it at scale. With the vision of the Apple headset, the ability to have an experience where you’re saying, “How do you climb up a pole? How do you do the physical activities? What does the sales experience look like or a presentation environment that you’ve got to do for the first time you’re terrified of, record that, put you in a room, and play it back and coach towards it?” opens up the cost of content piece to 3D and for virtual worlds to open up a whole new range of coaching, performance, learning, and content creation.

What I thought was a smart thing that they did is they have outward-facing eyes so that you can still interact with the environment because that’s the thing that I feel is the big detractor to virtual reality. You turn it on and you block everything out. I would hope that whatever technology we have does have some social component to it because it’s going to be more isolating, given the fears that people have about this technology. When you have the eyes facing out, it still has the ability to include you like the memory that you were saying, like if it’s somebody’s birthday party. You’re still there. Now it looks horrendous. It still looks like you’re half-robot when you’re in that situation.

Technology is going to change. I’m sure it’s going to get smaller and still having those same abilities will be cool ten years from now when we’d be wearing some glasses, recording that memory, and we could still be in the memory itself and not be excluded from it, but then enjoy it later. That’s going to be exciting. We’re getting to the end of our time. At the end of our time, I always ask three questions to my guests, things that I was thinking about while we were talking. I would like for you to indulge me because there are many different things that we talked about that I would love your insight on to get to know you a little bit better.

What I ask a lot of my guests, especially people in the technology space, is many of us have science fiction as one of our inspiring reasons for entering into this field. Do you have an inspiration to get the process rolling? I look at Star Trek as the utopia that I want to live in. The virtual reality minority report is something that’s interesting. I hope that I can have a robot that helps me, similar to Isaac Asimov’s dreams. What inspires you? What got you into this field?

I think of Captain Cook as far as all to go do things that other people have never done before to go to places and to discover things. That’s within all of us. For our AR and VR part, I watched Ready Player One three times inside the movie. It was amazing bringing back childhood, but also showing that near term. Most of those concepts they had there, whether my kids playing Roblox in a VR-type world towards it, you could see and touch it that it’s so close to us. It is a shame that it doesn’t look like Facebook’s Metaverse quite not to where it was trying to deal with it.

There’s always a Captain Kirk inside of us. Captain Kirk inspires us all to go do things that other people have never done before, to go to places, and to discover things.

It will reboot it and we get it there or maybe Apple is going to get it right, but they painted that world beautifully. At the same time, trying to balance with the world, to your point, “How do you make sure you don’t cut yourself off in society and you are part of it that it’s something you jump into?” I use that technology. My brother has a VR headset. He lives miles away from it. My kids and his kids often on a Sunday go in and play a game together. It feels like I’m talking to him next to him. There’s a little step towards that Ready Player One type of stuff, which is cool.

I look forward to that when these borders and distances are done away with the interactions that we could have. That’s a great future to be inspired by. The other thing that I think of when I’m talking about this stuff, especially software developments, is that we’re on a logarithmic scale. Who knew many years ago that I would be talking to you like this and it’s a natural and interesting interaction? What’s a low-hanging fruit that you want out of this logarithmic scale? Where do you hope that society goes? Personally, I can’t wait until we have a life extension. I want to see all of these different things. Specifically in the software field, what is something that you hope that happens?

My goal and drive are the same as now. I wouldn’t mind some of that as well. My goal has always been democratization and the equality of education. That’s the bit that I’m most excited by. It is when you see you make a jump towards that. We started on our journey on this many years ago. We created something that ten million kids and adults are using in our corporate business. How do you use technology to equalize and to allow, in a corporate, everyone to learn, not just the top 10%? In our Fuse channel, it was, “How do you give the kids in developing countries that have no power and no electricity access the same type of education that the kids in the posh school will get?”

To be fair, we saw that happen because our stuff has been used in developed countries for a while, but now we’re starting to see the top schools use our content in the classrooms. If I then go the next step forward, this is where I think generative AI is massively interesting to work because it’s accessible by all. I love AR and VR, but it’s not quite as accessible to all. Anybody then gets access to a mobile phone is accessing generative AI, ChatPT, or Bard and accelerates all of them.

Generative AI is massively interesting to work with because it’s accessible to all.

As companies like us figure out how you now start to merge and morph these technologies together into a new hyper-personalized experience, what we’re able to do is we’ve got a new set of tools that allows us to accelerate faster toward equalization. That’s what this 2023 we’re looking at going. That’s hugely exciting.

A log jam of content creation will be done away with because AI will be in charge of it. You could make tons of videos that democratize everything further. That’s an interesting future.

It’s the personalization. With the videos, you’ll have a high degree of creativity and human intervention to be able to create great content. What we see is the creators will create better content in partnership with AI. The learning experience of the learner will be much more heavily influenced by AI. It is the ability to learn in my best way and to learn in my best moments. I don’t necessarily even have to ask the question, but it knows it’s predicting what I need to know in advance of that, which we’re already almost there already.

We’re already in our technology, able to predict most of what you need to learn in a click of a button based upon who you are, what you’re doing, where you are, and what screen you’re on. All those things go into an algorithm to say, “This is a bit of content that is more relevant to you.” That’s only going to get smarter. Hyper-personalization and a contextual learning piece using technology for it is tremendously exciting.

Last question. I feel like there are a lot of negatives of society that are going to go away in the future. I think 100 years from now, we are going to look at the facts like, “We used to keep dolphins and orcas in cages. We used to make them jump for us.” That’s a terrible way to live. We’re going to look back at that and be like, “Thank God we stopped doing that.” What is something that you think that in the next 100 years, we’re going to look back like, “I can’t believe we used to do that? Thank god that that went away.”

It probably goes to that structured formal learning piece because it’s crazy. How much learning is still in the Victorian age? We learned in school and the classroom. That’s how we have learned since Samaria thousands of years ago. Still, the majority of corporates are doing it. You’re put in a room and we’re still talking to people. I do think that we’re now seeing an acceleration of companies like us being able to harness technology in a cool way. That way, people are looking backward and go, “Why would I put somebody on a Zoom call for 5 or 40 hours in a room towards that?” I think about my kids in my business. This one-size-fits-all approach to learning is madness.

We’re all different and all our kids are different. It is not to have one style for all of them and you’re trying to adapt to 20 or 25 people. I think of the fact that technology can understand the individual, where you are, the context, the language, all those things, and adapt to you to help you get to where you want to get to. That’s what we look back on even in 1 or 5 years. We see ourselves as little babies. It is a huge acceleration because of the jump in AI that’s become available.

Technology can understand the individual, the context, the language, and adapt to you to help you get to where you want to go.

It’s going to help those kids that are not thriving in this particular model. We’re going to look at four years from now, “Thank God I didn’t have to go to school in a classroom, and I was able to learn through AI. Otherwise, I would’ve been so far behind.” That goes into your piece about democratization.

Let’s say English is the main language in the classroom. There are disadvantages. Other kids may be neurodiverse. You’ve been taught in that particular way. They’ve got a massive disadvantage towards it. Fundamentally, that classroom is set up to fail for 20% or 30% of the classroom. The only way you get through that is through individual personalization.

I look forward to that future with you. It’s nice to speak with you. Thank you, everybody, for reading. For the rest of our crowd, we’ll see you in the future.

Important Links

• Steve Dineen
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About Steve Dineen

Steve Dineen founded Fuse in 2008 as an enterprise learning and knowledge platform that ignites people performance through active engagement and positive learning experiences. He has long been driven by one clear mission: forever change enterprise learning and development. He is a serial tech entrepreneur who, prior to founding Fuse, successfully scaled and sold the UK digital learning venture Fuel, a company that became Europe’s second-largest bespoke digital learning company, servicing 40 of the FTSE 100.