Harnessing AI for Learning: A Conversation with Eric Zenor on Transforming Organizations with AI-Powered Knowledge Systems

My guest on this episode is Eric Zenor, a learning and development expert and consultant with over 35 years focused on educational technology.  Eric shares his wealth of experience working with integrating AI into the learning and development space.  He shares the complexity of leveraging AI and the complexity of understanding and using AI and how it is rapidly changing the landscape of not just learning and development, but organizations in general.  He shares how AI can be an accelerator and is enabling organizations to move into the space of being learning organizations. One great example Eric discusses is the potential of AI to access and organize corporate knowledge from various sources. He explains how AI can easily codify explicit knowledge from documents, databases, and guidelines, but also go beyond by making sense of implicit knowledge from meeting recordings, emails, and chats. AI can identify patterns from these data and even infer tacit knowledge based on personal experiences, insights, and intuition. This combined knowledge can then be made accessible to employees based on their roles and needs. Zenor further describes a hybrid model, known as retrieval automated generation (RAG) architecture, which connects different systems to access and utilize this knowledge. If you want to learn more about Eric’s work and AI, check out his company, Epam, which is one of the market leaders in AI architecture, and their website has tons of information on those accelerators that he discusses in the podcast.