This week I attended the Learning Technology Exhibition and Conference (https://www.learningtechnologies.co.uk/) in London. These are my thoughts from the day that I spent there.
The exhibition was extremely busy with many booths of all shapes and sizes. There were 11 seminar theatres offering a whole range of talks which were always well attended.
The exhibition was co-located with the HR Technology Exhibition but as I had little interest in this, I did not spend much time there.
Almost every technology claimed to be “AI powered” or some such similar phrase. I have no doubt that they were but it made it seem that AI was not much of a differentiator for anyone. Beyond that, many of the booths were similar and made equally meaningless claims, for example, “Crafting learning solutions that enhance your business.” Can you imagine crafting a learning solution that is harmful to my business? If not, you are not really telling me anything I could not already guess.
These are some more examples of meaningless statements that were on some of the booths that I saw.
“The future of e-learning is just around the corner”
“Advancing Future-Forward Learning”
“We are at the forefront of refining learning with our customer-centric, AI Powered solution”
If I am wandering past your booth, I need to easily know what you do so that I can decide whether to stop and talk to you or not. These sorts of statements do not help.
As usual, despite the number of attendees, many people on booths seemed to prefer to talk to their colleagues or work on their laptops. I really do wonder why they bother going. Despite walking around with a name badge that states I am a Managing Director, I was barely approached by anyone on any booth, despite loitering around many of them.
I did attend some really interesting talks of which these are some highlights.
AI is great at performing mundane repetitive tasks but require much more power and data than a human. Over 20 billion data points are required to create an accurate image using AI which all humans could produce in minutes.
Humans are excellent at higher order skills such as planning, reasoning and critical thinking. We have learnt to do many things unconsciously. However, AI is now capable of learning and engaging in cognitive work.
There will be a skills shift over the next few years towards higher cognitive skills and emotional skills. The World Economic Forum predicts that the top 3 skills required will be
Analytical thinking
Creating thinking
Resilience, flexibility and agility
These human skills are increasingly important in an AI driven world.
The rate at which new consumer technologies are adopted is rapidly increasing; for example, the telephone took over 50 years to be adopted whereas the smartphone reached almost full adoption in about 5 years.
Sales managers are among the least likely roles to be automated, along with dentists and surgeons. Sales and marketing are some of the least likely roles to be impacted but automating certain tasks could have an enormous economic impact. That’s more of a personal highlight than anything ground breaking!
I did not see any great new technology but that might be because I have been to the show a number of times now and have seen most of what is on offer. However, I did sit through a talk from Bright Carbon, a Presentation design agency, about building PowerPoint presentations that was far more illuminating than I expected. They have a free plug in to PowerPoint that provides lots of useful extra tools that you can use to improve your presentation decks. They also offer webinars and free sessions to help people do this better.
Some interesting facts that I learnt during the talks
Every minute, shoppers spend over $400,000 on Amazon
Every minute, over 500 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube
There was 400 times more data transmitted via the internet last year than all the words ever spoken throughout time.
In 2025, there will be more work done by machines than by humans for the first time ever.
In 2014, WhatsApp employed 34 people and was worth 19 billion dollars. In the same year, GAP was also worth 19 billion dollars and employed 168,000 people.
Humans spend 80% of their day on activities that do not make much of a contribution. 71 minutes are spent procrastinating!
These are links to some really interesting articles that were referenced by one of the speakers. They will take a bit more time to digest so I will be writing more about these in the future.