Here at Thrive, we've recently launched our Winter Release: A brand new set of AI features designed to elevate your learning, automate your admin tasks, and connect your learners more seamlessly than ever before – so we thought we’d take this opportunity to show you five easy ways you can level up your learning strategy with the use of AI.

Use of AI has skyrocketed over the last year, and the technology is evolving at such a rapid pace it feels hard to keep up. In a 2024 survey conducted by McKinsey, it was found that 65% of respondents’ organisations were regularly using Gen AI – almost double the percentage from the same survey just ten months prior. Not to mention, CIPD specifically polled L&D professionals in 2023 and found that only 5% of them were planning to adopt AI.

It’s clear that this trepidation has now mostly dissipated, as AI evolves from the intimidating new technology touted by a few shiny-haired, Californian tech bros to an everyday tool used by the majority of organisations across the world.

As our comfort with this tool grows, so too does the opportunity for different applications of the tool for learning. Read on for five actionable tips.

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Personalised learning

One of the best and most useful ways to bring AI into L&D is through personalisation.

Personalisation is undisputedly one of the key pillars of effective learning – an assertion that’s handily backed up by data. This meta analysis published in Springer Link found that technology-facilitated personalised learning significantly improved learning outcomes when compared to traditional methods, which is no surprise to us. Acknowledging that everyone takes information in differently and has their own unique needs is absolutely crucial if you want your learning to land.

So, where does AI fit in?

Through the use of Artificial Intelligence, some of the guesswork is taken out of the personalisation process for you. If your LMS is equipped with AI personalisation functionality, it can observe your learners’ behaviours, needs, interests and areas for improvement before crafting a personalised learning journey just for them. This journey will take them through exactly which skills and knowledge they need to build in order to achieve their goals.

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Content curation

While we don’t want to advocate for 100% automation over human creativity in learning design, it’s undeniable that AI-powered content curation can conserve countless, precious L&D hours – while still making use of that human touch.

By using AI Content Curation Tools, you can take all the brilliant ideas out of your head and see them realised in record time and through just a few clicks. Gone are the days of spending a week on the process of identifying a gap or need, researching resources to support it, designing the learning, and uploading it to your learning platform. AI cuts that process down exponentially, so that all you need to do is bring your ideas to the Content Curation Tool and ask it to create relevant content for you through the use of simple, straightforward prompts.

What you’re left with is content that is curated through human creativity and automation, offering the best of both worlds to your learners and saving you time in the process.

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AI communication tools

AI communication tools can take a few different forms.

You may have read our blog earlier this year titled Is Linkedin’s AI coach up to the task? in which we explored the fascinating new use of AI technology in career and job role coaching. (And LinkedIn is far from the first company to launch such a product, with tools like Synthesia and CoachHub already on the market.)

What we established while writing that blog was that (a) coaching is an invaluable service to provide to your employees throughout their career, and (b) while an AI coach saves time and money, it’s not without its drawbacks. The idea of bias in AI has already been widely explored, and AI coaches are far from exempt. When an AI coach is trained on potentially biased data, this can negatively affect the advice it produces and therefore hinder the learner.

It also undeniably lacks the “human touch” that makes traditional career coaching so useful and nurturing for your employees. You could posit that coaching is an inherently human task, and one that AI can’t fulfil to the same standard. What you decide to do with this issue is up to you – but perhaps an AI coach is a better option than none at all.

Another application of AI communication tools in L&D, and one that we believe is more straightforwardly useful, is that of AI Chatbots. This is something that we’ve recently launched here at Thrive in the form of a WhatsApp AI Assistant. As an L&D professional – or really, anyone in a management position – you’ll be well aware of the hours you can spend digging through your training resources to find one piece of relevant information for someone.

An AI Chatbot like Thrive’s WhatsApp Assistant instantly cuts through the noise, and surfaces the required information in seconds – so that neither you, nor your learners, need to waste time looking for it.

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Data and analytics

AI can also work behind the scenes to give L&D professionals a better idea of what’s already working and where they could improve.

A learning platform with data and analytics functionality enabled allows you to take a bird’s-eye-view of your learner’s behaviour. You’ll see everything from when they access the platform, for how long, and which pieces of content they’re engaging with. In turn, this allows you as an L&D professional to continually refine and adapt your strategy, producing content that makes the biggest possible impact to the widest possible audience.

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Collaboration

Collaboration is another essential element of a good L&D strategy, rooted in the theory of Social Learning and the idea that people can find great success by learning from their peers. To collaborate efficiently and well, you need to be using your time wisely – and AI can help with that.

AI tools can supercharge this aspect of your strategy, allowing your people to collaborate with one another in a way that feels second-nature, seamless and fun. Here are a few examples of AI collaboration tools that will help your people reach their goals:

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Taskade

This AI workflow tool can automate tasks, generate workflows, and serve as an assistant delivering crucial information about your team’s projects. It can also summarise notes and create action items, to help your people collaborate quickly and easily.

Scribe

Scribe cuts down on training hours by automatically generating step-by-step guides for your company’s processes. Via a simple web plugin, the tool captures the process as you go through it and creates a step-by-step instruction manual. No longer will you have to stoop over your teammate’s shoulder, or take screenshots of your computer. Just undertake the process as you usually would, and Scribe will do the rest.

Magical

Magical is an AI writing assistant that automates the “boring bits” of a lot of roles by allowing you to auto-draft messages. It adapts to your writing style, absorbs the context of the conversation, and creates a response in one click.

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Thanks for reading this guide to 5 ways you can use AI in L&D.

We hope you’ve discovered some new tools to make your learning as efficient and impactful as possible. As mentioned at the beginning, we’ve recently launched our biggest ever feature release to help you do just that – so click here to browse the details of our latest Winter Release powered by AI.

From our AI content creator, to AI chatbot and search, admin automation and more, this new suite of features takes your learning strategy to the next level.

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