AI is changing how employees train—and starting to reduce how much training they need

Proficiency with AI tools has quickly become a top skill, and companies are working to train their employees how to use it. At the same time, AI is also emerging as a useful training tool in its own right.

Across industries, AI is helping companies create training materials faster and more efficiently, as well as allowing them to design new, more interactive methods to train workers. Artificial intelligence technology is also enabling a shift toward on-the-job instruction that can guide employees in real time. The benefits can be wide-ranging, from massive cost savings for the companies to providing a safer place to simulate tasks in which the cost of an error could be severe.

Creating training content just got easier.  BSH Home Appliances, a subset of the multinational technology Bosch Group, has been using an AI-generated video platform called Synthesia to create material ranging from compliance trainings to technical trainings. The platform allows users to quickly generate videos from prompts or documents and include generic avatars in their videos or even AI avatars of themselves. The videos can range from two minutes to 45 minutes, and the company has been significantly scaling its use of the platform after seeing a 70% cost savings in external video production.

Welcome to the simulation.  Sometimes, watching a video isn’t enough. That’s where simulation-style training comes into play.   For example, researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, and software company Robust AI have developed an AI-powered program to teach and simulate the basic tenets of laparoscopic surgery. Using the actual tools used in surgery, medical students complete exercises to transfer rings between pegs without dropping them and within short time constraints, mimicking the delicate movements surgeons need to complete with swift precision.  A recent study from this year showed the program is as good and even slightly better than faculty human evaluators when rating surgical skills. Currently, students are using the program informally, but it is headed to become an official part of the curriculum. Since surgical training involves significant oversight and input from senior surgeons who are typically already inundated with responsibilities, and since mistakes come with significant costs, improvements that allow students to do more realistic training in lower-pressure settings have enormous potential.  Benefits of improved AI-enabled simulation-style training stretch beyond the operating room, however.

The pursuit of real-time training.  Thanks to AI, Strivr is also making progress on its next frontier: augmented-reality-powered experiences that guide workers in real time and connect them to information they need while performing a job. The company is working with 10 design partners to build out early versions of its platform for real-time guidance, called WorkWise.  “The end result of all of this is going to be someone—let’s just say a warehouse worker—putting packages on a truck. They’re going to be wearing smart glasses, and the glasses are going to be telling them what to do in real time. This is kind of ironic, given what we’ve been doing for the last 10 years, but you’re probably not going to have to train people, or you’re going to significantly reduce the amount of training time required,” says Belch.