86: Using AI at Work to Rethink How We Learn and Build Expertise

**Panos Siozos** (0:00)
Nobody will be replaced by AI, but everyone can be replaced by a competitor who is using AI better than us.

**Chris Daigle** (0:06)
I would imagine that the finance person in your company is probably saying, oh, it can never do it as good as I can. Therefore, I'm not going to embrace it. I'm not going to leverage it. What was that experience like for LearnWorlds when all of a sudden, it had AI capability?

**Panos Siozos** (0:21)
So we try to be very careful from the beginning that guys, we're not trying to replace you. You are the director, but we're trying to enhance you.

**Chris Daigle** (0:28)
For professionals that are listening to this, how would you recommend that they not just consume the content, watch the video, listen to the podcast, but that they actually internalize this information about AI specifically in their industry so that they can not just know about it, but actually do something with it.

**Panos Siozos** (0:44)
I guess using it every day and embedding it into your workflows and directing it, it's the best thing that we can do right now.

**Chris Daigle** (0:52)
Panos Siozos is a pioneer in online education and co-founder of LearnWorlds. With a PhD in Educational Tech and decades of hands-on experience, he's reshaping how we learn in the age of AI, turning deep expertise into powerful digital learning experiences. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Daigle. Each week, we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs, and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. Right now, every business leader is asking the same question. What are we going to do about AI?
If this is you, chiefaiofficer.com has the answer. We'll give you a simple path forward where we provide executive and team training so your people know exactly how to safely use generative AI in their day-to-day. We also manage the deployment and implementation to make sure tools actually get adopted and deliver results. And we'll also guide company-wide transformation so AI becomes part of your operating system, not just another shiny object. The companies that act now will increase productivity, cut costs, and grow faster than their competitors. Those that wait will get left behind. So if you want to make AI work in your business, visit chiefaiofficer.com and see how we're helping companies of all sizes finally get results from AI. Hi everybody and welcome to the next episode of the Using AI at Work podcast. And our guest today is Panos Siozos, the CEO and founder of LearnWorlds. This is an interesting topic for us because one of the things that I hear a lot in social channels and in conversations is this impact of AI being able to generate content and training. And what does that mean for the traditional way of learning and developing skills and becoming a master of something? And this is a topic that Panos and his team have been focused on for since 2014, I guess, when they founded. And now I think they've kind of cracked the code on this. So Panos, before we get started and talking about the, I guess, the future of education really as an AI-enabled or an AI-augmented activity, give us a little bit of background on the founder side of things. I know that you started this in 2014 and that you guys were bootstrapped. That's a long journey.

**Panos Siozos** (3:01)
First of all, hi Chris. Thanks for having me on your show.

**Chris Daigle** (3:04)
Of course.

**Panos Siozos** (3:05)
It's much longer than 2014 With my two co-founders, we started working on the educational technology space back in 1999 So that's when we first built our very first learning management system.
It was part of an academic project within a university, our first LMS. We pretty much didn't know what we were doing by then, but we were very enthusiastic. We were doing our postgraduate studies in educational technologies. We've been working on this space ever since. So we launched our platform in 2014 We were already working a couple of years before that in stealth mode. As you said, bootstrapped company, so a grueling journey to the first customer, to the second customer, 10th customer, so that was the way that we were taking. In the beginning, obviously, we had to put the scientists in the backseat at some point, and we started learning fast from the market, adapting to market needs, bringing in, in some cases, releasing features even overnight to keep up with the very fast pace of innovation that we were seeing in educational space. As you can imagine, when COVID came along, this speed multiplied even more, and we see that again with AI, which is again another COVID level event when it comes at least to education, how we learn and how people will keep learning and working and even existing in the years that are coming. So definitely interesting times.