Since the arrival of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E in late 2022, companies in a wide range of industries have explored ways to use AI to increase employee productivity and optimize performance. Recent research from economists at the University of Chicago found that half of the workers they surveyed (100,000 in total) have used ChatGPT, including 65% of marketing professionals, 63% of software developers, and 55% of IT support staff. As the technology matures, and as companies spend more time applying generative AI to their workflows, we expect to see some of these initial experiments mature into standard practices.
One area where AI is poised to have a long-term impact is employee training. In everything from corporate values to safety procedures to sales and marketing messages, companies have to be able to deliver consistent, effective, and engaging training materials.
The vast majority of organizations rely on video content for their employee training. According to Training Magazine’s 2023 Industry Report, 89% of organizations use learning management systems (LMS) to organize content for their employees, while 85% use virtual broadcasting/webcasting/video broadcasting. Looking forward, AI will fundamentally change how companies use these LMS and video broadcasting tools for learning and development — allowing them to drive more value and improve training outcomes.
Here’s how AI will reshape the environment for employee training.
Leveraging AI’s strengths
The promise of generative AI has been to make employees more productive, allowing them to automate repetitive tasks and focus instead on high-value work that can only be performed by humans. According to the research mentioned above from the University of Chicago, survey respondents believe that ChatGPT can halve the amount of time it takes them to conduct 31% of their job tasks.
Why is generative AI so good at driving productivity? Tools like ChatGPT excel at making sense of enormous amounts of information — datasets that would otherwise be impossible for humans to parse through. Generative AI — and the large language models (LLMs) that support it — can generate digestible summaries of massive catalogs of text. These summaries allow humans to gather insights in a matter of seconds, as opposed to the hours of research it would have taken previously.
These capabilities can now be layered on top of video content. Generative AI tools can sift through transcripts from thousands of hours of video materials, allowing users to save time by finding and focusing on the information that is relevant to them.
Driving more value from measurement and reporting
For HR leaders and others responsible for training, it isn’t enough to provide employees with access to learning materials — they must also be able to track, measure, and report on progress. In some cases, training is a requirement for compliance with laws and regulations. In other cases, measurement allows managers to identify which of their materials are most effective and driving the most employee engagement.
Tools like Vimeo’s auto-transcription make video libraries understandable to AI, enabling the tools to understand which employees have seen which materials — not just the titles and tags of a video, but the complete text included within. Generative AI can help managers by producing summaries on which employees have completed which training. And in the event that an employee falls behind, AI tools can generate shorter versions of existing content to help them get back on track. Vimeo’s AI highlight reels can quickly boil down hour-long videos into short, easily digestible snippets — making it much less daunting and time-intensive to catch up on required training materials.
Quickly and easily updating materials
Company training materials aren’t static. As an organization introduces new products and features, launches new marketing campaigns, and expands into new areas, it must be able to incorporate that new information into its existing training catalog. Previously, this could add up to a lengthy process: organizational leaders identify the need for new training materials; spend time and resources to draft, produce, edit, and distribute the videos; and reorganize their curriculum to ensure the right employees are given the right information.
AI tightens that production loop, and in the future, generative AI tools will likely be able to create updated training materials without a human employee having to ask for them. How? AI can assimilate new data from the organization — from transcriptions of sales recordings to new marketing collateral to updated security policies — making it possible to update existing training materials to reflect the new information.
Vimeo AI supports text-based editing of video materials, allowing users to change or delete text from a given video’s auto-transcription and updating the video immediately — without requiring any manual editing. In the future, this capability will allow users to edit videos to include new or updated information, ensuring that employees are always up to date with the right material.
In the future, AI will allow companies to optimize their training content by generating multiple versions of the same material and then conducting tests to refine the video for best results. Individual users can already use features like Vimeo’s Ask AI to ask questions about the information contained in a specific video — Vimeo’s AI sifts through the content to find the relevant answer and takes the viewer to that point in the video, as well as surfacing a text-based answer. Over time, AI will continuously optimize the training information for the best results; when an employee asks a question of the video, they won’t just be given an answer, they’ll be given the best answer as proven by the company’s own data and testing.
To learn more about the features already changing employee training videos, visit the Vimeo AI page.
