Business education has a fundamental problem. It can change people’s careers if they commit to it … but most of us don’t want to sit down and take a course. Most people I know would rather go to happy hour / watch Netflix / read a book / play with their kids than spend their free time upskilling (and fair - I would too).

In the last 20 years, platforms like LinkedIn Learning have solved for scale and low cost in biz ed. But no one has truly solved for engagement and completion. Only 2% of the people with access to LinkedIn Learning actually use it.

A big part of the problem: Mass market education is hard to personalize to the student. We know students who are tutored 1:1 perform 98% better than those who aren’t. Benjamin Bloom proved it 40 years ago. But tutoring is expensive and really hard to scale – and the solutions we’ve tried (hiring fleets of TAs to provide personalized feedback) simply cost too much.

I believe AI will change all of this.

In the next few years, I think AI will provide a solution to the most consistent requests we get from our students – things we’ve never been able to solve for before. Things like:

• Give me in-depth feedback on my assignments
• Make this content personalized to my role, function, company, and industry
• Update this content every week to reflect the latest news/development/trend

We’re in the final stages of building an AI coach to guide students through our courses. It can personalize course content to your industry and role, it can focus your course project on challenges you actually face at work, and it can give you objective feedback and answer any questions you have about what you’re learning.

This is the future of learning – no more static, “one size fits all” courses, but a personalized, evolving experience powered by AI. Let me walk you through it.

(P.S. If you’re a training leader who wants to power your training with AI, get in touch. I’d love to talk about working together.)

Introducing our AI coach: ProfAI

ProfAI is a platform that takes our existing course content (in this case, the AI Crash Course with instructor Ed Ortega) and adds a 24/7 “coach” that personalizes each lesson.

Instead of taking the professor’s insights and applying them on your own, ProfAI guides you through them. Students can ask ProfAI questions about the material, in real-time, 24/7.

Let’s say you’re a mid-level content marketer in Germany working on a new shoe brand – ProfAI customize the content for that specific use case. It can also share relevant case studies so you can understand what you’re learning in the context of what you do, or answer questions through the lens of your industry or role.

A few of the coolest features (in my opinion):

– Personalized goal setting. When you start a course, ProfAI asks you to set a goal for what you’d like to get out of it, and then you work together to make progress against that goal. It can also tailor the course material and examples for you, based on that goal.

‍– Feedback on your work. ProfAI will prompt you to create your course assignment step-by-step and give you feedback as you go. It’s similar to working with a TA on a project, but on your own time and in your own way. This means the output you create will already be vetted and improved by ProfAI, before you even turn in your assignment.

– Translated into any language. Right now ProfAI works in English, Spanish, and Japanese, but more languages are coming soon. Let us know if there’s one you really think we should have.

What’s promising / what still needs work

The biggest challenge anyone building with AI faces right now is that AI isn’t predictable. The product can work great one day, and poorly the next as AI models change and improve.

Here are some of the breakthroughs that have been really promising to us.

• ProfAI demonstrates real mastery of the course concepts in our training data. Even more impressive, this mastery hasn’t declined as AI brainstorms beyond our training data set and brings examples in from its broader knowledge base.
  
  
• How much better the experience is when it’s in one place. With ProfAI, there’s no more shifting from watching a video in Member Center to completing your project in a Google Doc to submitting your project in Typeform.
  
  
• The capabilities and promise of the project builder. When we demo ProfAI, we get head nods when we show its ability to answer user questions. Their eyes light up when we show them the project builder, and ProfAI’s ability not just to react to the student’s prompts, but to proactively prompt the student.

At the same time, ProfAI doesn’t work 100% of the time, and it’s prone to weird answers and seemingly random bugs – even when we don’t make changes on our back end. Here’s what’s been harder than we anticipated.

• Proactive personalization. If the user asks a question like “give me three examples of a vision statement for a small DTC shoe retailer,” ProfAI is pretty strong. But we’re still figuring out how to proactively personalize the experience based on the user’s profile information, without the user having to ask. This is both an AI and a UI challenge.
  
  
• Enabling ProfAI to scale to hundreds of courses while still accounting for differences in each course. We’ve designed ProfAI to provide the same amount of guidance for all our courses as three different AI assistants – but not every course project looks the same, so there will be nuances in what ProfAI is expected to do.
  
  
• Getting the same results from the OpenAI API as we do from ChatGPT. AI is amazing at providing personalized, strong business feedback. We know this from uploading documents into Claude and ChatGPT and asking for executive critiques. But getting the same level of quality and personalization has been harder than anticipated when working with the API and many courses at scale.

What’s next?

We’re currently partnering with our TAs to QA ProfAI for 10 of our courses, and ProfAI will roll out in beta for those 10 courses later this summer. We’ll give you another shout once it’s ready.

If we need to retool anything, we will, but we plan to offer every course with the ProfAI coach by 2025. It will be the same courses and content you love – but with a coach who can personalize the learnings to you.

I know that Gen AI is over-hyped, and promises of an AI doctor or teacher on every phone are years – maybe decades – away. But effective AI-powered coaches like ProfAI are just months away.

I can’t wait to get ProfAI in your hands and get your feedback. Email me at greg@sectionschool.com.

Let’s go.

- Greg

P.S. This is available for your enterprise learning, too

Because we know our Section students will get a ton of value out of ProfAI, we know companies who run internal training, upskilling, and development programs will also.

So we’re going to make ProfAI as a platform available to learning leaders who want to create a personalized learning experience with their own training materials, too. You can learn more about that here and join our waitlist to try it with your own courses and your own teams once it’s available.