Yes, AI Can Improve The Performance Of Companies While Promoting The Fulfillment Of Their Teams

To do so, organizations of all sizes must focus on their training practices.

The story is as touching as it is impressive.

When the Taliban took control of her city and prevented her, like all young girls, from going to school, Sultana rebelled in her own way. She enrolled in the Khan Academy, a non-profit organization created by Sal Khan to provide free online education to students around the world. Sultana self-educated herself for eight years, studying subjects such as English, mathematics, physics, and astrophysics. She realized that she was learning more than her brothers in the Taliban-controlled school. She lied to her parents and traveled to Pakistan to take the SAT, the standardized test for admission to American universities, which was not accessible in Afghanistan. She then obtained a visa to study in the United States, where the University of Arizona welcomed her based solely on her SAT test and years of online learning. Today, she is a member of the quantum computing research faculty at Tufts University.

Sultana’s story highlights two realities: The unquenchable thirst of human beings for knowledge and the potential of digital technologies to satisfy it. This is where generative artificial intelligence comes into play. Its potential for education, for all the Sultanas of the world, and for training, for all employees, is unprecedented and limitless.

Indeed, chatbots such as ChatGPT (OpenAI) or Claude (Anthropic) can become individual and personalized tutors. As a result, every person, whether a student or an employee, can receive an education worthy of emperors. Every young person can evolve at their own pace and/or, like Sultana, access instruction beyond their reach. Every adult can specialize or retrain at will and at a cost that their employer will never consider prohibitive.

One of the added values of artificial intelligence in this context is its ability to act more or less like a Socratic tutor. I mentioned the Khan Academy at the beginning of this article because it is a pioneer in using generative AI for educational purposes. It has developed, in collaboration with OpenAI, the chatbot Khanmigo which prefigures the future of education.

When a student asks Khanmigo for the solution to a problem, it does not give it directly but presents steps for the student to figure it out on their own, potentially giving them clues. Better still, Khanmigo strives to understand the motivations of the student to offer the learning method that best suits their personality and interests. For example, if a student is more passionate about football than mathematics, Khanmigo will propose algebra or geometry exercises applied to the sport. Khanmigo can also debate with the student, allowing them to test arguments, even against historical figures temporarily embodied by the chatbot. Currently, the interaction with the AI is through a text-based interface using natural language. It can be assumed that in the future, this interaction will happen even more naturally through voice.

Thus, each person can have a tutor whose knowledge is as infinite as their patience, and who is entirely dedicated to their success, always ready to help and never overly critical. Incidentally, those last two aspects are far from secondary: A (rather old) study conducted by a team from the University of Southern California showed that patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder shared more information with digital avatars than with human therapists because the avatars were more patient and less judgmental.

The conditions are therefore being set for professional training to experience exponential improvements in its services to employees whose employers will be willing to completely rethink their human resources policies and programs. In this case, the interests of companies and their employees converge, which will not always be the case with artificial intelligence: In terms of training, it offers the former increased performance and the latter prolonged professional relevance and guaranteed cognitive fulfillment.