Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
How AI Agents Are Transforming Learning at Scale with Uplimit’s Julia Stiglitz
Julia Stiglitz is the CEO and Co-Founder of Uplimit, an AI learning platform helping companies equip their talent with the skills of tomorrow. She previously was a Partner at GSV Ventures, where she invested and partnered with some of the most innovative entrepreneurs in edtech. Prior to GSV, Julia was one of the first hires at Coursera and led many groundbreaking initiatives, mostly notably as Vice President of Enterprise, where she founded and led Coursera's enterprise business, growing it from concept to over 1400 organizations across the globe.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode
- How AI is transforming corporate learning & development
- The move from catalogs to custom AI academies
- Why SMEs are becoming company instructors
- The new role of L&D teams in an AI workplace
- How rapid AI innovation drives upskilling
✨ Episode Highlights
[00:02:22] Julia on moving from teaching to Coursera and founding Uplimit.
[00:04:29] Pivoting from B2C courses to an AI-powered enterprise platform
[00:06:44] Introducing Uplimit’s suite of AI agents for program management, skill-building, and teaching assistance.
[00:12:32] How small L&D teams can create custom, interactive learning experiences at scale.
[00:18:35] Leveraging subject matter experts to teach and drive business-aligned learning.
[00:23:21] Building AI academies to enable entire organizations.
[00:27:39] Using AI for real-time sales enablement and rapid product updates.
[00:31:47] AI as a tool for making learning experiences more human, not less.
[00:33:54] Julia’s vision for achieving quality education at scale in the AI era.
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[00:00:00] Julia Stiglitz: How you build an AI academy is actually gonna be pretty different depending on what your objectives are and what the ethos of the company is. And the tools that you're using are probably slightly different at different companies. So you know, you're gonna want that to be pretty tailored and an AI platform can enable that sort of tailoring.
To make it very specific to your company and actually accomplish the goals that your company is set out to accomplish.
[00:00:28] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all here at EdTech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod. Check out our newsletter and also our event calendar.
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for this episode of EdTech Insiders. We have a very special guest. Who is truly a legend in the EdTech space and somebody who I, I'm honored to have worked with in one of her past roles. Julia Stiglitz is the CEO and Co-founder of Uplimit, an AI learning platform, helping companies equip their talent with the skills of tomorrow.
She was previously a partner at GSV Ventures where she invested and partnered with some of the most innovative entrepreneurs in EdTech prior to GSV. Julia was one of the very first hires at Coursera where we got to work together, and she led many groundbreaking initiatives. Most notably as the Vice President of Enterprise, where she founded and led Coursera's Enterprise business, growing it from concept to over 1400 organizations across the globe.
Julia holds a BA from Pomona College, an MBA from Stanford, GSB, and an MA in Education from Stanford University. Julia Stiglitz, it's so great to see you. Welcome to EdTech Insiders.
[00:02:04] Julia Stiglitz: Alex, thanks so much for having me. It's wonderful to see you.
[00:02:07] Alex Sarlin: It's really wonderful to see you as well. So first off, for people who are not yet familiar with Uplimit, give us the overview of what is Uplimit, what do you do, and how have you evolved the company over the last few years to really focus on the skills of tomorrow?
[00:02:22] Julia Stiglitz: Yeah, so as you mentioned my background, I started as a teacher, a teacher, America teacher in East San Jose, and then was one of the first employees at Coursera. And while I was there, there was always this disconnect for me between what I had experienced as a teacher, where learning was engaging and differentiated and inspiring and sort of what I saw with that first wave of online learning, which was absolutely amazing at opening up.
This incredible content from these remarkable individuals, but lacked a lot of those interactive qualities that are really what make learning work for most people. But at the time I thought like that's what you need to do to get to scale like it. That's how we're reaching millions of people and it's a trade off, but it's one that we need to make to get to scale, which was so core to our mission.
And then during the pandemic, I started to think, well, maybe we can solve this problem differently. Maybe there's a way that we actually can get engagement and scalability. And the big things that were changing were how people engaged online socially with the pandemic. And then two, we saw that there was a huge amount of potential for AI to play a big role in making it easier to deliver programs and creating new experiences for learners.
And this was about a year before the chat two PT launch. So that's when I teamed up with my co-founder, Sara Baha, who you also know, who's an early Coursera engineer, and then had gone on to Google Brain, and then Jake Samuelson an early product manager at Coursera, and then had gone on to lead product in a number of companies.
And the three of us got together really to think about what this next generation of online learning can look like, especially for adult learners in the corporate setting.
[00:03:59] Alex Sarlin: Yes, and you know, I, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, you, your first classes were B2C and they were in very cutting edge AI skills, which is, you know, core to part of your mission, but you quickly not realized.
I think it was always the plan to be able to really move into the enterprise space and create incredibly interactive. Effective learning experiences to keep companies up to speed with all of these new changes, technological changes that are coming to the world. Tell us about the B2C and B2B thinking behind Uplimit.
[00:04:29] Julia Stiglitz: Yeah. Yeah, so we actually started selling into companies very early, very quickly. It was always the plan, but what we were selling initially was this marketplace of interactive blended learning courses taught by experts within ai. And we brought on some amazing customers and, uh, a number of Fortune 500 companies.
But very quickly what we started to hear was, I like your content, but actually our most mission critical content is our own content. Mm-hmm. And our own learning experiences. And what's really remarkable about you all is this AI platform that you built. And so can we use your platform to make it easier to create and deliver our customer education programs, our leadership programs, our sales enablement programs, our onboarding programs.
And so we shifted gears and became totally focused on the platform and figuring out how you leverage AI to make it a lot easier to create and run really amazing programs.
[00:05:29] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, and, and I think that speaks to your insight that you're mentioning about that first generation that we were, you know, the MOOC moment back in 20 13, 20 14, where it was like, how do we get great content out in the world?
Well, that's a really important scalable first start, but getting interactivity at scale, the ability to actually have an immersive, interesting, engaging, collaborative learning experience. At a humongous scale that really was enabled by ai, I would say I don't think anybody knew how to do it Before AI existed, we, we, we had Jeff Magine Calva on the podcast a few months ago, right at his end of his Coursera stint.
It was many years, but, and he was saying how Coursera pivoted to, basically from peer review, they offer started offering ai. Feedback instead of peer review as an option, and almost everybody preferred it and would much rather have rapid fire AI feedback than have to wait for the peer review cycle, which is, as you remember, one of the core issues at Coursera.
You know, AI basically opens up interactivity at a scale we've just never seen before. So. You have been thinking about this at great depth, and you just released a whole suite of AI agents that do different parts of the delivery. Tell us about your suite of AI agents and how you're using them to create interactive, really engaging learning about business's core content at scale.
[00:06:44] Julia Stiglitz: Great. Yeah. So earlier this year we announced this suite of AI agents that's really designed to create new experiences for learners and make it easier for administrators. And so there's, there's four areas that we're focused on. So the first is around program management. We built AI agents that do things like analyze the data for an administrator.
Pull out subsets of learners that are struggling, that aren't completing draft intervention. So draft nudges that can be pushed to slack or teams or email, and then the human's still in the loop and the human looks at the email. Make sure it's what they wanna say and, and then presses send. It takes all of the legwork away from what otherwise would be an incredibly arduous and time consuming task of sending these personalized interventions that are very powerful, that let people know that you care, that you're watching what's going on, that you are there if they have something that they're struggling with.
But it takes away all that work and allows you to do it really quickly and, and then later this summer we're gonna come out with a fully autonomous agent that supports the program management. Mm-hmm. And is can go even deeper so you can analyze how somebody got stuck on a role play and recognize that they weren't understanding some component of the material.
And maybe. The agent is sending them back to that component of the course. So maybe the agent is constructing a new role play that would allow them to practice that area again, or in a slightly different way. And so I think one of the things that's so exciting about it is, you know, you start with AI solving this problem of efficiency of, you know, it would be very difficult to send all these.
Emails, send all this, monitor all the data. But then what you start getting towards really quickly is beyond efficiency, to creating an even better learning experience than what you could create with humans alone and where you can get deeper and more personalized. So that's the first one that program manager agents.
Yep. And I'll just very quickly going through the others, we have a teaching assistant agent that can be the first line of a defense in large. Programs, large webinars, large experiences where you have people asking a lot of questions, and it's not scalable for one instructor to monitor and answer all the questions.
Instead, the AI can do it. We have skill building agents that facilitate practice throughout a course experience, and then finally course building agents that you can upload documents and then it'll draft what we think of as the first draft of a course. Including deciding what interactive elements to include, so like should you include a role play?
Should you include flashcards? Should it be text? Should you have an image? Making those sorts of decisions in terms of the design of the program.
[00:09:24] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. I mean, what's so exciting about hearing this vision is what I'm hearing you say is that in learning and development, in creating, delivering, personalizing, online learning, especially in high stakes environments, in very modern content within companies, you know, normally it would take either a lot of people or a small number of people doing a huge amount of work to send out all those nudges and check in on everybody's progress and try to personalize the feedback and answer questions in a webinar.
It's basically like. I think, and I think historically within l and d, it's been a few people doing a huge amount of work. I don't think there's that many companies that have these sort of massive l and d functions. I, I, I may be wrong there, but that's been from my experience. So instead, you have a small number of people who are working really hard, who are doing all of this administrative work, who are doing all of this complex, you know, data analysis on the fly.
And instead you can break it down into all of these functions and create incredibly powerful. Semi-autonomous or autonomous AI agents, they can design the course, they can answer questions. As a teaching assistant, they can manage the program and encourage usage and check in data. They can even do skill building, as you said.
They can actually do some of the direct teaching and head towards the outcomes. And suddenly it goes from being, you know, a four person team managing, uh, a l and d portfolio to feeling like, Hey, every single class feels like it has a hole. Team behind it that is really working behind the scenes all the time to make things amazing.
Is that, is that the experience you've seen as you roll it out?
[00:10:53] Julia Stiglitz: Very much so. And what we often hear from learning and development leaders is like, this is what they wanted to be doing. They just couldn't do it. Like, it's not that they thought like e-learning was the pinnacle of a learning experience. It was that that was the only option given the constraints on.
Resources and given the limitations of technology and that's just, you know, not true anymore. There's like a whole new canvas that learning and development programs are able to play on and able to, you know, reimagine what their team is doing and the impact that their team is having on organizations. So like one of the companies that we work with is very small learning and development, technical learning and development team, and they have been able to build.
An incredible number of courses and programs throughout the course of the year with a very lean team. And it's not just e-learning. They're leading, you know, cohort-based learning experience with live instructions. They've enlisted their subject matter experts to create and run programs on our platform as well, and they don't have teaching experience, but there's enough guidance within the platform that allows them to create and run those programs.
They've rolled out small, what they call small quick bites, which are like these interactive, practice-based small experiences that allow them to practice one skill. So it's this really robust program that they've rolled out over the course of a year with an exceptionally lean team. And before that would've taken a huge team and a very, very long time to roll out.
Just like one, you know, one leadership program. Exactly. And then the other thing I would mention is those programs are, are customed to Procore.
[00:12:32] Alex Sarlin: Yeah.
[00:12:33] Julia Stiglitz: So, and that's one of the big things that we're seeing transition, whereas before, you know, as rolling out a sort of blunt catalog and maybe one course would be relevant or some course would be relevant.
But it's not getting all the way to the application of a skill within the context that an employee is in. And these courses are getting there. They're very specific to the Procore environment. They're talking about the technology that Procore is, is using. They're talking about the culture that Procore has, and that's just a whole different level of experiences than was possible before.
[00:13:05] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, and I, I think implicit in what you're saying as well is that having this enormously expanded capacity takes that small lean l and d team and puts them in a strategic role. They can say, oh, we want more quick bites because people are looking for short form content. We want to recruit SMEs, you know, as a subject matter experts in different areas.
We wanna go deeper into cohort, like rather than, and it allows 'em to do all the things they wanted to do. Right. They're probably five years ago would be like, here's our. Dream roadmap for the next three years. Imagine if we had these quick classes. Imagine if we could get SMEs to teach and instead they can do all of it at once and then it becomes it.
It's created in part by AI agents. It's run certainly in part with AI agents, and there are all these teaching assistants to support any kind of instructor. I mean. This is really exciting for the l and d space. For me, it's also exciting for AI in education writ large because you could see this being what the future of higher ed looks like, right?
That you can have all of these agents doing a lot of the work that normally fall on teaching assistants or professors, or TAs or TAs are teaching assistants. But you know, and instead of it being all of this manual work. You can actually do the classes you always wanted to do, or the same, you know, person could teach five classes, uh, instead of two in a semester, and they could teach all the things they really love, but they're not having to keep up with every element of grading and every element of attendance taking and all of these painful things.
So I feel like what you're doing is really a vision of the future of what education could be, where capacity is increased so much that educators. L and D. You know, folks at corporate training can think about what they actually want and what their learners actually want, rather than just trying to keep up with what they already have.
[00:14:45] Julia Stiglitz: And we do have a few higher education customers that are using our platform, which is super exciting. We'd love to continue to grow that audience over time, but there still is a scarcity issue when it comes to education that not everybody has access to high quality education, and that we know that it takes a lot.
To persevere through a learning experience, whether it's a corporate adult learning experience or whether it's in higher education, and the technology that is out there now can really drive a higher level of persistence and a higher level of engagement that can have a big impact on people's lives. And so.
I am very excited about this direction, you know, not just for corporate learning, but for higher education as well and, and the potential impact it can have.
[00:15:32] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, and and one aspect of it that you named that I'd love to double click on, 'cause I think it's also really an interesting direction for this, is you mentioned that, you know, subject matter experts who had never taught before can now teach.
Classes, cohort based classes in this type of environment because they have enough AI agent assistance to create the course, to manage it, to send all the nudges, to check all the work, all of these things. Well, that potentially, if you sort of extrapolate that out, that could very quickly change what l and D looks like.
Because instead of everything having to go, you know. The sort of bottleneck of the l and d department and all the subject matter experts in the marketing department, in the data analysis department, in leadership, all having to sort of go through l and d. I can imagine a world where any expert within a company, expert in any vertical can suddenly share their expertise with the rest of the company, with new hires or cross-functionally without it having to be this huge project.
I'd love to hear what that looks like for you.
[00:16:33] Julia Stiglitz: Yeah, no, I think one of the transformations that I think is gonna happen for l and d over the next few years is having learning and development much, much more tightly tied into the business. And there is a number of different places where that'll show itself from who's producing some of the courses where if you can leverage subject matter experts to assist in creating the courses.
They're already helping in terms of providing guidance, but it normally is a pretty difficult process going back and forth between an instructional designer and a subject matter expert. Yeah, not easy at all. Instead, you can disempower the subject matter expert to create that quick bite that that sort of, or another company called that practice dojos, like you can have subject matter experts create this or facilitate the live cohort sessions.
And that really allows for more courses. It allows for more tailored courses. It allows for these really influential individuals within a company to be able to share their expertise. So I think that's really exciting. But it also changes how the l and d team thinks about their work. Like kind of one of what to what you were saying, you know, starting with what are the problems that the business needs to solve.
And not having all the resource constraints that you've previously had, allow you to like really focus on that question and find solutions that are derived from that as opposed to here's a content catalog. Right? And that's sort of the hammer, regardless of what the business case is, it's coming in instead.
It's like, okay, it looks like we need to, and one of the things we're hearing a lot from companies right now, we need a more enabled workforce. How you build an AI academy is actually gonna be pretty different depending on what your objectives are and what the ethos of the company is. And the tools that you're using are probably slightly different at different companies.
So you know, you're gonna want that to be pretty tailored and an AI platform can enable that sort of tailoring to make it very specific to your company and actually accomplish the goals that your company is set out to accomplish.
[00:18:35] Alex Sarlin: Yes, a hundred percent. I mean, a DG you can imagine so many different use cases of individual subject matter experts within a company, being able to develop it and then create learning experiences, courses, quick bites.
And then, yeah. I wanna drill down on, on what you're saying in, in terms of ai, the other AI in the other side of the equation, because this is also core to what Uplimit does. Yeah. You know, the, the courses you create, there's certainly the courses that you created on your own, but I'm sure that increasingly the courses that you're helping companies create from their own material.
AI and AI tooling, and AI first thinking and all of those things are, AI enablement, as you just mentioned, are increasingly the subject matter. Not just the tooling creating the courses, but it's actually what people are learning how to do. Yeah. And we know that this is gonna change. Workforce enormously upskilling is just going to hit this sort of incredible as ascent moment where it's just sort of like constantly having to learn new things.
'cause the tech landscape is changing so fast. So given that. How are you helping these companies not only use AI to take their existing material and make it into amazing interactive experiences, but also constantly draw in new material that's relevant to where their company is going?
[00:19:47] Julia Stiglitz: Yeah. So I do think that the first step is putting on your oxygen mask first before assisting others.
So I think, uh, the l and d team has a potential to be a real leader in thinking about what AI enablement looks like. And you can very quickly show measurable impact in terms of what an AI solution has on the learning, on the number of people that you're reaching in terms of a reduction in the number of instructional hours, if there was live training in terms of the outcomes and completion engagement, or having it tied to specific business metrics so you can make a very strong case for AI tools within l and d.
And be a powerful example for an organization. And we see that with our customers too. So one of our large customers, that's a large growth stage tech company, their team is really held up as the example of, look at this team that has become AI enabled. They've dramatically increased the amount of training that they're producing.
They are increasing the outcomes of those experiences and they haven't grown their team. And so I think that's the first step. But then the second step is helping the organization become AI enabled and helping the organization go through a really big change, which is also very scary for a lot of people.
And so there's different ways that we've seen organizations approach this. One is building a sort of custom AI academy. Mm-hmm. And I think that it is custom is very important. That it's not just a generic set of videos that you're rolling out, that it is actually getting to what you want people to be doing with AI in your organization.
'cause that's when the aha moment Yes. Happens where you actually see how AI. Can make it easier, faster, better to do your job. And that's when you're gonna see people continuously use it and then ultimately have that translate into some type of business impact on the road. So like it has to be pretty custom.
And then I think the second element when I think about building like a great AI academy is it has to have practice and application in it. Like it's not just watching a video, it's not just reading text. You have to have that aha moment. You have to build the intuition. You have to be thinking about your context and what problems you're trying to solve, and then how to leverage the technology around that.
And so that practice and application has to be baked into the solution. And that's one of the big ways that we see people like why people are coming to us, that they, you know, it's not just watching the videos. They want people to apply it. And then I would say what I'm beginning to see that I am super excited about beyond building an AI academy are companies that are starting to think about how jobs themselves are gonna change with AI and beginning to develop courses and programs that are oriented towards that.
Mm-hmm. So there's one customer that we're working with right now. They know that the role of the support agents, human agents, not AI agents, is gonna change. And they feel a very strong obligation to those employees. And they wanna create a path for those employees to find future opportunities, either at that company or at another company.
And so that is the other role that I think as companies sort of find their bearing with this and an LD team start to sort of really appreciate the critical role that they have in this transformation. One of those elements will be around the upskilling of people into higher demand roles as roles change with ai, and I'm very excited about that.
And I'm, I, I'm excited for Uplimit to help facilitate that.
[00:23:21] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's really interesting. I, it's a time of really deep rethinking about the future of work, the future of skills. I'm curious, Julia, you mentioned how one of the things that Uplimit can do really right now that's really exciting is they can take a company's existing training materials or their existing, you know, what, what they already teach and make it more interactive, make it be able to be produced and and delivered at scale.
But it could be customized to that particular company. But when you mentioned these AI academies, I wonder if there's an interesting opportunity to take. Some of the public content, like Open AI's, AI Academy, or the work that philanthropic is putting out, or, you know, perplexity or any of that and say, okay, well if you're a company that is using perplexity, perplexity has all of this content, but it's obviously totally, you know, one size fits all content.
It's for anybody using perplexity. But we know that your, your vision within X company is to use perplexity to do y. Yeah. Could you take the perplexity content? And say, okay, we'll use this as part of the material for a course. You, you will watch a video on perplexity. Yeah. But then you're gonna do an interactive, very company specific, very raw, specific activity with, it feels like a really interesting way to put the pieces together.
[00:24:36] Julia Stiglitz: Yeah. I was just on the call with a learning leader this morning, and that is exactly what they're doing. They're a, a Google shop. They use Gemini really extensively. There was a huge release from Google about a week or two ago. Yeah. With all these new super cool products. But they want their employees to be able to leverage those products and those tools, which is the same challenge that you know, almost every, especially tech companies are having right now.
And so they're taking the videos, the presentations from Google, and then they're adding an element of practice and reflection to it Exactly. So that people can start to think through, how do I actually apply this in my job? What are the ways that I can use this to make it better, make it easier for me to do my job, have a bigger impact.
And that's, you know, that's what learning is like. It's not just the videos, it's, that doesn't get far enough and that won't translate into business outcomes. It needs to go further. And that's where, you know, the practice comes in.
[00:25:30] Alex Sarlin: A hundred percent. And, and it is incredibly exciting because it opens up the content to, you know, the content can come from anywhere.
It can come from inside the company. It can come from the, the, the frontier models, you know, or, or any specific tool. If you're using something, a very specific AI tool for reviewing legal briefs, great. Well, they, they have some training that they provide and you could then personalize it to your company's use case.
Why are you using it? What are you gonna use it for? Have some practice or anything on the internet. Frankly, you could get stuff off YouTube and use it for that. I mean, it's really puts the pieces together in a way that we haven't seen before in l and d. Yeah. Where there people buy these, you know, the Skillsoft catalog, the LinkedIn learning catalog, and then people are just sort of left to figure out on their own how to weave together the, the LinkedIn learning videos with their particular role and their strategy and, and the tools they use, and very few people can really find the means to do it.
Uplimit is helping you put all the pieces together. Tell me more.
[00:26:26] Julia Stiglitz: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, it's changing so quickly, right? So like a catalog's gonna get dated quickly. Content you produce is gonna get dated quickly. How do you stay current with this? And I think that's also where you can, you know, pull content from somewhere else, add a practice element to it.
And that is a great learning experience. Like that is a complete learning experience. And so that's very much what we're focused on.
[00:26:48] Alex Sarlin: And even video itself is now getting very inexpensive to update or change. So you can imagine a world in which that you automate a video. So it's like you watch a video from OpenAI about their, or Gemini, let's say about, you know, their new features.
And then you have a video made inside the company, but made with ai. So it can be updated every month with whatever needed with a company strategy. Introducing the interactive and then the interactive element. It's so interesting how AI sort of comes into this learning space and allows much faster iteration and much more looping and, you know, you just, you don't have to accept anything being outdated the way that we all have in l and d and in in traditional learning.
[00:27:29] Julia Stiglitz: Completely. And AI is also the reason why we have to like keep updating things, right? Yeah. So another use case that we're seeing along those lines is around sales enablement.
[00:27:39] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm.
[00:27:40] Julia Stiglitz: Especially for tech companies where the velocity that companies are releasing things in right now is just. Insane. And so how do you keep your sales reps up to date in terms of what they need to be pitching in terms of the products?
And one of the ways that you can do so is both leveraging AI to create the learning materials and then pushing it out to nudging it out through Slack, through teams to the employees that need it at that point of time. And then ensuring that they have practice. So both they internalize it, like they do a role play where they have to explain the new feature to a maybe skeptical ai.
And then you get the data to see who's mastering this and who might need additional support. And so I think the learning function really changes with this, where it becomes. Less about just learning for corporates and, and really a performance engine in terms of how do you get people to be successful and effective in their job, and how do you provide them with support and how do you come in at the right time when they need it and provide what they need to, you know, advance in their jobs, in their careers.
[00:28:48] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's almost like, you know, within traditional companies, if something new happens, a, a strategic change, a new release, a, a policy change, there'll be like a memo or a Google Doc or some kind of notification that this thing has happened, and that's sort of all you get. But it feels like with this, in this new world where learning experiences can be built very quickly, iteratively, and with a lot of automation, instead of a memo, you get a class or you get a module, or you get a learning experience.
It's like, oh, this, we just launched this thing. Everybody should, you know, do this activity to understand what it is, how to talk about it, and what objections you might come through if you're a salesperson, how to market it if you're a marketing person, how to, and it's, it's just like, it's such a different, and we potentially at least weaves learning into the sort of flow of communication in a way that instead of three months later, you have a class about something if you're lucky.
Yeah. It's like the class arrives with the information.
[00:29:43] Julia Stiglitz: Yeah. Yeah. An example that I actually just rolled out for Uplimit employees is we are doing something called Speed 360 feedback, where uh, it's like performance reviews, but the only people that see it are the employees. And it's just a really designed around everyone giving each other really good high quality feedback.
Mm-hmm. And opening the doors of conversation and having people get that as a development opportunity. I want everybody to be able to give good feedback and know what it means to give good feedback. And that involves learning what good feedback is, but then it also involves practice. Yep. And so I created a very short course, and this was inspired actually by one of our customers, Sony.
Is doing something similar. So it was very much inspired by them. So I created a very short course, uh, very short module that explained, you know, what our feedback framework was, and then created a role play for them to practice giving feedback with that framework. And then they're going off and giving the feedback and then they'll submit a survey at the end.
And we have all the data in terms of how people are progressing through this experience that is allowing them to give better feedback to each other. You know, it takes 10 minutes right. To go through that whole experience. But it's really powerful 'cause it's exactly what they need right now. Yes. I can see all the data, I know what's happening, and there's lots of moments like that.
[00:31:00] Alex Sarlin: Yep. And if you don't take it, the AI will ping you and say, by the way, did you check that out? Uh, your, your, your performance, uh, your, your, uh, sorry, what did you call it? Yes. Yeah. Right now
[00:31:11] Julia Stiglitz: is coming from. Me. So we did have to warn people that like, were like, yeah, yeah. Don't be scared. It's Monday and I'm sending you a DM via Slack.
[00:31:21] Alex Sarlin: Exactly. Right, right, right, right. But it makes total sense.
[00:31:26] Julia Stiglitz: It turns out a DM from the CEO is very effective.
[00:31:32] Alex Sarlin: You gotta make a digital twin AI that that keeps everybody in line. Yeah, no, I, yeah, sure. Different kinds of motivation. Yeah, people may start to tune out AI assistance if they know their ai, ai, you know, nudges. But we'll see where that all goes. Oh,
[00:31:47] Julia Stiglitz: is it? Is the human still there? And actually, that's another thing that I will say that is, I think a misconception around what you could do with AI and learning.
Like, I actually think you can use AI to make a more human experience. Yeah. Like there's no way that I could've nudged every employee in the company without the tooling. But I did it with the tooling and then people are sending me notes afterwards and I am, you know, sending them a quick note back and that is a very human interaction.
So it was AI facilitated, but it created a human interaction that I wouldn't have been able to do before.
[00:32:20] Alex Sarlin: Totally.
[00:32:21] Julia Stiglitz: Yeah,
[00:32:22] Alex Sarlin: totally. I, I can imagine a world where if any subject matter expert or employee, basically in a company can send little classes. Like if, you know, it's like they do a loom video. And then based on the Loom video, it can create a course.
And then suddenly everybody's getting these interesting ideas from one another about things they're thinking about, which they can respond to. You could get to know people in an interesting way. It just, it just, it allows people to sort of insert themselves into the learning environment and the learning environment to be sort of part of the nature of work rather than something you have to stop and do compliance training once a year or, you know, you have to stop and do so if people are in it.
And then the learning is integrated into everything else. Then people are integrated in everything else and you get to learn. Yeah. I mean, people could even teach each other things that are not work related. I could imagine. Yeah. Sending something around, being like, Hey, my hobby is, you know, planting cacti and I, here's a fun little course about how to do that.
If you're interested and you can learn, learn about me. Take five minutes and then learn something. Why not? That would be amazing.
[00:33:19] Julia Stiglitz: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:33:20] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. So last question for you. This is, I mean, this is so much fun and obviously we share the enthusiasm for the excitement of how AI is gonna change everything.
You've been on the investment side of gsv, you've seen a huge number of pitches of different kind of ad tech companies. You've been on the builder side of multiple companies. From your perspective as the CEO of Uplimit working in corporate training and l and d, but also just as a, somebody in the EdTech space in, in a lot of different ways.
What are you most excited about over the next couple of years? Let's start within l and d and corporate training, but I'd love to hear it generally as well.
[00:33:54] Julia Stiglitz: Hmm. That's a great question. Let's see. I mean, in some ways I, what I'm most excited about ties back to our mission in terms of how you achieve quality at scale.
And we're still in the early innings of this. Like I think there's been so much progress and we're still in the early innings of companies. Really rolling this out and having the experience of being able to impact more of their employees in a more profound way. Yeah. That they couldn't do before because of resource constraints.
Yeah. Or university students or professional education coming from higher education where they can have a bigger impact on those students with less resources. And that's what I'm most excited about. Like I think how we do that, like there's a number of different things to be built. There's things that have been built, there's I'm sure things that we haven't dreamed up yet that are gonna come out in the next year.
The space is moving so quickly, the underlying models are changing so fast. So fast. But that's the vision. Like that we can make education not something that is so scarce. And then it can actually work for a lot of people. And I, I think a lot of people are gonna need higher level skills, you know, in thinking about the impact that AI is gonna have on our economy and our world.
And I think they're gonna need to adjust skills at a pace that our current legacy education system was not designed for.
[00:35:18] Alex Sarlin: Yep. Everything everywhere, all at once enabled by ai. Very fast changing, but hopefully in a fun way, right? Maybe we can avoid it feeling like we're all caught in the flood and instead be like, Hey, we're all surfing this crazy wave every three months is, you know, AI can do more and more and more.
We don't have to be afraid of it coming for our jobs, although some might be. But instead, how can you use it to change your job, to accelerate what you can do to think about, you know, even a new career. I mean, I don't know, this is a maybe naively optimistic view of it, but I, I really am excited when I hear about the kind of things you're doing at Uplimit.
It's sort of taking l and d, which is an incredibly important function, but often undervalued or over, over, uh, burdened. There are all sorts of things and saying. How could this just be so much more interesting and fun and interactive? How could the l and d folks be more fulfilled and more strategic? I think that same thinking could apply to a lot of the ed education sphere, from classroom teachers, to tutors, to professors, to college students.
It's, it's an exciting time. I wish we had more time. But we'll talk more soon, and I know that you know, Uplimit is doing incredible things. You should come back on and talk about more things on our Week in EdTech Segment as you continue to launch. Julia Stiglitz is the CEO and Co-founder of Uplimit, an AI learning platform, helping companies equip their talent with the skills with.
Tomorrow. Thanks so much for being here with us, Julia. Thank
[00:36:39] Julia Stiglitz: you, Alex. It's wonderful to see you. And yeah, thank you so much for having me on your show.
[00:36:44] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community.
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