Artificial Intelligence in Mimeo Digital: A Conversation with David Uyttendaele

[00:00] Tom Moriarty: Welcome back to the secret society of success. In this bonus episode, I sat down with Mimeo's Chief Technology Officer, David Uyttendaele over a cup of coffee at the ATD International Conference and Expo. We discussed Mimeo's latest announcement, our very own artificial intelligence, MICA. MICA, which stands for Mimeo Instructor Chat Assistant, is an AI tutor assistant that will soon be available to customers in the Mimeo Digital platform. After learning your material on the private Mimeo Digital Interface, MICA can start answering questions for your learners about your content to help your learners master course materials and help you crush your learning objectives. In this conversation, you'll hear from David more about why we decided to add AI to our digital content distribution platform, the features you can expect in the next few months on Mimeo Digital, and how he sees AI changing the lives of facilitators and instructional designers alike. Grab your own hot beverage and sit back for this exclusive conversation with David Uyttendaele.

[01:02] Tom Moriarty: But seriously, why did we do it?

[01:04] David Uyttendaele: With the emergence of generative AI and large language models, we found that there was an opportunity to change the way that our customers could deliver their training and give their students an opportunity to have a conversation with the content that they've created.

[01:25] Tom Moriarty: That makes sense. What impact are we trying to deliver for the classroom?

[01:30] David Uyttendaele: So, two things creating better outcomes for their training, so giving their learners the opportunity to have a tutor in the classroom and as well as an expert after the class. And this could not only allow them to end up with a better outcome for the training session, but could also then allow them to use what they've learned in a more effective way. Because now they can actually ask for help from the AI about the content that they would otherwise have to somehow figure out reread on their own.

[02:09] Tom Moriarty: So ultimately, trying to use the AI tool itself to create better outcomes for the learner, for our customer, it means a better class.

[02:18] David Uyttendaele: Better class. Yeah. So depending on whether if they're making money selling their training, it also is a potential revenue stream as well that they can now monetize after the class as well, right? Yeah. Okay. And if you're interacting with this content and if you're selling training, it could also potentially upsell their customer on other training that they could, you know, if they have another topic they may be asking a question about, it's like, well, to learn that topic, maybe we can point you to this question. Right? That's the idea.

[02:56] Tom Moriarty: So it's almost like MICA is a student aid in a classroom.

[03:00] David Uyttendaele: Absolutely.

[03:01] Tom Moriarty: They're not the teacher.

[03:02] David Uyttendaele: They're not the teacher.

[03:02] Tom Moriarty: They can't replace the teacher.

[03:04] David Uyttendaele: No, they're there to assist. So before the classroom, you could use MICA. Once MICA is trained on the content, you could even potentially use it on your website. So somebody could ask a question. Would this class work for me if I'm a new manager, would this class be a good fit class for me?

[03:21] Tom Moriarty: And then guide them through to guide your customer to the experience? What am I looking for?

[03:25] David Uyttendaele: Which class makes the most sense? Because once it's trained on that, it has that information and then you can make it act in that way as a salesperson or as an advisor on which class you should take. And then before the course starts, when you get your pre learning experience, it could be involved in that as well and let you know about when you're going to learn certain topics in the class so you're prepared for that. And then during the class, it can be an assistant and then post class again, it becomes an expert.

[03:55] Tom Moriarty: An expert. How long does it take MICA to learn to actually consume the content enough to be able to be expert, post class or help facilitate preclusion?

[04:08] David Uyttendaele: Yeah. In the current model, just like today, when you upload your content to Mimeo, it'll immediately be converted so it can be consumed by MICA and it's immediately available.

[04:19] Tom Moriarty: Many customers use Mimeo Digital to distribute global training to a global audience in a local language. Can MICA keep up with all those languages?

[04:27] David Uyttendaele: So MICA can consume all those languages perfectly fine. But you can actually allow someone to ask their question in their native language so that it's easier for them to ask the question. And then MICA can actually convert that, look for that content, find the answer, then convert it back, and then respond to them in their language again.

[04:46] Tom Moriarty: Wow.

[04:47] David Uyttendaele: Or it can respond to them in the language of the document. So it's really, really good at translations. That's another thing. So that's what these large language models can do.

[04:57] Tom Moriarty: That's awesome.

[04:58] David Uyttendaele: Yeah, so it opens it up to a whole different like so even as a content creator, you can maybe just write in one language and don't have to worry too much about the translation and just make sure that the way you use language is probably going to change the way that people write things as well. So that they can then ensure that the language model understands it really well. So then it can do a really good job in translating it. Do a really good job in taking your question and making sure that it finds the right answer to your question inside this content because it was really well worded. So there also is going to be a curve.

[05:32] Tom Moriarty: A learning curve to what happens to content creation.

[05:37] Tom Moriarty: How about analytics? I know one of the things our customers love about Mimeo Digital are the analytics they can get about content usage. Will they have access to analytics about conversations their learners have with MICA?

[05:47] David Uyttendaele: Yeah, that's a great question. Part of what we get now with MICA is a lot more interaction with the learner directly and so all that data and it'll be spelt out there for the learner to understand that we're going to be using this data, as in the training organization that's trying to improve this content is going to be using this information to make their course better. That'll also help moderate what they're asking MICA as well because you don't want to get yourself in trouble there, but it's going to give a plethora of information that you can now use and then we can use AI to analyze those responses as well. So not only do we have a better idea of the types of questions today you can annotate and that'll give you an idea of maybe you can make assumptions about like if somebody's annotating something, does that mean they got it or that means they didn't get it, you don't know. But with this they're actually going to ask the question about that as well. Right? So it's going to just give us more information to potentially support the content development process.

[06:50] Tom Moriarty: So the features I'm tracking so far are MICA can instantly learn your content on upload, it can operate for both admin and the learner in multiple languages, it can give you new and smart insights into what your learners don't get about your material.

[07:06] David Uyttendaele: MICA today can't make fresh coffee, but it could tell you how to make fresh coffee.

[07:14] Tom Moriarty: Yeah, actually do the act of making.

[07:16] David Uyttendaele: And it has access to the entire large language model of OpenAI chat GPT so it has all that knowledge as well. So we can train it to either use that knowledge or not ignore all the other information, have just use it to form answers but don't use any of its intelligence or we can allow it to use its intelligence, or we can allow it to reference like data on your website. But nothing else.

[07:43] Tom Moriarty: But nothing else. Right, so to some degree it gives us the ability to leverage the power of it to the degree that us or our customer wants. Right, which allows us to some degree, which is probably important for any of those customers that are selling content, it allows more protection of the intellectual property that's in the content than a normal chat GPT model or open AI model because it's not completely correct.

[08:10] David Uyttendaele: Yeah, that's the whole idea. The whole idea is that getting all the power of a chat GPT but on private data, right, because chat GPT today works on public data, right?

[08:22] Tom Moriarty: Yeah.

[08:22] Tom Moriarty: So why is MICA advantageous compared to whatever AI will be added into Google or Microsoft or any other tools that trainers are using today?

[08:31] David Uyttendaele: So Google will make it available in Google Docs, so if you have an intranet whatever and everyone in the company can access that because you're in that firewall, right, but for this you actually want to again, you want to package it up and hand it off to somebody and give them limited access to it. But you want to have all that same power, and then you want to be able to take it back.

[08:47] Tom Moriarty: Take it back.

[08:48] David Uyttendaele: And so that's really what we're offering.

[08:53] Tom Moriarty: Interesting. Why, if I'm one of our instructors for one of our customers, should I not be horrified by?

[09:01] David Uyttendaele: Well, I think what it really does is allows you to be a superstar. Right. They say, like, these instructors are not going to be replaced by AI. They're going to be replaced by somebody who uses AI. Right. And so you want to be that instructor who is using AI to your advantage so that you're a better trainer, that you can engage with a larger audience. That's the idea. So as we learn again and a lot of this is also how you generate the prompts for the AI. So you can actually give it a personality. So maybe for you as an instructor, you only want help in certain subjects or certain areas, things that you know that you're not that good on your strength. Exactly. And you can actually have it maybe supports you in those ways, but not in the other things. Or you can always, like, if you work better in an environment where there's lots of humor, you can make sure that the AI is always telling jokes when it's giving you advice, and all of a sudden, you start hearing giggles from your learners.

[10:01] Tom Moriarty: Learners. You can riff off of that.

[10:03] David Uyttendaele: Exactly. Say, what did it say? Things like that. So that's the beauty of this. You can start giving it personalities as well that'll work with your content or with your personality. You can make it the opposite.

[10:16] Tom Moriarty: Yeah. So to some degree, it's a tool, right. Like, at the end of the day, it's just a tool that should enable you to create a better classroom to some degree. It's the same logic that somebody selling training would use for why they should buy your training, right? Absolutely. It's the same exact thought process there.

[10:31] David Uyttendaele: Yeah. And with the instructor at the center of this today, digital, it allows the folks in training operations to make sure that they deliver the content. Right. And it's not really centered around the instructor.

[10:44] Tom Moriarty: Correct.

[10:44] David Uyttendaele: And now with this, we're starting to think about how do we center the experience around the instructor so the instructor becomes the superstar.

[10:51] Tom Moriarty: Superstar.

[10:52] David Uyttendaele: So they can teach as many folks as possible in the most effective way. And this is our first major tool in supporting that. Again, more long term, with digital, the idea is digital in the center of the classroom. So digital becomes the operating system for running an instructor led training. So whether you're using hard copy as part of it or digital as part of it, we want you to use this as a tool to support the.

[11:19] Tom Moriarty: Class, to support the classroom environment itself, no matter what.

[11:23] David Uyttendaele: Today, if you did a flip classroom, you could send content before class in video form or in digital form. Then in the classroom, you can shut it all down so they can't access any of it. They're using the physical documents. You want their attention to be on the physical documents and then after the class, you can turn it back on. The digital version of this, they now.

[11:43] Tom Moriarty: Have a reference yeah.

[11:45] David Uyttendaele: They can take their document with them as well, the physical document, if they like using a physical document. But now they have a reference where they can not just search through the document and look at it in digital form, but they can actually interact with it like it was the professor, like the instructor. That's the idea.

[12:00] Tom Moriarty: Yeah. It's almost to your point on being able to generate our customers being able to generate do this in a for profit model to some degree. It's like they get to pay for a class that never ends.

[12:14] David Uyttendaele: Yeah, absolutely right.

[12:17] Tom Moriarty: Only ends when I want it.

[12:19] David Uyttendaele: Exactly.

[12:19] Tom Moriarty: It's extending that classroom experience outside of the 8 hours if everybody flies together or two days or whatever it is.

[12:26] David Uyttendaele: Yeah. And again, it does it in a controlled way where they're still in control of their content, their intellectual property that they've spent their careers developing, building right. And they make it available to the people that have paid them for it. And this keeps it safe. They can't share it with other people.

[12:43] Tom Moriarty: And then they could shut it down at the point that they want to shut it down.

[12:46] David Uyttendaele: Yeah.

[12:48] Tom Moriarty: So one thing customers love about Mimeo Digital and really all Mimeo applications is that they can brand them with their own colors, logos, likeness, et cetera. What about MICA? Will customers be able to change the name MICA to suit their classes?

[13:02] David Uyttendaele: Yeah, I think just like you can give MICA a personality, there'd be every reason for us to give it a name that makes sense for your training organization. So if you have a mascot and somebody could even again, they can have their own every instructor could rename MICA to be whatever they want as they create a brand and a persona for that bot in their studio.

[13:27] Tom Moriarty: All right, so say I'm an instructor at ABC Company. I upload my content into Mimeo digital. How do I train MICA to be funny?

[13:34] David Uyttendaele: Add humor. So there's different types of prompts, but you would set it up, what they call a system prompt and tell it how you would want your interactions with MICA to go. So you say like, this is MICA, she's a teacher's assistant. She tells jokes continually. The other thing about that is that's where you create all the profiling around how you want them to respond, whether or not you want them to be an expert in a topic or whether you want them to be a tutor and use a Socratic method. So they're leading you to the answer, but they're not giving you the answer. It's all the same prompting. So you can write an entire little paragraph about the personality and what their skills are and whatnot and write it in a way that is actually consumed better by these models than if you were to write something that was like more bullet points. So it actually works really well for the trainers. So we're doing all those prompts ourselves behind the scene and we may again have these standard prompts which is likely right for how we think MICA could respond well in most scenarios. And Then We'll Have either Maybe Some Toggles to Turn Things On And Off, and Then maybe We'll Open It Up A Little Bit More to let Somebody Just Work on The Personality of MICA, and Then maybe We'll Open It Up A Little More so that we Have Different Tools and Different Ways to Access Other Content and Other Data.

[15:02] Tom Moriarty: How's your thought about rolling it out? Obviously we're like announcing it. You got an alpha. What is your thought about…

[15:09] David Uyttendaele: The first thing we want to do is really just let it be the expert. So the in class part of it, I think that's something that has to evolve because we don't know exactly how people yeah, exactly. But the one thing we do know that we'll be able to do really well is just answer questions about the document as an expert. Right. And we can let them, the clients add more and more data to that. So it's not just what's limited in the actual content that the user can read, that the learner can read, but.

[15:40] Tom Moriarty: It would also have to be all the content, a whole bunch of other different levels of higher up.

[15:45] David Uyttendaele: Exactly. And so they can upload as much of that spot.

[15:49] Tom Moriarty: All right, so right now MICA works on content uploaded in the Mimeo digital. But earlier in our conversation you've also hinted at a longer term vision that would be trained against content outside of just the course materials. Maybe an outline, specific learning objectives or other components of the course design itself.

[16:04] David Uyttendaele: Yeah, reference materials, anything. You could actually add a lot more content than just what's in the class. You can upload just your PowerPoint presentation, but then you can put a whole bunch of background information behind that which you would never expose to the customer, to the learner, but it would then have all that information to support learning.

[16:24] Tom Moriarty: Yeah, that's interesting. So it's almost a tool in that longer term vision that a customer can use to make for a more efficient and better reinforced classroom environment. Right, because you still need to ask those questions, you still need to know the reference material, but you can upload all that as a model and then use to actually do that reinforcement with your professor.

[16:44] David Uyttendaele: Correct. You can also since we know it's a class, we know it's a classroom environment, there's probably a schedule. So you could also upload information about the agenda and it'll know what time lunch is so if the student says, what time is lunch? And don't want to interrupt the class, and they don't have the syllabus right in front of them, MICA can then just give them that kind of information, too? It's not just it could be logistics information. It could be a bunch a bunch of different things. Now that you have this interactive assistant yeah. So it could be used for all sorts of things we haven't even thought of. And the exciting thing is, you put it in front of our customers and they start coming up with ideas that.

[17:20] Tom Moriarty: To make it that we'll never be.

[17:22] David Uyttendaele: Able to it's already happened with just a couple of customers we've talked to.

[17:26] Tom Moriarty: That's interesting. Yeah. To some degree, it can become an assistant for the instructional designer who's trying to make sure that the class itself is being delivered in the most effective way. But then it's also an example. You just shared an assistant for the actual instructor themselves, who doesn't want to have to answer seven questions about what we're going to yeah, absolutely.

[17:49] David Uyttendaele: Yeah. And then hopefully, it can be interactive in a way where it could be part of Icebreakers or other activities in the class as well. As it gets more and more advanced. Sal Khan has a great Ted Talk around it about how at Khan Academy, how they're using generative AI to teach kids and the whole tutor in the classroom thing, and how it moves the so-so student and makes them a really good student. How it makes the really good student, like a fabulous student, how it just moves everyone up that curve.

[18:32] Tom Moriarty: As you could tell, MICA is an exciting development for many. But we do know that artificial intelligence is changing the corporate L&D landscape beyond our scope. That's why we're excited to announce our third season of The Secret Society of Success will be all about about AI in L&D. If you're already experimenting with AI in your instructional design, facilitation, or any other parts of your training, we'd love to hear from you. Send an email to [email protected] and we just might interview you for season three. If you're interested in learning more about MICA and how Mimeo Digital can empower your content, reach out to your Mimeo representative or send us a note directly here.