AI Changed the Product. Education for Customers and CSMs Has to Catch Up.

So thank you all for being here and for being in this session. I am deeply excited to be in this room with everybody. For the folks that are way in the back, I do encourage you to come up front. There will be a couple of things that I'll be showing on screen that may not travel all the way back there.

So if you're okay with it, I would highly encourage you to come up to the front. Okay. So what are we talking about in this session? This is a theme that you've heard throughout this entire conference and a theme that you're feeling which is product release velocity is increasing.

AI is changing the product at a pace that is something we have not seen in a very, very long time. And so education for your customers on how to use the product and education for your internal teams on how to deliver the value and how to communicate the value of that product and how to help your customers take advantage of the products that they have invested in. The need for that and the pace at which that needs to happen needs to change as well. So that's the thing that we're going to focus on for the majority of this session.

Okay. And just a quick note for the folks in the back, the AV team. I do not see the notes anywhere. Not a deal breaker, but it'd be nice to see the notes.

Oh, the slides aren't showing either. That is a deal breaker for sure. So I will wait until all this gets sorted out. Was there a picture on the dock?

Well, it didn't make it into the deck, but I would love to somehow share it if I could in real time, but I don't know that AI has figured out how to do that these days. That's the one AI innovation I'm looking forward to is when you can just project things without having to go through all these hoops. And I think we're going to get there one day. Any other questions about Great Danes, dogs?

Anyone else have a Great Dane? Yay! How old? Oh, that is small in Great Dane world.

Yeah, that is a... And how long have you had him? Okay, okay. Do you have any room whatsoever on the couch or are you just like a little corner?

Just a little corner. Just a little corner and he takes up most of it, but I find his presence very calming. I don't know if you agree, but Great Danes are very chill. They're very mellow.

So it's a very calming presence. It's a good time to plug the puppies if no one's seen them yet. Yes, the puppies... They were sleeping yesterday when I was there, but hopefully they'll be awake at lunchtime.

They were sleeping yesterday. I love the puppies of Pulse. Some trivia about me. I used to work at Gainsight, so very familiar with all the work that goes into organizing Pulse.

I was a CMO here for about two years. And it is a Herculean effort to put this conference together, and it is always very, very well done. So I'm just going to fast forward and thank the whole team that put this conference together, because A, it's valuable, B, it's very well done. So I appreciate you all being here.

Thank you all for coming as well. I know it's a lot of time away from your families and a lot of expense, but I hope you got something good out of it and did a lot of networking. I think that's a thing... The networking is the key piece here.

Getting to know other customers, seeing S&M, how they're doing things, especially now how AI is changing. So I think we're all going through this phase where it's like, what do we do next? How do we take this forward? And we're all figuring out together.

I might just actually get you all to log into a Zoom link on your phone, and then you can just follow along with me. That might be the easiest way to do this. And you can ask questions now. There's not much to ask questions about yet, but ask questions about our dog, about anything.

Yeah, ask questions about the presentation that you have not seen yet, for sure. I think we're coming. [pause] I hope this is not ruining your presentation, but how have you seen AI changing your role, and how have you used it? It's really helped me make a lot more sense of large amounts of information.

I think that's not different from anyone in this room. I think that's probably the first way that it changes things. It's just it really helps you make sense of very, very large amounts of information in a very quick way. So that's definitely one thing.

The flip side of it is, given how fast we can now move based on the information that we're seeing, it does require a whole bunch of other things to change in terms of how we do our work. So I think that's just everyone's feeling it, everyone's living it, but that's a natural consequence of that reality. And then while we're figuring all of this out, I can also get through quick... There was one question that Leela asked me, which was a great question, and it's something I was gonna explain at the beginning of my presentation, which is my title as chief commercial officer.

So what does that really mean? What it means is the commercial in there, I manage sales, marketing and customer success. So one of the things that articulate is that we believe in keeping that entire customer journey all the way from when you're a prospect to when you're a customer and in for renewals and everything else to be very, very, very deeply connected and unified. So that is why my role exists, is to really, really create that tightly woven connection throughout the entire customer journey.

I can also, which I was gonna do a five second blurb of what articulate does for those of you that don't know. So articulate is actually an AI powered workplace training platform, and it is used by about 125,000 organizations globally across over 180 countries, the learning content created on articulate has been consumed by over 130 million learners worldwide in all kinds of settings, corporate settings, educational settings, non-profits, government all over the place, and on both sides of any corporate learning, and by both sides I mean customer facing learning, as well as internal employee facing learning. So that is essentially what, you know, more about the company, and plain English, exactly what articulate does, is it is a platform on which you can create, manage, localize and distribute any kind of learning, all the types of varieties I talked about before. And we have slides.

Okay, I will keep us on time, and I will go quickly through this because I can see the countdown timer right here. Okay, so we'll skip through this slide, but this is the statement that I want you to really pay attention to because my entire 40 minutes is going to be based on this one sentence. They were informed, they were not equipped, and essentially my thesis is that a lot of learning that is created has been with the purpose of sharing information and not necessarily the purpose of building capability. So if you're a CSM, you've been informing CSMs.

If you're building training for customers, you've been informing customers. There have been decks, there are Zoom calls, there's videos, there's all kinds of things. But a lot of that historically has been information sharing and not capability building. And this didn't used to be such a sharp problem.

Prior to AI speeding things up, we had the time to take a product release and all the information associated with it and put the scaffolding around it to turn that information into actual capability building. If you did some level of internal training or shipped some level of customer education, let's say in January, that was potentially still relevant in March, but now things are moving so quickly that the luxury of time that you had to put the scaffolding around the content that you were creating to truly build capability, that time has shrunk. So that gap between a product shipping and teams and customers being confident with what that thing does or what value it delivers, that time has shrunk. So the brutal truth is, and I'm going to reemphasize, that most, I'm going to call this front line training.

So training done on the front lines. What I mean by that is training your sales organization, training customer success teams, training support teams, and training customers. That's what I think of as front line training. Front line training historically has been designed for information transfer.

I want to caveat this by saying that this is not a knock on enablement teams and this is not a knock on customer education teams. I am one of the people who manages one of those teams. I have been in the shoes of having to create internal training. I have been in situations of having to create customer facing training.

But the way we did things before when we were building these types of training, and the reason why so much of it turned into more of information sharing, and I'll show some examples of what that is, is because that's the only thing that's scaled. You couldn't really write custom situational learning for every feature released, every product released. So you built a deck or you wrote some documents or you sent out a Zoom call and you invited people to a training session, a live training session, or a virtual training session. And then that worked again until the pace of change shifted to what it is today.

And it's not that AI broke this system that we had. It was that the system that we had already had some cracks in it, and the velocity of AI is just making those cracks really impossible to ignore and much more visible. So while potentially some of us who are building frontline training were sharing information and sort of packaging it up as training, there's an entire discipline of instructional design. And some of you in this room may be instructional designers.

I have deep, deep respect for that profession. But there's a whole discipline, your discipline of instructional design, that for 40 plus years has been taking a very different approach to learning. An instructional designer, when they think about training or a learning experience, they don't start with what does this thing do that I need to teach people. They start with what does someone need to do after this?

And so that is a very different starting point and it leads to a very different learning experience. And what you see here on the screen are four different principles. None of these principles are anything that I made up. These principles are just a small sample of instructional design principles that instructional designers use a lot.

Some of these like learner-centered design, retrieval practice, scenario-based training, which is my favorite. How do you take a certain amount of information but then make it contextual, put people in different scenarios with the same information and help them train them to adapt differently? So each of these are instructional design principles and there are more of these. But just some examples here.

So the question that probably pops to your mind is if these principles have existed for 40 plus years and there's a whole profession surrounding it, why didn't we do more of this? Why don't we do more of this? Why don't we just do it naturally? Well, the thing is most organizations don't have enough instructional design expertise to apply that type of amazing learning principle design or instructional design principle to every piece of learning content that an organization needs, especially at the speed and scale of which organizations are moving right now.

So when a feature is shipping on a Tuesday and somebody needs to train an entire frontline team the week before, no one's doing a learner analysis and figuring out all the different scenarios that people are going to be in. They're building a deck, right? I mean, that's probably a huge exaggeration, but most of the time that is what is happening. And that is not a willpower problem.

That is not a lack of people wanting to do this. It's a structural constraint. Organizations were not designed, org charts were not designed to have enough of this type of skill set inside of a company to really expand to fit the demand of learning that is happening inside of companies right now. So that's sort of the scary part of it.

But the flip side of it is that in the age of AI, these principles can be embedded inside the tools that you're using to create your training content. Scenario prompts and branching logic and immediate feedback, in the moment feedback. The best customer education and employee education authoring tools, they don't just help you build faster just because they have AI in them. Yes, you're going to build faster, but it's not just about building faster.

It's about building with these sorts of principles already in mind. And the system guiding you with these principles already in mind. So think about the constraint that I just talked about earlier, which is that instructional design is just an organizational constraint. The lack of that expertise being in every single team, it's a structural constraint in an organization.

There's not a whole lot that we can do about that. But on the flip side, if instructional design principles can be embedded into the tools that you're using, then that constraint becomes less binding than it has been before. And now with AI, those sorts of principles can be in the tools that you're using. And so that constraint, it doesn't fully go away, but it's a lot less binding.

And then all of a sudden, when you are creating learning experiences and learning content, it moves away from just being an information dump and a bit more into the richer, the more engaging learning experiences that really stick and that change behavior, which is exactly what you're trying to do. So I'm going to walk you through a real scenario. This is not hypothetical. This is a real scenario, personal experience.

So as I said, in my role, I'm responsible for sales, marketing and customer success. And yes, part of that is also enablement internally for our frontline teams. It is also thinking through as part of the product release, how do we train our customers and what kind of learning experience should they have. So I'm going to walk you through a real scenario right now that our team is working on.

We are literally about to launch a new product. And I'm going to walk you through that scenario using two contrasting approaches. The first approach will be the traditional sort of information sharing approach. And then the second approach I'll walk you through is looking at the same situation we're about to launch a product.

But if we were to build training a different way with a lot more instructional design thoughtfulness, what would that look like? So let's dive in. I want to start with one of the foundational elements of any launch, which you all probably familiar with. I use this for simplicity.

The launch that I am talking about right now, again, I was going to pull from a personal thing that I'm working on that's keeping me up at night. My company is about to launch a product called A.I. Avatars. Now, one of the foundational elements of any launch, if you've all worked on training that we all need to build as part of a launch, is you look at the technical documentation write up that the product team creates.

So this is an example of that. It's a real article on the right hand side. In the middle of the screen there you see that's our technical documentation teams write up of A.I. avatars.

That's one of the source materials that I'm going to be looking at or my team is going to be looking at. It's on the knowledge base. It's super well written. It's clean.

It's very, very clear. It has a whole bunch of how to information. It has a whole bunch of what does this do information. And it is findable.

It does great. It does great at a lot of different things. This is one of the source materials that you might have for a launch. Other source material could be videos and recordings and little explainer things.

You'll probably have a whole bunch of things from your subject matter experts. Now I'm going to go to one example of what someone might derive from one or more pieces of that foundational knowledge. This is a very abbreviated version of how an internal enablement presentation may have been created a couple of years ago. Someone in enablement will take that tech docs article along with some additional information from all the subject matter experts and create a deck.

They may also infuse it with some value props from the product marketing team and everything else and they'll build a deck. Every one of the things in this deck is information broadcast. 100% information broadcast. None of this is in my opinion at the moment in its current state capability building.

It is information broadcast. And then at the end of it there might be a quiz, a certification quiz. So you have your frontline teams come to a call. You show them a presentation about this new thing we're about to launch.

You teach them about some of the positioning and the value and everything else and you make them take a quiz. Again, because the learning was information sharing, the quiz, even if somebody gets 100% on the quiz, what they are good at is repeating that information back to you. So for example, one of these questions in here is about how many languages in the avatar, you know, how many languages can you create avatars in. And so if one of your frontline team members gets a question from a customer and the customer's question is how many languages does this feature, AI avatars, how many languages does it support?

And if your frontline team member answers it exactly perfectly because they know the information, that's great. But that's not how you want them to answer it. If you're a frontline leader, you know that when your person gets that question, and especially if you're in sales or if you're in customer success or you're an account manager, you want them to respond with how many languages do you need to be. How many languages do you need to translate in?

What are your current translation needs? Do you need to translate all kinds of avatars or just a couple that fall into certain categories of learning? That situational capability building is not covered by that information broadcast that I shared with you. So, there were two, you know, let's think through if somebody just got that information broadcast and then they come to a customer meeting, a QBR or any kind of a customer meeting, and they talk about AI avatars, coolest thing, we just launched it.

Let me tell you more about it and the customer says, timeout, we'd love to add videos and stuff to our customer education, but we just don't have the budget for it this year. That's it. How do you want that person to respond? They know all the stuff that was in the deck.

None of it prepares them for this. What do you want them to do? Do you want them to ask a question? Do you want them to let it go?

Do you want them to schedule a follow up? What do you want them to do? So, here's the change and here's the reframe. There were two different ways to, or there are two different ways to get someone ready for something.

And the example I'm using here is a product launch. Before AI, information was harder to find. It was harder to distill. It took a while.

So we spent our entire, or a big chunk of our training budgets on making sure that answer or that information existed somewhere somehow. Index and recordings and knowledge bases and articles in different courses and stuff that got created, but a lot of times even the courses were information sharing. But the other way to get someone ready, which is, you know, the rich and instructional design and built around the actual outcome that you're wanting to drive, that took a very, very long time. It took weeks per, like I said before, it took weeks.

It was difficult. You needed to have specialty expertise. And so people didn't always have the luxury to do it. Well, now in the age of AI, information retrieval is solved.

It is so easy for your customers and your teams to find the information they're looking for. You just, you need to structure the knowledge sources in the right way. But time spent on creating learning that is just information sharing is the wrong way to spend that time and budget. That time that you save where you're not having to create all this training just to share information, because information retrieval is super easy now.

You can now reinvest that time in building some of these richer ways of getting people to learn things. And the impact of doing that and the value of doing that is not small. It is pretty large. Humans retain only about 10% of what they read and what they hear.

But when they practice and when they are put into certain situations and asked to apply certain things, they retain 75% of that learning. So when someone stumbles on a question in a QBR, that's not that person's problem. They may have studied perfectly all of the training you gave them. It is a learning design problem.

Did we prepare them for the different situations that they're going to encounter? And how much effort did we spend in doing that? A lot of times training is designed to test recall. It is not designed to test capability.

And the latter part is what we need to move over to. So I'm going to go back to that scenario that I was telling you about where, let's say we've launched the product and the person on my team is in front of a customer and they are asked the question, or they get that same objection from the customer about budget. I'm going to walk you through a different learning experience that in the age of AI potentially takes, frankly, less effort to create than it ever did in the past, but is richer in terms of the value it delivers to the learner. So this is, so yes, we're going to go through the QBR objection, but what I'm going to walk you through is a course built with the same source information, the technical documentation article.

And what I don't want, I mean, the learners could take the course if they wanted to and walk through all the content in here, but instead what I want to do is put them directly in a customer situation. See if this plays. We actually looked at this and it's just not in the budget for this year. We're limiting our use of videos to just screen captures.

Other video formats are too time consuming and expensive to create. So what I'm trying to do from a teaching standpoint is put the learner directly in the situation. There's no wall of text describing a customer meeting scenario and coming up with the five different ways in which they're going to respond. I'm literally just using AI to say the words that I expect a customer to say in the form of an objection.

We've all done the objection handling training in the past. So just literally like mentally put somebody in that meeting where they face that objection. The next thing I want to do is ask the learner to put in here what they would say next. And again, I could have asked them to speak and put their response in as well.

I'm choosing as the person who is teaching this thing to ask them to type it in because there's something different than happened that happens when you ask somebody to type in a response versus just speak it. The typing in gives you some time to think it gives you some time to really refine what you're saying and you don't always get this luxury when you're in front of a meeting, but it's valuable if you're trying to do like situational learning. So you can see here the learner is typing in stuff. They're asking a question before we move on.

Let me ask you some questions. They are trying to talk about their talking about some things that maybe the customer hasn't considered yet. And then this moves into an immediate feedback. So again, this would have been a lot harder to create before I but in the age of AI, it's it's incredibly easy for me to put someone on my frontline team in a simulated customer conversation and then ask that same teammate to respond to an objection.

Or a particular comment the customer is making and then give them feedback right away. And the feedback is based on expectations that I have. So one of the things that you all uniquely have is you know exactly what specific like how you want your teams to respond. You have the subject matter expertise.

Your companies have the subject matter expertise. So that's the unique value in creating this training. It's not necessarily the the information of the how to like the how to use avatars that can be very easily gotten to by your own teams as well as your customers. It's this putting somebody in a particular situation asking them to respond and giving them feedback right away.

And you can see the feedback has been given immediately based on certain a certain set of frameworks that I put in here. And it took me very, very little time. I will raise my hand and be the first to say I have no instructional design expertise. The expertise I do have is subject matter expertise, i.e.

how to navigate customer conversations. So, you know, someone can go in and keep doing this and until they actually respond in a way that maps to the expectations that that I have. So that's the corporate side of it of internally getting your frontline teams ready for a product launch. What about the customer side of it?

So Tuesday morning product has launched same feature shipping. It's the morning of the product launch, but now it's not about training the CSM. Now it's about what experience do you want your customers to have the first time they meet this feature? What do you want them to know?

So there are different surfaces in which you might be putting your customer education content out there. Some of you might be putting customer education content in public facing academies. Some of you might be putting customer education content in communities at Articulate. We utilize our community quite a bit for that.

And some of you might be putting customer facing education content in inside the product. So the two examples that I'm showing you here are examples of how we do this at Articulate. We definitely put a little bit of, you know, customer education content inside of the product, i.e. the product launches, you at least get to know a little bit about what it is and how to get started with it.

And in the product, the other thing that people have always not done enough of, and I think should do more of, is a quick 30, 60 second video talking about the value of the thing you're about to use. So if you're in customer success here, we talk a lot about value realization and all of those things, but we forget sometimes that teaching people what that value is that you're delivering and constantly reminding them of it directly in the product is a good thing. So in the exact moment that thousands of people see the product, or see the new feature inside the product, they get a quick 30, 60 second video telling them the value of it before they move on and they go into all the how-to stuff and everything else. And the same thing in the community.

Like I said, we use community a lot and a lot of you here are building communities around your users, and so we put the same value framing in front of any of our training and our articles describing this new feature in the community as well. So again, it's the training that used to just be the how-to and what to do can also extend into reinforcing value even with your customers. So it's, you know, I just talked about two different principles information sharing versus capability building. And then how do you now tell which one of the two that you're doing.

So there's two things that I want you to keep in mind, two principles, none of them are new, none of them are things that I uniquely come up with. But practice beat certification anytime that you can get people to practice something in a situational context that will always be super valuable. That is something that will stick that will change behavior and continuous beats one time. So continuously reinforcing something always beats one time training.

And I think we inherently know this. So if practice beats certification, then what you want to try and do is not only or limit how much of recall that you're testing. So when you're trying to see if somebody is the training that you put out there is actually sticking with people. What you want to do is test how they respond to certain contextual situations that surround that information.

In the example I showed you about objection handling, if we just had a bunch of slides with some generic objection handling tips that would not have been as effective as putting somebody directly in a customer situation, even though it's simulated, and then having them respond in the moment to that objection and giving them the feedback immediately. Now in the past, a lot of times, that objection handling training and giving feedback, that would have been done in one on ones with managers, but that doesn't scale. It definitely doesn't scale at the pace at which we're all moving. So if we have the technology to do this today with all of the AI that we're using, then this is the direction we need to go to make sure that that capability building scales and you're giving people ways in which to practice what they're learning.

And then, continuous beats one time, I don't think I need to say a whole lot about this, this is self-explanatory. The teams that are doing this well obviously are releasing customer facing education and employee facing education with every release, but in addition to that, they are doing that every time other things happen inside of a company. So a product release is the most obvious thing, but there's something that I like to give an example of, which is we have teams that create training around what we call capability tuneups. So every quarter, you have so many ways in which to see how your teams are handling or not handling certain situations well.

And AI helps you uncover that these days with all of the technologies like Gong and everything else. Once a quarter, if you can see some trends in which your teams are struggling in certain areas, once a quarter, there's a tuneup training. We're going to tune up, we're going to do this learning to reinforce something that we're not quite hitting the mark on. So there's a lot of examples like this that we can go over, but again, repeat it as much as possible and turn it into something that is regular.

Now, when I say that, you might think, well, isn't that a lot? That's just a lot of content. That's a lot of learning that we're going to be pushing at people. And what I would like to say there is the goal is not more and more and more content.

It's not more and more just AI-generated content just because you can do it faster, just push it out faster. It's more using AI to create more learning that is grounded in your company's information, that is grounded in the information that you're already seeing about how your teams are working, and that is grounded in data that you're seeing about how your products are being used by your customers. AI has made it easier to see a lot of those signals a lot quicker now. So how do you then make sure that you're building your curriculums around those signals that you're picking up and doing it in a very, very regular way?

So we don't necessarily need a whole bunch more content. What we do need is now that we're listening to signals a lot more often and it's much easier to pick up information using AI across large, large data sets, one data set being how your customer is using a product. The second data set could be conversations your teams are having with customers. How do you take that information and figure out what additional situational learning do you want to create for your teams?

And the creation of that learning has gotten a whole lot easier with the advent of AI. So I want to make this very concrete with a customer example. USAA, if you're familiar with this brand, which I'm sure most of us are, but USAA is the most service-driven company in the world. It's the kind of brand where when you call in, that phone call is the product for them.

They care very, very deeply about customer service. And so in that company, training for a frontline team is extremely important. And prior to AI, what they had was very dense linear training that it took a new frontline team member two to three days to get through. A lot even more effort for the team building this to actually create and keep it up to date.

After AI, just it's a lot faster for learners to get through it. They do it in 90 minutes, which 90 minutes seems even longer than what it should be in this day and age. But it went from being two to three days for a learner to get up to speed to 90 minutes. And it went from being this very dense, heavy, you know, just really static learning to very situational, engaging, simulations, things that made people lean in and really just get them up to speed quicker, but also in a way that was, frankly, much more enjoyable for new hires.

So if you remember one thing from this, just remember, there's two things that you want to build when you're thinking about internal training, for example, for CSMs and I'm using CSMs as an example, because we're at the Gainside conference, but it could be sales, could be anyone in frontline. Build for the situation. Don't build just for the information they need to know what situations are they going to encounter, build for that. And then for customers, build to show value.

Yes, of course, you're going to have to give them some how to training, but you can build a lot more of the value based framing into it using all of the new AI tools that we have at our disposal. And none of these are information transfer. You will have to do some base level of information transfer, but the pace at which you can do that is highly like, it's super easy to do now. So the job now is about these two types of learning.

So the principles, like I said before, the principles of this have existed for 40 plus years. Many of you in this room are very familiar with those principles and embrace them. I think what's changed is for the first time in our careers, we like some of those prints, like we've got technology that has those principles embedded in it. And so even though if you're an instructional designer or if you have that expertise, you know that you don't have to be in every room to sort of elevate the quality of the learning that's happening in your organization.

You can with the tools that you're using, embed those types of principles in the technology that other teams are using across the company to build this kind of learning. And so if the technology has arrived and the principles have always been there, then the question is, how are we going to actually build the right system to get the outcomes that we want from the effort that we're putting into customer education, as well as any internal employee education. So that is all I had, and I know that we started a little bit late and some of you have to rush off to get some lunch before your next session. But thank you for your attention today, really, really appreciate it.

That QR code is my LinkedIn profile. If you want to continue the conversation, please scan that. Drop by the booth. I'll be hanging out at the booth this afternoon, the Articulate booth if you want to continue the conversation.

And yeah, I'm just I'm happy to share what we can. Like I said, my role involves I am responsible for educating people. And so I'm, you know, I do care about this problem as well as coming from a company where we just talk about learning all the time with all of our customers. So very, very happy to share any best practices that we can with you.

Thank you, Monica.