The EFMD CLO Roundtable, hosted this year by London Business School, explored the impact of AI on the future of business, work and learning.
Sergei Guriev, the Dean of London Business School, and Helen Kerkentzes, Associate Dean for Executive Education, warmly welcomed more than 30 senior learning & development executives from Europe and overseas who jointly explored AI’s transformation potential for businesses and their workforces, and how corporate learning can play an important role in its deployment.
Keyvan Vakili, Associate Professor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship and Co-Director of the Data Science & AI Initiative at London Business School, led an intense and highly engaging session on the fundamentals of AI, differentiating between predictive and generative AI and their deployment options, underpinned by lots of research findings.
He observed that there are still a vast number of untapped opportunities for AI deployment and that an increase in labour productivity can expand the market. Hence, the impact on employment requires a more nuanced analysis.
However, as content generation becomes more commoditised because of Gen AI, content evaluation and contextualization become more important. Context knowledge requires experience, which makes it more difficult for junior talent to add value. This will constitute a major challenge for future talent pipelining.
As EFMD’s Director of Corporate Services, I had the honour of moderating the subsequent corporate learning session, thereby outlining four essential action areas for L&D:
- Ramping up its own productivity and the personalisation of its offer with AI tools along the entire learning value chain from needs anticipation, design, delivery, through to evaluation.
- Providing a rich up- and reskilling environment to allow learners to build new skills as they emerge, compensating for the effects of automation.
- Enabling the workforce in a segmented approach to understand AI and apply AI tools, from basic literacy to expert knowledge development, and supporting businesses in respective change management efforts.
- Contributing to the enablement of ecosystem partners to grow the market together, and to the discourse on ethical AI and its impact on society.
Central to this session was the presentation of two corporate use cases, each with a different focus area. The first was about UBS and its comprehensive approach to AI people enablement as a joint initiative of HR and Technology (action area 3).
Katarina Rosen, Global Head of Culture and Learning, shared how the entire UBS workforce gets addressed by seven workstreams from AI awareness and foundational knowledge to AI leadership capabilities, organisational transformation, gen AI tool proficiency, expert proficiency, reskilling and UBS embedding.
Top management, e.g., engages in an intense leadership program, supported by a future-ready ecosystem including external experts and 700+ internal champions to accelerate AI adoption and position UBS as an AI-enabled employer of choice.
The second use case was presented by Jenny Lin, Global Head of Learning and Growth at Siemens, sharing Siemens’ approach to leveraging AI in its learning & development practices (action area 1).
Siemens has developed an impressive learning ecosystem called My Learning World, providing at one’s fingertips access to more than 180,000 curated learning assets and content libraries as well as assessment, coaching, mentoring and community learning opportunities.
Earlier this year, the experience platform got augmented by the AI assistant Zoiee that offers learners and curators search, conversation, tutoring and authoring support.
The roundtable concluded with an outlook on the transformational power of AI and the essential role of corporate learning in preparing organisations to thrive in an AI-powered world.
A respective whitepaper has been published jointly by LBS and EFMD Global, providing more details.
For additional insights, announcements and perspectives, visit the conversation on the Corporate Learning.
