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Artificial intelligence has been front of mind for virtually everyone of late, and with good reason. OpenAI’s ChatGPT took the Internet by storm last year, and ever since we’ve seen both hobbyists and professionals come up with a host of new and exciting use cases for it.
Not surprisingly, training — both employee education and customer onboarding — has quickly become a top use case.
Most media talking about ChatGPT simply refers to it as a chatbot. While that’s not necessarily untrue, it also doesn’t really give the tool enough credit. ChatGPT is actually a sophisticated conversational AI built on the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer language model.
The data on which this language model was trained includes blog posts, wiki articles, journalistic publications, eBooks, social networks, and more. Although OpenAI continues to release new iterations of GPT, this training will conclude in 2021. Today, ChatGPT continues to learn through its interactions with users.
Instructor-led training, whether virtual or in-person, is invaluable, and should be a part of every organization’s training strategy. At the same time, self-paced training has its own benefits, including greater flexibility and improved personalization. Most training should incorporate both approaches to some extent.
But what exactly does any of this have to do with ChatGPT? Quite a bit. But before we get into the benefits of using ChatGPT in your training, there’s one thing we should make clear.
ChatGPT is not a replacement for human instructors, nor should your organization lean on it for every facet of training — we’ll let the chatbot speak for itself:
There are many advantages to using ChatGPT in your corporate training, though a premium subscription is generally required to make the most of the platform.
Unsurprisingly, there are many ways corporate L&D professionals can leverage ChatGPT. The best examples are listed below.
By combining ChatGPT with your organization’s Learning Management System and training tools, you can make it far easier for your instructors to both predict and respond to the unique learning needs of each trainee. ChatGPT’s natural language processing capabilities make it very well-suited for identifying and extracting training content.
Bear in mind, however, that you will need humans to guide this process for two reasons.
First, ChatGPT still suffers from hallucinations. Basically, this means that it will occasionally generate results that are either factually incorrect or unrelated to the context of a prompt. You’ll need human experts to verify ChatGPT’s outputs.
Second, ChatGPT doesn’t really understand how to generate courses on its own. It can provide a raw framework, sure. But you’ll need flesh-and-blood instructors to refine that framework into actual education.
People aren’t perfect. They get tired, they get frustrated, and they make mistakes. Artificial intelligence doesn’t suffer from these shortcomings.
For that reason alone, having ChatGPT standing by to answer questions posed by trainees can go a long way towards reducing instructor workload. Additionally, ChatGPT can potentially help address errors and biases in training and onboarding if trained to recognize certain patterns. Again, however, there’s a caveat — you cannot afford to rely too much on ChatGPT, nor should you forgo your own error checking.
ChatGPT cannot fully eliminate human bias, nor is it immune to bias itself. Recall the data on which the GPT natural language model was trained. Content pulled from all corners of the Internet, laden with its own biases and shortfalls.
Again, ChatGPT itself put it best:
If your organization is anything like most, your instructors likely dedicate an inordinate amount of time to administrative busywork such as scheduling and logistics. Believe it or not, this is another area where ChatGPT demonstrates value. We already touched on how it can answer basic and common questions related to your training and how it can support continuous learning through data collection.
Did you know that it can also schedule events, manage user registration and sign up, and organize user data? Depending on how you integrate it and what tools you integrate with, it can basically function as an administrative assistant for your instructors. Using it in this way means your trainers are free to focus on designing the best lesson plans possible — and that they have more time to do so.
We’ve mentioned Microlearning in the past as one of several trends reshaping the future of virtual training. In case you’ve not heard of it, the concept is fairly simple. Instead of presenting training as a monolithic series of scheduled courses, it keeps your training bite-sized.
Employees can learn things bit by bit instead of being flooded with new information all at once. ChatGPT can support this approach in a few ways:
While it’s true that ChatGPT is not well-suited to generating entire learning programs, that doesn’t mean it can’t independently create any training content. Provided you acknowledge its limitations, you can use it to create invaluable supplementary content for your training, including:
Answers to frequently-asked questions, comments, or concerns.
Developing topics and winding those topics out into summaries, comparisons, evaluations and more.
Provided you’re using ChatGPT in tandem with training for your developers, the chatbot can translate complex development tasks into different programming languages on command.
Simulated conversations and scenarios to help employees practice their skills and put their problem-solving abilities to the test.
Personalized feedback, recommendations, and advice for both instructors and employees.
ChatGPT can act as something of a pseudo trainer, responding to trainee queries and concerns in real-time. This makes it an ideal choice for self-paced training, as it ensures learners will still have access to an organization’s expertise and knowledge base even outside of regular office hours. It can also help your organization improve the integrity of its training data by consolidating and curating information about your training.
In order to maximize the effectiveness of ChatGPT, there are a few things you should keep in mind:
We asked ChatGPT for a few prompts you can use to start preparing it to help with interviews and onboarding.
Today’s blog post primarily focused on the applications of ChatGPT in learning and development. If you’re looking for a more general thought piece on ChatGPT’s role within the software as a service (SaaS) market, we published a blog on that topic, as well. Check out ChatGPT for SaaS Sales: 5 Ways Your Team Can Use ChatGPT to Convert to learn: