Welcome to an inspiring conversation on the future of learning with Michael Ioffe, founder of Arist, a company doing really interesting work in education. Michael is a Forbes 30 under 30 and a Thiel fellow. Michael joins host Mike Palmer to share his journey, beginning with his early obsession with education, influenced by his parents who were refugees. His experiences, including scaling free live conversations with entrepreneurs to 500 cities in 50 countries by age 18, led to a critical insight in a war zone in Yemen: the best way to deliver learning where educational resources and internet access are limited is via text message. This led to building Arist, which focuses on meeting people where they are and making learning conversational and digestible.
We explore how constraints drive innovation and how Arist was ahead of the curve, foreseeing that most workplace communication would shift to messaging tools and leveraging the power of early AI models like GPT-3. We discuss how being text-based puts Arist at the native environment of LLMs and how conciseness forces clarity in learning design. Michael explains that Arist courses are not "micro learning" in a way that suggests they are less significant, but are intentionally designed to chunk information into bite-sized, conversational, and practice-oriented pieces.
We also cover the importance of making instruction feel human, using custom data and custom workflows to ensure content is reliable, and how Arist enables rapid upskilling in the flow of work for enterprises. For example, a client with 30,000 employees was able to push out content on AI and data literacy immediately using Arist, compared to the six months it would have taken with existing tools.
The conversation culminates in a discussion about the shift from focusing on skills to focusing on outcomes, and why agency is the single most important human skill in the age of AI. Michael shares that the role of the teacher is evolving from knowledge-provider to curator, facilitator, and mentor, helping students define their ambitious outcomes. The limit in the age of exponentially better AI models is no longer the model, but our own ability to ask better, smarter, and more interesting questions.
Key Takeaways
Learning in the Flow of Work: Learning should meet people where they are, making it digestible and conversational, often via messaging tools.
The Power of Constraints: Challenges, such as a lack of internet access in a war zone, can drive innovations like text message courses, which then prove widely relevant.
AI and Frictionless Learning: Leveraging AI to create content delivered through messaging makes learning completely frictionless for both the creator and the end-user.
Focus on Outcomes Over Skills: The future of education needs to shift its focus from building and measuring skills to achieving specific, desired outcomes, with AI accelerating the path to those outcomes.
Agency is the Core Skill: The number one skill that matters with AI is human agency—the ability to figure out the outcome you care about and what you need to do to accomplish it.
New Role for Educators: Teachers and leaders shift to curators, facilitators, and mentors who help students define ambitious goals and push them to achieve more than they thought possible.
If you're interested in how disruptive technology like AI is reshaping corporate learning, instructional design, and career readiness, this episode offers a forward-thinking perspective. We break down the evolution of learning delivery and why focusing on human agency is key to thriving in the future of work.
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