Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
The MBA in 12 Weeks? How Abilitie is Changing Business Education with Bjorn Billhardt
An organizational and leadership development expert, Bjorn Billhardt has designed leadership development programs and collaborated with world-class institutions for two decades. Since 2015, Bjorn has been CEO of Abilitie, a provider of leadership development & mini-MBA programs. Abilitie’s programs have educated over 100,000 learners worldwide. Prior to founding Abilitie, Bjorn was Co-founder and CEO of Enspire Learning, Inc. Bjorn holds a BA from the University of Texas & an MBA from Harvard Business School.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in this Episode:
- How AI is transforming leadership training through real-time simulations.
- Why business education should focus on judgment, not just knowledge.
- The power of AI in social learning and group collaboration.
- How AI can enhance professional skills like hiring and management.
- The growing impact of mini MBAs in corporate education.
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:02:37] Why leadership is about judgment and the future of MBA programs.
[00:05:43] AI-powered simulations and decision-making in training.
[00:10:38] Adaptive AI in professional development and business training.
[00:16:48] AI’s potential to enhance social learning and collaboration.
[00:22:20] AI as an assistant for hiring, management, and leadership.
[00:33:32] The rise of mini MBAs and alternative business education.
[00:36:00] Why transfer skills matter more than memorization.
[00:38:35] Final thoughts on AI’s future in leadership development.
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🎉 Presenting Sponsor:
This season of Edtech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M&A firm for EdTech companies. Run by serial entrepreneurs with over 25 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies, Tuck believes you deserve M&A advisors who work as hard as you do.
[00:00:00] Bjorn Billhardt: With AI right now, everyone is streaming toward, let's use AI to like, be a, you know, your personal mentor, your personal coach. I think there's a huge market for that where it's a one on one interaction with me and the computer versus me and a customer service Absolutely first use case, you know lots of people going after I'm more interested in what can I do to create a better social learning environment and experience?
That is, I think, something that in five years from now, there may be some real interesting applications that we're not even right now thinking about in terms of letting AI. Be part of the human to human interaction.
[00:00:39] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to Edtech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact AI developments across early childhood. K-12, HigherEd and work. You'll find it all here
[00:00:54] Ben Kornell: at Edtech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter and offer our event calendar and to go deeper.
Check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod.
[00:01:19] Alex Sarlin: Today we're talking to Bjorn Bill Hart, who is the CEO of a. Really interesting platform called ability that does leadership development. This was a really fun conversation and Bjorn and I just got to really sort of nerd out on all the potential of AI in education and for training across the K 12 higher ed and especially leadership sector.
Bjorn Bilhardt is an organizational leadership development expert. He's designed leadership development programs and collaborated with world class institutions for two decades. And since 2015, Bjorn has been CEO of Ability, a provider of leadership development and mini MBA programs. Ability's programs have educated over 100, 000 learners worldwide.
Prior to founding Ability, Bjorn was the co founder and CEO of a company called Enspire Learning. And he also holds a BA from the University of Texas and an MBA from Harvard Business School, which we will also be talking about in this conversation. Bjorn Bilhard, welcome to EdTech Insiders. Thank you for having me.
So, ability has been at the forefront of leadership development and you're using EdTech and AI to sort of reinvent the case study as well as the MBA experience. Tell us about what ability is and what brought you into the EdTech field.
[00:02:37] Bjorn Billhardt: Yeah, so we are a leadership development company. We've been in the field of leadership development.
I've been in it for the last 24 years, and we are working mainly with large fortune 500 clients on their high potential leadership programs. And we have a flagship program. This is a 12 week mini MBA that is virtual, and it's part time. But the secret sauce of what we do is that instead of lectures or discussion threads or team projects, which we also have in which are valuable.
The core of our program consists of interactive multiplayer simulations where you're being put in charge of a company, you're being put in charge of a team, you have to make decisions and you learn by doing and you learn by being debriefed with expert faculty in a group setting. So that's sort of the five second pitch of what we do.
[00:03:25] Alex Sarlin: So, you know, business school is famous for its group projects and its case study methodology, which I think was pioneered at Harvard Business School, where you're sort of thinking about a real situation, but traditionally, that's been with text, you're reading about a company, you're reading about their history, reading about a decision they have to make and discussing it, you're taking it to a totally different level with simulations, and you're doing it using artificial intelligence as one of the core tools.
Tell us about what one of these simulations actually looks like and why AI is taking it to the next level.
[00:03:57] Bjorn Billhardt: Yeah, so AI is obviously one of the things that everyone's talking about in terms of how it can create new leadership development offerings that are elevated from what there was before. So I love the Harvard Business School case study.
It's a really effective way to put yourself in the shoes of a protagonist. You read the case. Yeah. You're in a situation and then you debate what to do next in a classroom environment, which is actually really important. No one does Harvard Business School case studies by themselves. It's always the discussion in the classroom that makes those cases valuable and the Socratic questioning that comes from an expert facilitator.
So what we're innovating on and we're sort of at the beginning stage, I think anyone that says they have figured out how AI is going to change the world is probably full of it. We don't know yet, but we're doing some really interesting work in terms of creating another type of interactive case study where instead of reading what the protagonist is facing is in terms of a situation and then having to quarterback, you know, Monday morning quarterback, like, Hey, here's what I would have done.
And then finding out what the protagonist did. We actually put you in the situation where you have to make not just the decision, but more importantly, these things in business, it's not necessarily. Just the decision that's important. It's also how you communicate the decision, who you talk with first, what do you say to them, all of those things you couldn't actually simulate before AI in a way that was, you know, truly high fidelity and realistic, but with AI, you can, and so I do think we are entering a really brave new world of creating content that.
Levels up leaders in a very different way than was possible before I. So I think we're living in an incredibly interesting time. We're working on a lot of really interesting A. I. Cases here at ability and, you know, we'll see where it goes.
[00:05:43] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, we talk on the podcast in a variety of different contexts about how A.
I. Could be disruptive for the assessment space, and that can mean standardized assessment, summative, formative, you know, any kind of feedback based or assessment context. And the use case that you're thinking about with business school is one in which assessment has a particular sort of flavor that's a little bit different than some other pieces.
There's obviously, you know, a GMAT exam to get in. And for selective business schools, there's a lot of different sort of selection criteria. That you need to do to get into it. But once you're in it, the sort of structure is a little different than some other kinds of professional education and the case study or the sort of discussion group project model is one that is been really embraced by the business school environment.
You know, you're mentioning how communicating the decision that you make in the case study is one example of how an assessment can be more authentic to the actual job. But I know there are a lot of other ones as well. A lot of ways that you can actually practice. Being the manager, being the CEO, being the entrepreneur in a way you could never have before.
I'd love to hear you talk about what your vision of what that might look like could be.
[00:06:53] Bjorn Billhardt: Yeah, I mean, first of all, you said something really interesting that I think not too many people realize. Business schools and business education is often lumped in together with other advanced degrees, right? Law, medicine, you know, even accounting.
But there's actually a unique and very interesting difference, right? In law, in accounting, even, which is part of business, but not business school.
[00:07:14] Alex Sarlin: Right.
[00:07:14] Bjorn Billhardt: In medicine, there's a large body of facts that you need to know, materials that you need, which is why you don't want a shortened medical school. You don't want a shortened Law school, because you want your lawyers and you want your doctors to know everything there is to know.
No
[00:07:28] Alex Sarlin: 12 week MD coming. There's no
[00:07:31] Bjorn Billhardt: 12 week MD in the world. I will not want a doctor. Yeah. So the question is, what's different with business? In my mind, so business is all about judgment. And it's very clear, you know, Michael Dell and Bill Gates dropped out of college. Like, they did not need business school.
To become an expert, right? You would never have a Bill Gates in the medical field. There's a, you know, I hacked this together and now I can operate on you. That's not gonna happen in these fields where true expertise is needed. But business is not about true expertise. It's about judgment. And so What is so interesting about it is people, you know, think of the MBA and the business degree as sort of in the same category as all these other groups.
I think it's a whole different animal because it is a judgment based kind of curriculum. And the other thing about judgment is it actually can't be taught even in two years. Judgment is learned the hard way over 20, 30 years of painful experience and having to dig yourself out of holes in the real world.
That's how real judgment is, which is why. You know, after medical school, you are starting to operate on patients immediately, but you would never say, hey, you know, you just got out of business school. Let me have you take over Disney or Medtronic, right? Like you're not going to become CEO that because the journey of developing judgment and evaluating trade offs in conditions of high ambiguity.
That's a lifelong journey. So where I see this world of business going is like it's instead of kind of, you know, here's the two year kind of fixed curriculum. They're going to be many curricula that over time will build someone's skills and judgment. And to answer your question a little bit, like where we see things going, like I do think AI is going to be this incredible tool that helps build those judgment, but I think there's a lot more.
Then AI that will transform the world of business education. The thing that we really have specialized in is highly interactive simulation environments. And this is not just here's an AI character talk to them. The world of putting people into simulated environments. And letting them judge and then letting them see the outcomes of their actions and judgments and then seeing them interact with others as everyone grapples with, Why did I get the results from this input that I that's what's so rich and that is rich and the regular Harvard Business School case study.
But that is even more rich when you put things into a simulated framework, where you really put people to the test, where you have to make these decisions, not just one, but multiple decisions in sequence, and then you see the outcome.
[00:10:08] Alex Sarlin: Right. So that multiple decisions in sequence is a type of. Interactive simulation that we've seen people work on, you know, for a couple of decades in various iterations where you're sort of, you're going through a series of decisions, there are these branching scenarios, you decide to invest in this, you know, team rather than this one.
And then this happens, and then you have to figure out how to deal with this crisis. And there are all these sort of different endings. That's something people have worked on for a while, but it takes a lot of work to make one of those. You have to do every time you make a branch, it's literally exponential.
[00:10:38] Bjorn Billhardt: I've been building them since 2001. So, you know, and it's not, it's. You know, lots of trial and error and lots of lots of work. Yeah, so
[00:10:45] Alex Sarlin: So, I mean, you, you probably see where my question is going from there. It's traditionally, it's been lots of work and basically the more complexity, the more decisions you add, the more work it is for the content creators to figure out all these combinatorics of, you know, what should happen.
That seems like it's very different in the AI era where things can truly be adaptive in real time. You could come up with. any idea for a marketing plan and it can react in real time to what you're actually saying rather than it being, you know, click a B or C.
[00:11:14] Bjorn Billhardt: Yeah. I mean, I'm grappling with this question every day as I think is every ed tech leader.
I mean, so there are two impacts that AI will have in the ed tech world, right? Number one is actually the impact on the learning experience itself, which is, you know, you embed AI into a simulation and all of a sudden the simulation. gets put on steroids, right? And you have like so much richer discussions and you have all these kind of data points that you can collect as well in terms of why they're making a decision because you can ask them, why did you make this decision?
So that's one part. The other part is in the content creation process. And so the question there is how is that going to affect the ecosystem of Various players, right? If content creation, if the cost of content creation goes to zero, as you can just create content with AI in no time. And right now that's text.
But like, I mean, they're already, you know, if you see AI, like you can start movies, making movies with AI. And what we're seeing right now, this one of my favorite things to say these days, what we're seeing right now is the Netscape Navigator.
[00:12:11] Alex Sarlin: Like we're,
[00:12:12] Bjorn Billhardt: we're not even at the stage, like when you think about a current e commerce website or everything that's on the cloud right now, we have like three bookmarks on like a riggity page that loads in five minutes.
Like that's the place where we are right now in AI. So the next five years is going to be really interesting in terms of where it goes. And I do think there are these two really interesting components where AI is going to. Completely disrupt. I think the way we teach, but then it's also going to disrupt the content creation process.
And I haven't wrapped my head completely around what that means in terms of, I know who's going to win in this market. Like who's going to, because if content creation is goes to zero and you know, everyone can create a recreate the LinkedIn learning catalog in like five minutes. So. Yeah.
[00:12:55] Alex Sarlin: I couldn't agree more.
And I mean, I've become a little bit of a sort of flag waving ambassador for AI, trying to help people get their head around all the things that are going to happen in all of these areas. I think content creation is going to be one of the most disruptive ones of all. And the thing I always like to point people to, to just get a glimpse of the future is the Haygen real time simulated avatars, because it's just where you literally They train it in the back end.
It looks like a person and it reacts to you in real time. You talk to it. It talks back to you. You talk to it. It talks back to you. There's no typing at all. It looks and sounds exactly like a real person. And it obviously fits so naturally into so many of the different types of simulation Scenarios that you're talking about, you know, you can negotiate with a customer, you can try to sell something, you can try to work with a colleague, manage up where I mean, literally anything, or, you know, I know that you have a really interesting 12 week MBA, like textbook that sort of goes alongside your 12 week MBA program, or I think can be even done as a sort of give your students optionality, but giving that book.
That proprietary data book to a bot suddenly makes it a great, you know, a potentially a great teacher. There's so many things I'd love to hear you just think about when you let your sort of sci fi speculative flag bend, where do you see business education going?
[00:14:13] Bjorn Billhardt: So one of the constants. In my life has been actually the belief that learning is a social process.
So there's actually a really interesting analogy that I have to the early days of the Internet, which it's not just that we're in the Netscape navigators, but we're all just trying to figure out what can we do to create really meaningful learning experiences. So when we started out, so my company, my first company, Inspire, we started actually at Harvard.
I was a second year student at Harvard Business School, and we started. Developing some interactive content as was everyone else in the day. And so at the time I remember distinctly, everyone was like, wow, this new internet thing is going to change everything. And it did, but it didn't do it in the way that everyone was expecting back in the day, everyone was like, well, we will not no longer need universities because why would we, when everyone can just, you know, go online and do these interactive e learning courses.
And so what was really interesting is that in those early days, one of the more striking experiments that, that is to this day, shaped my thinking about what learning is, is that with two products that we were working on simultaneously, trying to figure out which one, one was this incredible tool on explaining monetary policy, which was great and amazing online tool you do by yourself.
The other one was an interactive simulation on global supply chain, which we did with one of our professors, but it was a social simulation. You had to. partner with someone. And so what's interesting is back in the day, not a lot of people were thinking about using the internet as a tool to get people to collaborate and interact in a social setting.
Everyone was like e learning, let's go, let's put all this content online. And there's certainly an application for that. But what I feel is like what people overlooked back then is the same actually was that when you think about the internet, Amazon. You know, became a known quantity in 1998 and then it took five years for someone to realize, Hey, I can use the internet to connect people to people.
That was five years after Amazon started selling books. So I feel like with AI right now, everyone is streaming toward, let's use AI to like be a. You know, your personal mentor, your personal coach. I think there's a huge market for that, where it's a one on one interaction with me and the computer versus me and a customer service service is absolutely first use case.
You know, lots of people going after. I'm more interested in what can I do to create? A better social learning environment and experience that is, I think, something that in five years from now, there may be some real interesting applications that we're not even right now thinking about in terms of letting I be part of the human to human interaction.
[00:16:48] Alex Sarlin: Let's dig into that, because I think that is something that is. A really rich vein that I agree with you. It's not talked about that often. And I'm guilty as anybody of, you know, going to these relatively low hanging use cases of the AI tutor, the AI lesson plan generator, all these things, the AI homework helper, there's all these really easy ones to think of, but there's these new generations coming, you know, in ed tech, we've seen a handful of companies start to play in this space.
I don't know if you know, breakout learning, that's. Trying to be an AI based social sort of small group discussion facilitator. We've worked with OcoLabs, which is trying to do this for K 12, actually like a small group facilitator in classrooms that can, you know, basically get groups to talk about math and get them to sort of find consensus and work together.
But we are at the very. Very beginnings. I'd love to hear you talk more about this vision, because I also share your love of using the beginning of the internet as sort of the abiding metaphor for for AI. What will be the sort of 2. 0 moment for AI where people realize, oh, it's not just about getting information from a machine.
It's about the machine connecting people, making communities, allowing people to date, allowing people to go to events together, to find things in the real world like maps. I mean, there's so many things there that we have not thought about. I'd love to just go all out. This is one of my favorite topics.
[00:18:11] Bjorn Billhardt: Well, it's the same here, Alex, if you and I figure this out on this podcast, then we should stop what we're doing and start a company together and like become the next Mark Zuckerberg, right?
[00:18:18] Alex Sarlin: Yeah.
[00:18:19] Bjorn Billhardt: I mean, it is a really, really interesting area that we live in right now. And I think the next five years is going to be so interesting.
So I don't have the answers for this. But I mean, when you think about, What AI is really, really good at, right? So it's summarizing a lot of information very quickly and then synthesizing and distilling things right now. Again, we're still in the early days. It's not perfect and it's pretty wooden. And you can absolutely tell when you have an AI summary, right?
It's like, there's, you know, that it's AI written, right? So it's very clearly not human yet. I don't think we're that far away from it being harder to distinguish, but yeah. Like, I mean, when I think about. All of the things that we do on a daily basis in our work life, you know, some of them will just be overtaken by AI, right?
Like there's no need for human customer service rep to like answer the standard questions. There's no need for
[00:19:11] Alex Sarlin: transactional one on one transactional. Yeah.
[00:19:14] Bjorn Billhardt: If I have a question about my bank in terms of what my interest rate has moved to, I would like to talk to AI because then I don't get the, you know, like.
The annoying questions about my family that like, I'm like, I know the guy doesn't really care about me, like he's just doing his job. Right. But I think there's also so many interactions we do on a day to day basis that I think could be AI assisted. Right. And I'm thinking like in leadership development, for example, one of the things that is, I think the bane of so many managers is the performance review.
Right. Even digging into like, what examples can I get for performance review or like, how cool would it be? And I know this is, there's a thousand things that stand in the way, but how cool would it be if AI could summarize like all of the emails that someone sent or, you know, you just like have the employee put together.
Here's my portfolio of what I did in the last, you know, Three months and AI gives you a first cut. It won't give you the performance. We should not give you the performance review, but it gives you a summary of that and it gives you something that you can work with hiring process, right? Like how much do we all dread the interview process?
Right. Can we not make that more fun? Like, can AI like put us into like a, you know, hey, let's do something fun here together and then let's see how you and I collaborate. So, I mean, when you think about all of the interactions. That are not just the customer service interactions, but the ones that are a little bit more complicated that could be a I assisted, like, I feel like you could start 10 companies that will each be worth a billion dollars if you, you know, so it's a fun time to think about what's possible
[00:20:48] Alex Sarlin: very much.
So, and one thing that's been happening also in sort of the K 12 ed tech world, but I think is really transferable to adult learning and to on the job learning and to the type of situations you're, you're mentioning here are. You know, Stanford just put out this report. They've been doing this thing called a tutor copilot.
That's basically, you know, when you have a tutor working with a 2T, which is a one on one relationship, but it's, it's not transactional, you know, it's relational, you want to build trust and all those things, how might. AI be used to sort of create an interface, basically, you know, grease the wheels, make it more interactive, make it more fun ability to sort of pull something up in real time and all these different tools.
And they found that it really has a major effect. It speeds up training for the tutors. It speeds up efficacy for the students. And I think, you know, you think about the paradigm of that and zoom out. And I think it's very similar to some of the things you're saying. I mean, as a hiring manager, why shouldn't you have a sort of heads up display interface saying, Yeah.
You know, giving you all sorts of information and follow up questions to ask and, you know, different kind of sentiment analysis in real time and vice versa as an interviewee. Or if you're doing a group project at work, if you're, you know, in a zoom call trying to build something, not only do you want AI notes, which we are increasingly.
Having AI note takers at our calls, but why not have an AI that's actually making the conversation richer, right? That's actually building the ideas. So I love this idea of what role can AI play inside a group environment to make it both more fun, like you're saying more engaging, but also more effective to do whatever you're there to do.
[00:22:20] Bjorn Billhardt: And like one more thing to add that is a really. Deep, deep question that I've been grappling with, with over the last, you know, a few years since I came out, just like, cause I think those are all like, I mean, we can go on for, have 10 more of these types of things where I will disrupt the process. Right.
And in particular, you know, the idea that the whole idea of education. is the most ideal one is a one on one mentor, a tutor, right? Well, that's not possible. That's why we have classrooms of 30 people in one professor, right? Like, or lecture classes of 500 people in one professor, just because we need to scale, right?
So the question is always like, Hey, the most ideal way of to educate is have someone take you under their wing and teach you one by one. And education has been a compromise ever since trying to figure out how to create a scalable version of that, right? So all of a sudden now, you know, Stanford is like, well, maybe we can put a one to one tutor in there.
So I've been thinking about that for a while now. There's one caveat to that, and I haven't. You know, I haven't fully figured out all the implications is that, and I've been thinking about, I intentionally put myself in the shoes of a learner in the last two years, I became a private pilot, which is, it's not an area I've had any expertise in, and I really wanted to understand what it's like to feel really dumb again.
[00:23:36] Alex Sarlin: That beginner's mind, right? Yeah.
[00:23:39] Bjorn Billhardt: Yeah, because, you know, I teach business and I'm like, why do people not get this accounts receivable? This is such an easy concept, but it's like, if you've never heard of the term accounts receivable, you're just like, I don't even get like the, the framing of this. Right.
And I was like, why is it so hard for people to understand that? And then I, you know, kind of started studying about, you know, class ABCD airspace. And my instructor was like, well, it's so obvious. Cause, and I'm like, no, it's not obvious. I don't even know what class C airspace is. Like I have no frame of reference.
So it really made me think about what it's like to be in that position because a lot of us are not in that position anymore. And a lot of, honestly, a corporate education, right? It's building on a ton of things that we've done over the years. So here's the one caveat to this one on one tutor that AI can provide.
When I think about, you know, very clear motivations to become the private pilot. And there was a test at the end, and I was highly motivated. But when I think about my kids also that are in school, like trying to figure out like, why should I learn this math concept? Right? Or like a manager's like, Hey, I can manage like, why should I even learn anything about management?
Like I know how to do this. So much of education is related to the concept of motivation. And the motivation is related to the concept of inspiration. What's actually because it's an internal process to learn. It's A role of inspiration is, I think, not nearly as well understood as it should and not nearly as well recognized.
So, so what AI at this point at least cannot do is provide you with that. Intrinsic motivation to learn and in my mind, inspiration, right? Like the math teacher that is so funny in in the classroom doesn't even have anything to do with math, but you just want to be like them, right? Because they're funny and they're in front of the class and they know math.
And so all of a sudden you've got this inspiring. Well, there's someone cool that knows math and like, maybe math is cool. Like that leap that humans make when we are starting to become inspired to learn something is, is I think, I mean, you know, this whole K through 12, like, you know, let's teach the test.
I mean, yeah, it's important to have all the STEM concepts, but like, what's so much more important is for kids to have a motivation to learn more because that's, what's going to take them. To the Google site to the next day I tool to be, you know, kind of to learn about the next concept. So I think the only caveat to like this brave new world where I as our personal mentor and personal tutors, what's the role of inspiration and how do we make sure that we don't fall into this trap of like, just putting everyone in front of an AI mentor and thinking the knowledge transfer is the goal when it's actually the inspiration motivation that is.
[00:26:20] Alex Sarlin: Fantastic point and very well expressed. I've never heard somebody sort of go through the whole. I think that was very, very clear articulation of something that I think a lot of people struggle with. It's true. It's something that it gets to, I think, the heart of an issue in our education system at large, as you sort of mentioned, right?
You know, what are teachers roles, right? Is it to transfer knowledge? Is it to inspire? Is it to, you know, share passion? Is it to model? You know what it looks like to be a cool person that knows math. Yes. The answer is yes to all of those, but we don't always see it that way. And I agree that we do not yet understand what it looks like to inspire and sort of model expertise through an AI.
I wonder to build on your previous ideas in conversation, is there a way that AI could help inspire or model through other humans, right? Could AI. bring up other people that are inspiring? Could they connect you with them? Could they highlight, you know, what's inspiring about them or help you be more like them or bring them into your field of consciousness?
[00:27:23] Bjorn Billhardt: I think those are the types of non obvious things that I think will become obvious in the next five years and exactly how that works. Right. But like, yeah, and I, that basically is like, Hey, You know, these are my interests now. Like, what should I do with my career? Right. And it pulls up three people that you can talk with.
And then it summarizes their past. So when you talk with them, you actually, you know, you first, you talk with the AI version of them. I think Reid Hoffman had this kind of like AI version of himself. Right. So first you talk to the AI version, but then like it transfers over to actually talking to the person for five minutes.
Right. And it's only five minutes of that person's time. Right. Right. Right. But they don't have to explain who they are. They don't have to, you know,
[00:28:00] Alex Sarlin: and then after you get access to them for the next year and you can ask them what the AI version of them and you can ask them questions. Yeah.
[00:28:07] Bjorn Billhardt: Something like that.
I don't know. But when you think about like. What's more interesting to you having access to an A. I. Version of someone that you know is an A. I. Version the entire way through having access to an A. I. Version of someone plus five minutes of the actual person. Think about how much different you think about that.
And I think a lot of it has to do with human psych. It's the same psychology is like we can listen to all of our favorite bands at home and, you know, be just as happy there. The music is the same. Why do we spend, you know, 1000 or more on a concert? There's something psychologically about, you know that Life connection, even if it's, you know, one and one to many connections.
So
[00:28:42] Alex Sarlin: that's a great, great point. And, you know, when people talk about those experiences where they sort of met somebody who changed their life or changed their way of seeing things, often what they'll say is, you know, we only met for a day or I only took one class with them. But I always think about, you know what they said.
I remember this is how they saw the world or they'd always say this exact thing. And it comes up for me even 10 years later. So I can imagine AI serving that role, basically, you know, capturing. In the time that you are with people capturing some of these nuggets and then resurfacing them when you need them later, right, which I think is something that, you know, anybody who's had mentors or role models in their life that sort of begins to happen naturally, but it doesn't happen for everybody.
And it certainly doesn't happen if you only have a few minutes with somebody, it could, it's a really interesting sort of path to go down.
[00:29:31] Bjorn Billhardt: I feel like in this podcast, we've come up with 10 ideas that are each. So if there's any listener that takes these, can we like negotiate in some type of equity for,
[00:29:39] Alex Sarlin: for.
Yeah, exactly. I have one more for you. When you talk about the accounts receivable, there's this concept in instructional design called the expert blind spot. And I've talked about this to various people over my career. And almost everybody's like. Yes, I'm so glad there's a name for that, but it's called the expert blind spot.
It's exactly what you're saying. If you're a pilot and you're teaching new pilots and you say class C airspace, you start using jargon. You literally forget what it's like to be a beginner. You can't even relate to the novices. Just like your example with account receivables. I can imagine an AI tool that literally does subtitles while you're talking to people.
That just translates what they're saying, pops up, you know, it defines all the jargon. It explains it like you're five for when, when it's something you don't know.
[00:30:24] Bjorn Billhardt: Another great idea.
[00:30:25] Alex Sarlin: Right? Like, because it's true. There are these barriers to social learning that are so potentially simple to overcome, but we just don't think about them as such.
And I think your concept of inspiration is, is something that's going to really stick with me. I'm going to mull on this because it makes me think of social media, right? When Facebook first came out, And it was like, everybody has a wall and you can poke each other and you can post things on your wall.
And it was, it was so flat and then Friendster and all those, that first generation, nobody thought of, nobody looked at that and said, someday I'm going to scroll for three hours a day through a million different influencers trying to compete for my attention, doing all sorts of things. And we incredibly niche that's all user generated content, right?
That's not, that's not the tech that did that. It's the platform that allowed people to act in a new way and then connect in a new way.
[00:31:17] Bjorn Billhardt: It's another fascinating, and I know we're coming close to the end of it, is another fascinating aspect of this whole Facebook story. So before Facebook, there was Friendster actually, who, who also did the same thing, but both Facebook and Friendster originally was literally just the wall of the directory.
And I actually remember there was an outcry of users when Facebook went to, Hey, we're going to. The front page is going to be this feed. And everyone's like, you're taking away my directory. I found that fascinating because I remember exactly that moment where it's like. No, that makes a lot more business sense for Facebook, but no one was, but like, everyone was like, you're taking away my directory.
What are you doing? So I think it's that type of innovation. So it's not just in the non obvious idea. It's then also in the, in the smallest of refinements, it's actually, it's a really, Hey, let's make the front page. Cause they actually had a feat before, but it was not the front page. It was like, here's the directory.
And then you can click over to see what people are saying. And then they just move that to the front. Simple and, you know, made them billions and billions of dollars. So I feel like we're in AI where it's like, Oh, someone just tweaked this and that's what made it like useful. Right. So I think we're in that stage where,
[00:32:28] Alex Sarlin: and then the question is, you know, can we get out of that even though it's so addictive and it's in some ways it can be really, you know,
[00:32:35] Bjorn Billhardt: there's been a lot of dealing with it.
Yeah.
[00:32:37] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, right. I mean, that sort of variable reward feed that we all live by these days, you know, I think there's a desire to get past that. Is there a way for AI to sort of filter back, like to expose you to the people and the ideas that you want to be exposed to without it being this sort of Yeah.
Chaotic town square that we have all come to love to hate in the social media era. So we've gone far afield of what you've been doing with ability, but I think that the core concepts are there because in doing leadership development, inspiration is obviously a core piece. Group learning is a core piece simulations, many of which have AI baked into them.
Create that authentic assessment just to wrap up, tell our listeners, you know, what has been the most surprising thing about developing ability after, you know, as you say, decades of leadership development and different types of software development experience. And where do you, what are you most excited about next?
[00:33:32] Bjorn Billhardt: You know, I think when I started out in, in the learning and development space, we'd custom developed, uh, leadership programs for companies around the world. And so that was 15 years of my life. I went into the senior executive, you know, office, I was like, what do you need from learning and development? So I talked to a lot of, you know, big C, big time CEOs.
I was really lucky to have a lot of those conversations and they all said different things. And so we all developed, we developed different applications and different, and then over the years. I realize there's so much commonality in what we're teaching, and there isn't actually that much. So that was actually, I said this before, that was one of the more, more interesting things about, you know, there's a two year MBA to teach you judgment, but the actual knowledge base that you need to be successful as a leader in business is not that large.
Which doesn't mean that it's not wickedly, wickedly hard to be a great leader to have the right interactions with people to say the right things at the right time, like it's really hard to do, but there's just not a lot to like, not a lot of knowledge to learn. So I think the most surprising thing for me was when, and this was the origin of the 12 week MBA, it's a pretty provocative title and we had a lot of flack for it.
It's like, Hey, you can't teach an MBA in 12 weeks. This is wrong. And it's like, it's a mini MBA. It's a certificate program, right? Like. I mean, you went, I mean, you, you know, you know about this, right? So, you know, we were like, no, no, we're going to put a stake in the ground here and say, an MBA is, is a very fluid concept.
You're not going to learn to lead a business in two years. You're not going to learn in 20 years, but there's a standard set of knowledge that you do need and you can't teach it in 12 weeks. So that was sort of the origin of the book, the 12 week MBA. the curriculum that the book is based on, which is 12 weeks.
So how little there was in terms of knowledge is, uh, that was probably the most surprising thing. And so where, where that leads me to, it's like, I do think, you know, I'd love your perspective on this. I know the world of the mini MBAs is struggling. The custom acquisition costs are not where it's conducive for these types of programs to really accelerate.
And yet, I think actually we are, we are in the very nascent stages of. This kind of like re evaluation of business education in general. And I do think, you know, the offerings that you all have and that we have, I think are going to play a major role in the ecosystem in the future. So that's where my head is in terms of where the future holds.
So pretty excited about that. And then, and then obviously incorporating AI into everything.
[00:36:00] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, 100%. I mean, the only thing I'd say to that is that I think transfer is the key, right? To your point, you know, it's unlike medicine where you have to know a huge amount of core knowledge about anatomy and physiology and oncology, whatever, whatever you're specializing in and all different things before you can go out and sort of figure anything out.
The corpus of knowledge and business is relatively small, but the hard part is figuring out what part of that knowledge to use when in your actual life. And I think that that Transfer piece is potentially a seed for what the next type of not just business, but definitely business education will be is learning in your actual job or your actual interviews or your actual sort of like being able to take that knowledge and use it and learn it and apply it at the point of need.
That, I think, is a really exciting idea.
[00:36:50] Bjorn Billhardt: I couldn't agree more with that. I think that word transfer is, that's a critical life skill. From my background, uh, we didn't even talk about it, but I, I was, uh, I started out at the University of Texas as a drama major, and I went to this interdisciplinary honors program that basically allowed you to take classes in all areas of the, of the universities.
It's one of the most incredible experiences I've had in my life. And I'm now actually about to invest a little bit in a K through 12 school that has a similar concept of, you know, creating Renaissance people that have the ability to transfer what have pattern recognition, but then the correlate not have pattern recognition bias and know what the difference is.
Right. I mean, those are the key skills that propel you in your career. And that's also propels you forward in your life. And I feel we are, this is going to sound really controversial. I feel we have. overinvested in our entire education system on STEM. I know that sounds controversial because everyone's like STEM, STEM, STEM.
It's like, it is important. You, you know, understanding statistics and what is standard deviation. It's actually important, but it's just as critical to have the transfer skills to be able to say, Hey, I see a pattern here and let me apply it over here. And so I love, I love that word. And I think if I had to put one magic one into this world, it's like, let's talk more about transfer skills instead of STEM skills when we teach our kids.
[00:38:10] Alex Sarlin: I love that. That's a great note to end on. I feel like this has been such a fun conversation. I love it. And I, you know, we obviously should continue to talk, but I hope that some of the listeners are, as you said, you know, saying, Oh, there's some ideas in there that we might incorporate into our products or start something new.
Cause I think the social aspect is huge. Inspiration, huge, really, really great conversation.
[00:38:29] Bjorn Billhardt: 0. 005 equity. That's all we're asking for. If you're, if you're building a business based on anything you heard today,
[00:38:35] Alex Sarlin: we have proof that you heard it here first. Do we have a timestamp? Bjorn Bilhart is the CEO of ability, a provider of leadership development and many MBA programs that is now incorporating AI into simulated learning environments.
Thank you so much for being here with us on ed tech insiders.
[00:38:53] Bjorn Billhardt: Alex, thank you. It was a true pleasure. Fun interview.
[00:38:55] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you liked the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more EdTech Insider, subscribe to the free EdTech Insiders newsletter on Substack.
