Why you should be interested in artificial intelligence as L&D professional

In our book Leren in tijden van tweets, apps en likes there is a clear call for people working with learning, change and innovation processes to dive into technology. Everyone sees that technology is increasingly taking an important place in our lives- even people who are not into technology. I did intakes with vocational teachers this week and I heard that they experienced daily competition with mobile phones. The attention span of students got shorter. If you compete with technology you might make technology work for you and help you? My advice is be curious about technology and get started. But how deep do you dive into different technologies and tools? and why? There are so many developments, think of blockchain, of which I do not know what it actually is. Sometimes it feels like you are in a tsunami of new developments and you let it flow by. For learning professional e-learning seems a clearer need than knowing about artificial intelligence and blockchain.

the allerhande recipes

Artificial Intelligence- What the heck?

A great example of such a what-the-heck development is artificial intelligence (AI). Artificial intelligence is a collective name for software that manages creative thinking by the computer: the learning computer. I've heard about AI regularly, but a lot of it is at the level of 'HEEE, it's coming'. What can you really do? What's going to change? It doesn't click for me unless I get to work with it and start to apply it. A clear application of AI are chat bots. I have written about chatbots before. Those crazy puppets are everywhere if you have an eye for! Especially in Facebook messenger there are many chat bots to follow. I follow Poncho for the weather and a joke, and the allerhande chatbot with a daily recipe. For Slack users: the Slackbot helps you with all your questions about Slack. By the way, there are also chatbots which are not driven by AI, but those will be less smart in their conversations.

What is the influence of AI on the L&D profession? 

During the L&D unconference in Rotterdam I hence threw the  above question to the group: I thought I would be alone in my group, but there were 8 people with interest in the topic. Additionally, those who did not attend seemed to regret it :). The nice thing was that there were concrete experiences in the group with AI applications. The first was the experience of a bank to have Watson analyze credit applications. You will have to teach Watson how to do this, but then you can save a lot of time. Another application shared: At a factory in Japan, a robot runs around (powered by AI) that connects with employees and coaches workers, for example, to take a break. It's not a big brother, but a very helpful robot. The time saved by the use of AI can be put into more creative tasks. A third example was an application that receives information from the internet to make predictions about the market.

The Calimero effect

The AI group acknowledged that you as L&D-er might be afraid of this type of development or may think it's got nothing to do with your business. The famous Calimero effect: What can we do as advisers / trainers / facilitators? This too big for us and something for the ICTs and decision makers and visionaries in the organization. It's not for us but for others. Perhaps AI will take over L & D's work by doing performance support tasks, for example. There is already one AI online teacher doing a great job. Or people are scared of the smart youth who understand it all. Look at the example of  Tanmay Bakshi a 12-year old programmer of IBM.

You will only see it when you get it

This famous quote by Cruijf applies to AI.  You can only imagine or dream up an application if you have seen enough examples and those examples inspired you. Because I opened my eyes (with a group of colleagues), we see different applications. For example, we will experiment with an online confession box for reflection. We could not have thought of this AI application if we had not followed the developments and many examples. In addition, many applications already use AI, think of your news feed on Facebook (does it?) Or your results in Google search. The danger here is that we are increasingly dealing with filter bubbles, you are getting more and more closed in the same line of thought.  Think of the Netflix bubbles. It might be another role for L&D? Ger Driesen calls this the bubble bursting role.

So what to do as learning and development professional?

• Read, watch, follow. Read an article, attend a summit or start to follow some chatbots. This is a dutch article by Ger Driesen over de invloed op HRD van AI.
• Investigate whether there are AI projects in the core business and try and learn from those. 
• Help people in the organization to prepare for robotization.
• Brainstorm applications of AI to support your work and make it easier. Think of the selections of CVs, relevant chatbots or analysis of online learning data. You might be able to start an innovative project together with others. 
• Take up a role in the consciousness about algorithms. Burst the bubbles.

Are you working with AI? I'd be happy to know about it in a reaction. 

What can you learn from a chatbot?

I have my office on the first floor of our house and therefore I use a Wifi homeplug to strengthen the WiFi signal from the groundfloor. A week ago, suddenly the signal dropped. The homeplug didn't work anymore. I looked back at my mails and discovered that I had bought it at bol.com and that there is a 10-year warranty. I was quite happy to find it but at the same time thought: oooh how to send it? How to get a warranty reparation?  I went to the customer service page of bol.com to see what I had to do. And I bumped into the virtual assistant. My experience with this type of assistants is rather frustrating. However, this one gave me a sensible answer. My question: "I have a defective product which is guaranteed, what should I do" was understood as a warranty question. He wanted to look up what the product was and offered me to sign and go to the product (together!).

So he sent me to the page with information about sending a defective product. It was clear how I could return the product with a label on the envelope. That page I had not found myself! Thanks to Mr. virtual assistant. They are slowly getting better?

What is a chatbot?
This virtual assistant is a fine example of a chatbot. A chatbot can converse with you to perform a task. Other examples of chat bots are:

• The invisible boyfriend. You can create your own type of boyfriend and to practice with him through SMS texts in dating.
• Slack is a teamtool with various chatbots like the busybot. Busybot lets you divide tasks Slack. Its sends you a reminder on a date that you set yourself.
• The telegram MUSIC bot or youtube bot helps you find music or video.
• In Facebook Messenger you can get CNN news via a personalised chatmessage. If I type 'discrimination' I get 3 articles (see image)
• The brain bot op Twitter. Answers every question by googling it. 

Why are chatbots interesting for learning professionals?
If you define learning broadly as "the process that leads to improvement in the capacity of people '(see Illeris) with a cognitive, emotional and social component you could say chatbots help you find the right information, and hence the cognitive component (think of the CNN bot helping you find articles). From a performance approach chatbots are very suitable for just-in-time support, such as help in dealing with a new tool. There is also a chatbot in Slack where you can ask questions about the working of Slack. Is it not the same as Googling? Then we come to the social component. Many companies invest in chat bots because messaging apps (like whatsapp) are currently used more than social networks. Messaging apps are used to enter directly in a conversation with someone. In that regard, chatbots are a more social form of googling. Chatbots are your new friend or colleagues on whatsapp or Slack.

Should I find an interest in chatbots as learning professional? 
The development of chat bots for learning purposes is still in its infancy stage. If you want to lead technological learning innovations you may experiment with it. Otherwise you can follow it from the sidewalk. Just the fact that I learned about chatbots made me see chatbots everywhere! It is true that there are still many concerns, like the quality, security and costs. That is also reflected in the video of Craig Taylor, the facilitator of the MOOC "learning beyond the next button" in which learned about chat bots.


A few examples of chatbots for learning in organizations
In this online MOOC we brainstormed and exchanged about applying chatbots in organizations. Some possibilities:

• Answering questions. Use a chatbot in the most frequently used IM tool in your organization to answer questions a routine sort of "Ask HR". Or "MOODLE chatbot". This ensures that HRD professionals can focus on interesting questions.
• Practice interpersonal skills with a chatbot. Similarly as practicing with the invisible boyfriend you could practice a difficult conversation with an office bot.
• Learning languages. This seems a very logical. Instead of conversation lessons, chatting for an hour with your chatbot. Duolingo is offering this.
• Curating content. A chatbot is curating a topic and can offer the most important questions.
• Provide feedback. Employees often need feedback. A good chatbot could also provide feedback. An example is the chatbot Your Face on Skype. It will ask you to upload your photo and get your feedback based on your photo. This feedback is not very high quality because I was told: "You're a 37.2-year-old woman You look remarkably cheerful.."

Eventually, you could analyze chats again to see patterns in the questions and conversations with bots. Another good read is chatbots for learning. I don't know how expensive it is to develop a chatbot. But as a start, you could, of course, examine the chat bots which already exist alert employees to the possibilities of using existing chatbot services supporting their practice.

Book instead of blogposts

My last blogpost is almost 4 months ago. I admire people like Richard Millington who blog faster than I can read.. The reason that I did not find the time to blog is that I have written a book with Sibrenne Wagenaar called 'Leren in tijden van tweets, apps en likes'. You can almost guess what it means: Learning in times of tweets, apps and likes (and yes we have driven our editor crazy with the amount of English terms in the book).

We have written for almost one and a half years. It was great fun to do, but it costs a lot of time, in addition to ordinary consultancies, our courses and private life. It was certainly a difficult book to write: more difficult than our previous book called 'En nu online'  which gave tips on how professionals, teams and organizations can use social media. Learning in times of tweets, likes and apps is more descriptive and examines the changes in society as a result of social technology and its impact on professionals, the opportunities for organizations and what this means for learning professionals. What I really liked is that we had a group of 20-25 people who wanted to think along for instance with a facebook exchange and/or reviewing the models.

Writing this book was almost like sculpting a model (which I did once). We started brainstorming and writing to reflect on the main themes. This was supplemented by interviews, reading and case studies. I guess we have rewritten each of the five sections at least eight times! In this blog I would like to share in a nutshell what the book (of 250 pages!) has brought me in terms of new insights:

• First, I got to love the term social technology. I want to use this more frequently and consistently. We started with Ennuonline almost 10 years ago talking about 'web2.0' then 'social media'. Followed by 'new media'. The beauty of the term social technology is that the word is social has return. That is our focus and passion. We are not experts in individual e-learning modules.
• Secondly, I like the distinction we started to make between different types of professionals: Knowmads, Googlers, Followers and Hobbyists while we started with the Knowmads as an ideal type. I have used this typology already in several sessions and it helps to see that not all professionals are the same. I think it is a good framework which I'm going to use in my future work. You can facilitate the groups in a different way. Informally we already did that, I believe, for example, by always look for the pioneers.

• I see more clearly or understand better why often the communications professionals and IT specialists are taking the lead concerning social technology within the organization. This is a huge frustration of mine. Many learning professionals do not yet have a social lens and have no affinity with technological developments. Despite the focus on 70-20-10! I think that learning professionals in the future will have a much higher involvement with social technology in the organization. I also understand that the technology has helped to put social learning into focus. When I started in 2005 with communities of practice, few organizations were interested. There is now much more buzz around learning in communities. 
• We distinguish different stages of how organizations embrace social technologies, for instance organizations focused on online and blended learning versus social learning. It is still a question of where we want to focus our advisory practice. On both? Or should we specialize? At least this justifies reviewing the websites and our learning trajectories. 
• Social Network Analysis is one of my passions, but I always felt it is an odd one out in my advisory practice. In the book I tried to find a place for it and found it. Doing SNA is a super important step in social learning. I'm looking for a situation where I may apply this in full. 
• The chapter about the future made me dive into developments like artificial intelligence, machine learning, experience API. Areas that I'm not an expert in and more importantly I don't have experience with. My conviction is that I like to talk and giving advice on things I have experienced, I'm not sure what to do with this. Or is it the doctor's case who doesn't need to have undergone malaria in order to treat it? 

Enough lessons to justify writing 1.5 years? One way you can help is responding whether you think we should translate this book in English or not and what may be creative ideas of translating it, for instance by crowdfunding or crowdsourcing.