Name: Smarter Learning Investments: How AI Maximizes Content Return on Investment (ROI)
Uploaded: 2026-01-15T20:30:17.860Z
Duration: 37 min 45 s
Description: Smarter Learning Investments: How AI Maximizes Content Return on Investment (ROI)

Transcript for "Smarter Learning Investments: How AI Maximizes Content Return on Investment (ROI)": Well, wherever you're calling in from, we're so happy to have you here with us today. We'll go ahead and get started. We have a great session for you today where we'll be discussing where how AI maximizes the return of investment on or ROI for learning content. This is the first session in a new series that we're calling the learning breakroom. So we're excited to be kicking that off with you today. To give you a little bit of background on what the learning breakroom is, this is a new series that's meant to be a break in your day, a chance for you to recharge. Maybe you grab a cup of coffee or tea or a snack and join us for conversations around topics like AI, modern content strategies, and tips for measuring ROI. So when you join this series, you'll be surrounded by your peers, everyone that you're seeing in the chat right now. And you'll hear some fresh perspectives as well as walking away with some ready to use tactics to make L and D programs smarter, more engaging, and impactful. So we'll share what's coming next in this series a bit later on. But as I mentioned, today's topic specifically is Smarter Learning Investments, How AI Maximizes Content ROI. And before I hand it over to today's speakers, I will just cover a few quick housekeeping things. Any troubleshooting items, I'll actually just put in the chat to save some time or help anyone who may not be able to hear us at the moment if you're having audio issues. But all attendees will be muted and off camera for today's session. We do want today's session to be very engaging so that you can learn from each other. So please do engage in that chat and also participate in today's polls. And we encourage you to submit your questions as they come up throughout session. So we don't want you to forget a question that you have. Please put them in the Q and A window, and we'll have some time dedicated at the end to get to them. And then finally, the slides and the recording will be shared in the follow-up email, so you'll get access to that after the session. And with that, I will pass it over to Beth and Natalie, and they're going to introduce themselves and kick things off. Thanks, Jenny, Kate. Happy New Year, everybody. Glad to be with you today. My name is Beth Noble. I am the RVP of our content solution here at Cornerstone. I've been with Cornerstone about a year and a half. As I put in the chat, I'm based out of Seattle. We do not have 15 inches of snow, maybe, thankfully. And I've been in the this broader space of learning technology for twenty five years. Spent a lot of time actually working with various learning and learning content partners. So I'm very, again, familiar with the space and looking forward to today's discussion with Natalie. So I'll turn it over to Natalie for an intro. Terrific. Thanks, Beth. Hi. My name is Natalie Augustin. I have been with Cornerstone for about seven years. But prior to coming to Cornerstone, I was a customer of Cornerstone. I spent thirty five years on Wall Street running large training and development organizations, linking initiatives to business imperatives. What my role here is is to kind of help to identify what we've got and how our customers are using content. And so again, that's where my background is. So looking forward to the chat. Lots of good info to come. So thanks so much. Thanks, Natalie. I appreciate certainly having Natalie's practical experience to apply into the discussion today. So from an agenda perspective, as Natalie and I were talking about this webinar, we really felt like this is an ideal time to look at this question of ROI. And in particular, you know, personally, a lot of people are setting their goals for the year. As a side note, I did learn the state of Washington has the highest percentage of people that actually fulfill their New Year's resolutions. So we'll see if maybe some of the new goals that are set today around ROI and measuring the programs our programs will also be fulfilled. So that'd be maybe one of our lofty goals for today. But we're gonna start off in just sort of taking a little bit of a look at how are people either historically or currently looking at measuring ROI and learning, suspect that these are strategies many of you are already using today. And then we'll talk about what are some of the things that are disrupting it and bringing in some, change in how people are considering, ROI. It might give you all some ideas that you can implement within your own organization. And, specifically, obviously, calling out the elephant in the room, which is what is that impact that AI is having specific to l and d and this investment in content content solutions. And we'll do some wrap up and conclusion there at the at the end. So before we get sort of step into that historical look back on how people are measuring ROI, I I was curious, you know, when you all thought about attending this session and when you think about this ROI question, do you does it emit a response of, no problem. I've got this, or wow. I I'm not really sure where to go. So if you would like to share, feel free to just drop a note in the chat. Natalie will take a look at it. And if there's any particular questions that was prompting you to join us today, we'd we'd love to hear that there too. So feel free to add those into the into the chat. But when we think about the this historical question of, you know, why is ROI so critical? Again, I I'm sure these are all concepts that you all are already embracing, but, you know, really looking at what's the justification of an investment. And this is really true for any investment within an organization. It's really about providing that concrete evidence of a learning program's value back to your stakeholders, whether that is lines of business that you're working with, whether it's, the executive team. But making sure that, again, the justification for the investment that not only helps to secure the budget that you've got today, but any future funding that you might be might be requesting. Second of all is measuring that impact. And this is the piece that I think, again, really challenging for us to identify. How are we gonna measure the fact that this investment we made in x actually moved the needle towards our goal, which is y? So, again, looking at how that can be quantified, how we can measure it, and get agreement from our stakeholders on how we are going about to, provide that measurement. Right? What's the data that we're going to use? And the third piece there that often can come up is, around benchmarking. So if organizations are particularly concerned with how are we doing compared to other organizations, either in our industry, maybe similar size. It might be in our geographical region so that, again, we can show that we're moving the needle maybe at a better pace than than, again, another organization that we've selected to benchmark against. So these are sort of three key components that are really highlighting, you know, why ROI is so important, and it is supporting, our our case, our justification as a as a LMD part of the organization. The, general, like, historical ROI equation, if we really wanted to kinda put our math class hat on, of how people have come up with and sort of that that bottom line result is traditional ROI is looking at what's that value gain from whatever investment we made. In this case, we're talking about, maybe a external content investment, subtracted by the cost, divided by the cost and times 100. That's how you can actually get to a, you know, percentage difference ROI, that would really probably speak to the the CFO of the organization. And so, again, the we've actually as an organization, we've written an ebook, about this sort of, you know, historical way that, organizations are determining that ROI. This, QR code will bring you to that. We'll provide you some information, as a follow on as well. So, again, this is one way that organizations, again, still today, are utilizing to measure that ROI equation. And so if we look at what are some of the changes now that are coming up that might push us to think about that legacy ROI equation a little differently? And, again, maybe in the chat, you wanna add in what are some of the specific ROI questions that you're being asked from your leadership, or what's the language that they're using that might be different from what you have seen in past years. So, again, look forward to seeing if anybody has some specific questions that they're being asked that maybe has prompted them to join the conversation today. But I think a couple of the factors that are really fueling, this change is, one, we're all reading about this urgency, around importance of upskilling and reskilling the workforce. In fact, I would say we're we're seeing and hearing from our customers that l and d is sitting at this intersection of, you know, the the critical importance of adopting AI to increase our efficiency, and of our organizations, of how we can, again, do do more or be able to leverage AI for some some parts of our roles so that we can do more strategic things. And, again, l and d is really sitting at that that Cornerstone, pun intended, because of the fact that it is an upskilling challenge. But we're doing that and have to, sort of find that path forward while we're still facing tightening budgets. Right? L and D is under pressure to really prove our value and how we're tying it back to the bottom line. But, again, it's not just about necessarily measuring historical employee satisfaction or their engagement. It's about how we're really able to measure that back to business outcomes. So the pressure to reskill is certainly there. In fact, I know in a recent talk, I heard Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, and really highlighting that the real limitation around AI progress and adoption is is about a deficit in the human skills and our organizational adoption. So, again, that's highlighting how this is a huge opportunity for L and D to lead the way and to step into that role of how can we start to incorporate the, adoption of AI maybe into that measurement of the success of of our programs. Some of the specific sort of changes that we're seeing and and are affecting a lot of the customers that we interact with on a regular basis, I put these into a couple of different buckets. First is the sort of hyper personalization that's really has the opportunity to increase effectiveness. So AI presents this opportunity to customize content to the needs or the skills, the pace of each individual employee. Right? So they can get this targeted approach that's gonna improve the potential learning outcomes that they get, ensuring employees have, you know, spent less time on irrelevant material and a lot more time acquiring the valuable skills that they need. It's gonna accelerate that time to competency, boosting productivity. So that is, again, one great opportunity for l and d to have a significant impact. Second, for a general area is around content creation. You know, historically, really, creation was housed within L and D. But as there are lower cost AI, enabled tools coming into the market that can not only quickly produce, learning materials, quizzes, summaries, documents, etcetera, but also putting those tools in the hands of maybe subject matter experts that sit in the business. And that's freeing up time of the core L and D leaders to work on more strategic initiatives. So sort of changing that equation of content creation, again, getting out more into the business so that, again, we can be focusing more on some, higher impact, type of results. And third, I If I can, Beth, I'm just going to jump in. There's been a couple of good questions and some comments in the chat really around a lot of these changing impacts on L and D. You know, one of the questions is how is the implementation of AI software cutting L and D operational costs? And I think you're seeing that in efficiencies across the board, right? So how are the processes that you have in place today are now a lot of that can be done by using AI tools and freeing up resources to really kind of focus on other things. There's also some really good questions about this idea of aligning ROI for learning to the ROI of the business, and that's really the key. Ultimately, you've got one of the most important things you can do is to prove your value, you and your team and the work that you're doing, the value to the business. So it's aligning things from a very different You might look at it from a different perspective. So it's not just how many, and we talk about this in a couple slides, but not just how many people have taken a course or how much time has been spent in learning. But what you might really want to think about is how you're aligning those skills that are being developed that support the business imperative that you're measuring against. So really aligning those skills and how those are progressing, so how many people have done that, have done a certain thing is really helpful. And we didn't do that before. We measured L and D before on the click the box, right? How many people took a course? How much time was spent doing that? Mhmm. Things like that. We really need to think outside the box a little bit when we're aligning to business objectives now. Yeah. I think, that's a great point. Thanks for, bringing up what's, going on in the chat, Natalie. And, yeah, that smarter analytics. Like, how do we use, again, AI as a way to sort of change our thinking there instead of that historical view of and everybody did this. Right? Completion data, maybe, progress from pre to post test within a course. You know, how do we really look at maybe elongating that out, the impact of, yes. I took this, learning intervention, and now I'm looking at three, six months later. Have I still retained that? Are we seeing a difference in my performance, right, in the way that I am able to, be reskilled into this new role that I might have to go in or an adaptive role going forward? We've even heard I I know Natalie and I listened to some podcasts in advance of this, and she'll be talking about that later. But it's, you know, looking at how do we measure people's curiosity? Like, are they leaning in and showing engagement with a lot of the new tools that are available that just speak to a change in company culture and the adoption of a lot of these tools? The the last piece I was gonna touch on just here is around, again, adaptive learning. So we've also seen a lot of exploration in the use of learning events that actually adapt while you are interacting with them. So this could be something like a AI driven coaching tool. It could be, you know, kind of a more traditional course, but that adapts based on how you are progressing within within the course. That's gonna change that equation of, you know, kind of time spent being an indicator because then it's really maybe it's a less time in the training would show, a greater output because it shows that people are getting right with, you know, what they need, just the the content that they need in order to continue to advance in their role and the and the skills that they need. A lot of this we talk about in that white paper that we provide the QR code for, you know, a general framework for measuring ROI, which even as these new elements come into play, still stands true. So kinda starting with establishing that agreed upon baseline with your stakeholders, talking about that alignment to business and objectives. And I know a number of people brought this up in the chat. Natalie, you were just speaking to it as well. So that importance of understanding, what are our key business objectives that we are, again, trying to point to? And then once we have that, then we can decide what are the metrics that we're going to use to be able to measure back to it and and finally then identify how we're actually going to collect collect that data. And this from a business objectives perspective, these are some of those types of questions. This is very general, and and, you know, Natalie, maybe you've got some input on how you saw this applied within, the organizations you've worked in. It's ultimately, again, looking at what are the key business goals for the organization. Are we trying to break into a new market? Are we, you know, deciding to lean in on a certain geographical, growth strategy? And then what are going to be the skills that are needed to be able to accomplish that, that these are sort of the ultimate ways we need to measure success. Natalie, I don't know if you can speak to any specific example you saw when you were in practice. Yeah. I mean, I can go back to one of the we had a situation where we were hiring a lot of entry levels into, the investment banks. And one of the things was one of the ROI was we weren't retaining them, right? And then there was a lot of discussion about whether or not we should continue to train and develop individuals coming right out of school. And what we found was, when we really dug into the numbers, was that what really mattered to the business was not retaining every single one of them, but was really retaining those high performers. Mhmm. And so we were able to really focus and target our numbers and our reporting and all of the information that we were developing this program around was identifying and then promoting and training out those high performers. It changed the narrative around what we were doing. We were still running similar program, right? We've made tweaks and changed, in their training overall, But we really started to work, once we dug in with our stakeholders to understand what there was really important to them as a measurement for this program, it really ended up being something very different than what was being presented to them today as this is what success looks like. Yep. And so we changed, you know, in working with those business leaders, we were able to really identify what makes the difference to the business. And so that's one example. I mean, we've seen it across the. board with skills, implementing new skills, identifying those specific skills that people are interested in, not necessarily, here's learning as a whole what's happening. We always had that in our back pocket. But ultimately looked at the objectives of the business and tied those skills to those and said, here's where we're seeing individuals taking those courses, right, Yeah. or taking that learning and seeing that development. I do in the in the chat, I like what Corey commented on about certification training. I agree. Right? Certifications is a great example of how, historically, it's always been, have you passed the certification exam? And I don't know about you, but when I was in school, there were those people that were just great test takers. And so how do you really know somebody not only can pass the test, but more importantly, that they can apply it in the workforce. They can apply it to a project. And so, yeah, Corey, I agree with you that we're seeing quite a bit more of organizations adopt demonstration of skill as being that real. sort of result versus just the I've I've passed the test. And you see that now with, like, labs coming into play that reinforce that, like, practical examples, certainly from a technology skill perspective. So some great discussion. there are certain indications though that certifications are always going to be there, right? So that's a measure. If that's important to your business, that's a measure that you would want to report on. If it's But think and keep in mind that it's not the only measure that you could look at. Yep. Exactly. So, again, getting into some of the specifics around where we're seeing an AI impact, and we've we've covered some of these themes, but we'll go into it here. Again, do encourage anybody to share a a best practice of how you might be leveraging AI to, you know, impact your l and d strategy. So any of those good, again, best practices, please do keep them coming in in the chat. So, again, as we look at if you look at the sort of benefit cost model, what are some of the things that we're seeing? Certainly, you know, from an AI perspective, there's the opportunity for increased productivity. So we kinda talked about that of, like, how does AI being introduced then free up some of those more, you know, repetitive tasks that can be taken on by AI so that then, therefore, we can point to. Now it's freeing up time for us to do more strategic work. And so it's that idea of being able to do, again, more with less, and tying that back to it's it's all about people's adoption of AI that is helping to drive that increase in productivity. Same with, again, the speed to skill acquisition. So if, you know, we talked upfront about the hyper personalization of learning experiences, which can come from within a a learning asset as well as within a learning platform. Like, how are those helping to enable, you know, cutting down time to get at the exact skills that I need for, again, the new role or expanded role or adjusted role that I that I'm now in. New revenue streams. Now this is getting at the, again, the the bottom line to the organization. So if an organization, your organization is going through a fundamental shift, maybe there's a new strategy that they are pivoting towards with, you know, automation, a new market they're breaking into, etcetera, there's going to be new skills required for that. And so, ultimately, the l and d role with helping to support people to be prepared for those new skills and being able to do it in a, you know, efficient time period is directly tied back to the growth of that new revenue stream. And I think we need to be bold from an l and d perspective in making those connections because, truly, those new revenue streams are not going to be successful without L and D's support. And the last one on here is about reduced turnover, which came up a little bit in our conversation, when Natalie was, again, talking about, you know, the we wanna retain our our most high impact, high performing employees. And so by showing that we are investing in them and their skill set with, you know, advanced AI training and helping them to be more efficient, effective, etcetera, moving into more strategic roles, that that can help and be directly tied back to that reduction in in turnover. And, again, maybe most importantly, the reduction of turnover of our, you know, high impact employees that that we have and we really wanna retain. On the flip side, from a cost perspective, how can we tie back to, again, lower, costs when it comes to content creation? So that's where leveraging more of the resources and tools that can be brought in, whether that's getting the development of content into the hands of subject matter experts so that we can, you know, get their knowledge into some of our learning development programs, but do it at at scale, right, and be able to deliver on that much more quickly. Again, that personalization piece comes up on the cost side as well. Like, how do we leverage the AI platforms? You know, one thing about and it comes up on that, final bullet here on initial technology investment. You know, AI, yes, it can deliver these lower operational costs. That comes after there's an initial investment in AI powered solutions. So those can be very costly. And so I think, again, this ROI component and really thinking about that ahead of time is really important because sometimes that initial investment can be, in some cases, significantly higher than maybe what we've invested in the past. So we've it's even more important for us to be tying back to where do we see those benefits, not only lower operational costs further down, but us being able to, again, deliver more, better, faster, and tying it back to the the overall operational goals. And the last one on here is about the data analytics. So the ability for AI to take in multiple sources of data and be able to, you know, quickly, extrapolate, some measurement measurement points, really can help because, historically, we've seen, you know, most l and d folks that I talk with, we're getting data sources from five, ten different places and having to do more of a manual, process to extrapolate and and get to a measurement point out of that. AI can automate a lot of that, and then it was a great opportunity for us to have a better way to measure the success of our programs by leveraging AI in that in that process. You know, as we look kind of from a summary perspective and certainly, excuse me, want Natalie to, chime in on this as well. Again, that ROI equation, the historical one, it still is applicable here. I think it's just looking at it with a a new lens. Right? And how do we, really look at with AI in the picture, how do we become sort of more strategic as we look at the different factors that can come into play, both from the the costs of, training investments that are made and then the exponential benefits that can come from having that highly skilled AI augmented, workforce. You know, from learning leaders perspective, really, we are being challenged to look at how do we go beyond those traditional metrics that, again, are still in in place in a lot of our organizations, but really trying to be bold and and push some of that conversation of of being able to do more to be aligned to strategic initiatives for the organization and how L and D really sits at that intersection of AI adoption to fuel the growth of our organization, going forward. I know, Natalie, you'd mentioned some of the, again, podcasts that you'd listened to in advance of coming in here and some other articles. I just wonder if there's anything in summary you wanted to share with folks as well. Yeah, we can we'll include them at the end, some links to one, there was there's some some great articles in tech industry about kind of learning and development and what does it look like as we move into this AI space more in in kind of we're jumping in with both feet, if you will. And the other is if you haven't accessed through SHRM, the AI plus HI, they have a podcast that is absolutely excellent around, what does it look like? What does it mean for us as as practitioners and and our organizations as we look to in all aspects of AI, from recruiting to training to development, in all kind of that employee life cycle. So there's some really good stuff there that you can look to, to give you ideas or to think differently about how not only are you measuring content and, and learning within your organization, but how you're positioning it and and what you're putting forth and the messaging around what's important to the people that you're you're working for. So, I I think Jenny Kate just put into the chat, some links, but, really good stuff out there, that you can access. One thing in the chat, I see Sean's question on are there any success stories on using AI to create skills matrix? Great question. I think what I'm hearing is certainly organizations leveraging AI maybe to, again, look at their data sources within their own organization, you know, whether that is your, HRIS system, your learning system, maybe people even look at their talent acquisition, to look at, again, that sort of in house skills matrix. I think where we're seeing organizations look externally at, you know, external partners is how do we also, look at the skills and and sort of that benchmarking piece across across the market. Right? Like, what skills are available in the marketplace even down to not just broadly in, you know, like, the, The US marketplace, but in our geographical area. Like, what if we know we need to hire in certain areas, this is sort of taking it to the next level, but how do we identify that those skills actually exist? And so there are, you know, a number of, you know, AI tools that are out there that are incorporating that type of data. So, Sean, it's kinda taking it to the next level of marrying up internal, data about skills with that external component that is so critical, to that that equation. So thanks for sharing that, Natalie, feedback. And I I also had a question from Danielle about the name of the podcast. I I think she might have mentioned from Sherm. Okay. Yep. So you can see that link in there. Know they've even got some upcoming events that I think are worthwhile for people to explore. Again, there's great resources out there in the marketplace that we can all be leaning on. One of which, by the way, is the World Economic Forum, which is an event that happens in Davos, Switzerland every year. It happens to be next week. Last year, they released some really interesting findings and discussions around this topic of, you know, skills and learning and AI. Because it is coming up next week, actually, our CEO is attending, and so we expect by the January, February, we'll have be sharing some interesting findings from that that I think also might nicely add to this conversation. Just a few other updates, from Cornerstone that relate to the same topic before we wrap things up is, you know, again, there are for any of you that are Cornerstone customers and have our content, we have AI fluency skills, playlists across all of our content packages. So whether you're, you know, utilizing, like, our silver, gold, platinum, content packages or we have a take your pick program. Again, there are AI fluency content in all of those, and we've we've done some, work to create those playlists for you. We also are incorporating a lot of, obviously, AI within everything that we do specific to content within our content studio tool, which can help with, you know, recommendations, that ease of finding content, but then more broadly across the Galaxy Galaxy Learn. There's gonna be a lot more AI incorporation, especially in this next release that's coming up in March, which scary enough is right around the corner. And then from some of our partners, last year, we introduced this new partner, EZ Generator, which actually saw really broad adoption, across our customer base as a tool that is used for you know, think about content development by SMEs. That's really what EZ Generator is. It's like that type of tool you can get out there and that somebody who is out, and, again, in enroll in seat that they can actually create high quality content. So helping to free up l and d's time, to work on more strategic initiatives. So just a couple of things that are, available within Cornerstone OnDemand. And then we've mentioned a number of different resources. Again, Jenny Kate Purcell put some of those links into the chat, and we can also share those, as a follow on to this webinar. And then lastly, One other thing I just mentioned, Beth, before we jump into the next session is the other thing too from an ROI perspective, and if any of you are interested, we also you know, there's a lot of work that's been done within our thought leadership team to look at ROI and to work with customers of Cornerstone OnDemand around ROI and and help build those business cases and things like that. So that's a resource that's available, to to work with your account managers to to actually tap into our thought leadership team is another avenue as we're, you know, we all know how important it is to justify the existence, to justify the investments, things like that, and we can help you do that as well. So as another kind of resource for you going forward. Thanks for the reminder. It's a great great point. And, again, so for our next session, we are planning on it for late February, the twenty sixth, and hope that, many of you can join us again, continuing this conversation. And this will focus a little bit more on, you know, still as we're looking at the ROI conversation. We talked about today about how important it is to partner internally to identify how we're gonna measure success of a program. So how what are some ways that we can really show up and be that true strategic partner? So I hope that many of you are able to join us for that, or you can register and get a recording after the fact. And, by the way, as part of that session, I mentioned the World Economic Forum next week. I do suspect that some of that content we'll be talking about will be coming directly from some of the output of of the WEF. So that'll be a timely session again a month from now. So with that, I know people have been putting questions in the chat as we try to address them as we go along. If anybody has any questions before we wrap things up, I'm happy to take those. one that was on there. It was a question about outside of the box thinking for certifications and but just outside of the box thinking in general. One of the things that you'll read in in one of the articles, it was cited that they were looking at how they were skilling their organization around specifically the skills around AI. And they specifically, instead of looking at how many people were taking courseware and how many people were were completing courses, they were looking at how many people were actually going out to Gemini and and starting and playing around. And that was a measure that had nothing to do with education, but it was actually showing again that, I think Beth mentioned it, the curiosity factor. And so this idea of going and and thinking, hey, I'm gonna look at this differently. It's not about how many people did this one course, but it's how many people who are actually going out and touching and feeling and trying, to do something. It becomes a measure of behavior versus, versus just taking a course kind of thing. So that's the kind of out of the box thinking that we're we're kinda suggesting is go beyond what you have the control of and start to say, you know, how many people are actually accessing this stuff or trying this stuff, and and taking it from there. It's it's a great point. And and I know for, again, from L and D perspective, it puts us in the unique position of we have to educate our internal stakeholders on what's different and that we can be thinking of the measurement of the success of a program or this measurement of this investment in a different way. Mhmm. So, hopefully, from today's conversation, you've gotten, you know, some new ideas, not just from Natalie and I, but also from the the some of the questions that folks, posed in the chat, different ideas of what they are implementing that you can explore as you are here at the beginning of the year, probably setting some of your program goals. So thank you to everybody for joining us today. We hope to see you again next month. And if you've got any follow-up questions, feel free to send them our way. So thanks again for joining. Thanks so much, everybody.