The Future of Data & AI Education Just Arrived with Jonathan Cornelissen & Yusuf Saber

Jonathan Cornelissen

I think it's it's the biggest kind of Scurve in, in the history of technology education. You can leverage any AI to build a much more personalized experience that adapts to the learner in various ways. We're going to get to the point where eventually education technology will beat the kind of human, one on one tutor. And I think that's an incredibly powerful moment.

Yusuf Saber

GPT came out in late and it felt okay. Now there's a chance we could do something different. We latched on the idea of instead of creating content, we create the ingredients that then make up the content, and then we have the AI actually deliver the content in real time.

Jonathan Cornelissen

It's not just that the new curriculum will become available, it's also that there's an infinite amount of versions of that curriculum that that will emerge over the next year. We are now testing this with this kind of real learners, and the early results confirm what you kind of intuitively expect, which is like people just enjoy the experience better.

Jonathan Cornelissen

They feel like it's more uniquely for them. And and it drives engagement up.

Yusuf Saber

The journey from seeing a particular audience that has particular knowledge needs going from that to having a course that can be delivered can shrink significantly from months to days. And we think that this can all be possible within So that's like really, really exciting.

Richie Cotton

Welcome to data Framed. This is Richie. Of all the ways generative AI is changing the world. Its effect on education has perhaps the biggest positive impact. Camp has always been at the forefront of using technology to educate people. But continuing that trend because Datacamp has just acquired the AI native education platform Optima. Today we're going to find out what Optima is and what the implications are for Datacamp users, data cam admins, and the future of education.

Richie Cotton

Our first guest is Jonathan Cornelissen, the CEO and cofounder of Datacamp. I feel like he needs very little introduction at this point. He's been on the show enough times, but suffice to say, he's been building Datacamp for the last years or so until a few days ago. Our next guest use of saber was CEO at Optima, and as of now, he is chief AI Officer at Datacamp.

Richie Cotton

Before finding a startup, he was one of the top data scientists in Dubai, acting as VP of data at tell about what kind of Uber Eats for the UAE. So let's hear about the AI revolution for education. Welcome, Yusuf. Good to have you on the show.

Yusuf Saber

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Richie Cotton

Excellent. And, Joe, welcome back.

Jonathan Cornelissen

Thanks for having me.

Richie Cotton

Brilliant. So, to kick off with, what is Optima? Tell me all about it. Yusuf.

Yusuf Saber

Yes. So optimize an online learning platform, where the content is created by a human expert, but is delivered, by AI in real time to the learner.

Richie Cotton

Okay. Easy peasy. So, it's edtech, but, with an AI twist. Now it feels like almost every, like, low rent data cam competitor is advertising, like, oh, I've got an AI tutor. This sounds different. So tell me, how is it different from a standard AI tutor?

Yusuf Saber

Yes. So in, most instances, the content is still the good old content that we have been working with. So I'm still learning from a video or by reading an article. So the content itself is static, but, on the side there may be an AI that I can speak to to ask a question. Most often it's, it's kind of, you know, added to the experience.

Yusuf Saber

It's not naturally part of it. And if I don't think about asking a question, then it doesn't really help me with the learning process. But what we are trying to do is that the AI actually delivers the learning, as opposed to being on the sideline waiting to be asked the question. It's like when you think of a human tutor, you don't think of someone sitting on the side waiting to be asked the question.

Yusuf Saber

It's the entity that's actively delivering the learning and that's how it is on as well.

Richie Cotton

Wow. So this is like really, it's imagine from the ground up being an AI experience rather than sort of a bolted on feature. That's very cool. So I'd love to get into more, but it sounds like you have some pretty big implications for, education in general. Joe, do you want to give us some wider context on this?

Jonathan Cornelissen

First of all, I mean, I'm incredibly excited. Because I think if you if you kind of take a step back, it's, well, research that the best way to learn is kind of having your own private tutor. And this has been researched over, over the last few decades. So it's it's a it's a wellestablished fact. I think Blum was the researcher that, first tested this and kind of compare it's sending people to a conventional classroom experience.

Jonathan Cornelissen

And then he tested sending people through a one on one tutoring experience. And the people that went through one on one tutoring, they were not just a little bit better. They were two standard deviations. Better. So what that means is you have kind of somebody who would perform average, going through a classroom experience, and they would get into the top three percentile after one on one tutoring.

Jonathan Cornelissen

I'm saying this because one on one tutoring has always been the best kind of experience, but it's very expensive and it's just not affordable for most people. I think with JNI and with some of the technology that Optima has created and that that will continue to to invest in, we're going to get to the point where eventually education technology will beat the kind of human tutor.

Jonathan Cornelissen

And I think that's an incredibly powerful moment. So kind of similar to how you now have Tesla and Waymo who are building the AI driver. And that AI drivers is starting to become better than a than a human driver. We're going to reach a point in education technology where the AI educator is is really better than the best to tutor.

Jonathan Cornelissen

We're not quite there yet, but I think this is the start of that process, and I think it's going to be really exciting next couple of years. As we built that technology and kind of roll it out into the world.

Richie Cotton

So yeah, certainly the idea of, having a one on one tutor, I mean, this makes a lot of sense for every sort of rich family. They give personal tutors to their kids in order to help them get into university, want to do better in school. And so the idea of bringing that to everyone, regardless of, like how much money you have, that seems a pretty huge game changer for education.

Jonathan Cornelissen

Huge. Absolutely huge. I think it's it's the biggest kind of Scurve in the history of of technology education, right. Like if you go a step, take a step back. I think the first wave in online education was the massive open online courses like think of Coursera, Addicks, Udemy, the video based platforms. And I think what they did is they bought a conventional classroom online.

Jonathan Cornelissen

And I think there's a lot of credit for doing that, because there's some amazing content that came online as a result of that first initial wave in online education. But they all share the same problem, which is like you're just passively watching videos. And so it's not personalized. And then data Cam came about and we kind of as a counter reaction, we said, hey, learning has to be active.

Jonathan Cornelissen

People learn by doing. It has to be engaging. People actually have to work with the technology, solve challenges. And so we we kind of wrote the second Scurve in online education. We were not the only ones I think Duolingo could Cademy and a few others were ahead in that wave, if you will. But now, today, I think we're at that third Scurve where you can leverage any AI to build a much more personalized experience that adapts to the learner in various ways.

Jonathan Cornelissen

It adapts to their pace and so on. And I think what, what use of an optimal team have built was kind of the best incarnation I've ever seen of that kind of vision of the early phases of that vision kind of materializing.

Richie Cotton

It's a bold claim having, an AI tutor this sort of as good as or maybe even better than the best human teacher. So definitely, something aspirational to work towards. Exciting stuff. Okay. So, I mean, let's get into more of the details of Optima. So, Joe, you you alluded to the idea of personalization and before use of you were talking about how, the AI, it generates exercises on the fly.

Richie Cotton

That seems very cool. Talk me through. Why is this a good thing?

Yusuf Saber

Yeah. So just to to make sure that the, the process itself is, is clear in traditional learning when I'm watching a video. What I'm seeing here is like a set of elements. So there are some concepts or techniques that are being explained. There are some examples that are being given. There's some exercises, there's some, you know, illustrations, figures and so on.

Yusuf Saber

And all of that is interwoven into this, narrative that I am going through. But that narrative is static. So what we do is say, let's roll this back, let's extract these elements. So the set of concepts and techniques that are being taught and then all of these components. So we have, you know, exercises, examples, illustrations, figures and so on.

Yusuf Saber

So the human course creator kind of prepares all of those. And then this set of ingredients goes to the teacher. So instead of, you know, for example, I get the ingredients and then I bake the cake and I give it to you, I prepare the ingredients and then I come to you and then we bake it together. So that's essentially what, what we do.

Yusuf Saber

So instead of passing the static, already written content, we pass all of the ingredients, because thinking through the ingredients takes a lot of time. It needs, you know, until now at least needs a lot of deep human thought. And that cannot be replaced with AI. But the act of that interweaving the the delivery that can be done fairly well with, today's AI technology.

Yusuf Saber

So elements get to the AI and then it also has the profile of the learner. So essentially, you know, just essential, pieces of information that are incredibly valuable to deliver a high quality lesson to the learner. So one, for instance, what is the role in industry, like what's their current situation? And then second, what are they working towards?

Yusuf Saber

What problems do they really care about? So by knowing these two things like their situation and what they care about, they can then deliver the information to them in a way that is really connected. So they get examples that are from their domain and industry. So they instantly make sense, when motivating why the learners should learn a particular conceptual technique.

Yusuf Saber

It connects it to the problem they're trying to solve. And then instantly they have reason to care because they see how knowing this can help me with the problem that I am working on at the moment. So that's on one side. So connecting the learning to their context and the other side connecting it to their ability. So we've all been in classrooms where it can be like really boring and we can zone out or we are struggling because we, you know, zoned out for a few seconds and then we missed, key point.

Yusuf Saber

And then now nothing makes sense. So the idea here will do everything possible to prevent any of those, to negative outcomes. So if the learner is struggling with something unclear, it will slow down. Make sure to fill those gaps. And only once they're clear, it will move on. So either the learner will express their confusion directly, so they will say, I don't really get what this means.

Yusuf Saber

Or, before moving on to the next point that you will will test if they, you know, captured what was just explained, especially if the next point will build on it. And if they, unable to, you know, perform the exercise, it will then, you know, spend some more time before moving on to the next point. On the other end, for people who, captured the information quickly or happened to know some of it already, then it can move really quickly through those points.

Yusuf Saber

So they are not sitting through content that they already know. So these are, like both of them, with putting it into context gives people reason to care. So they are engaged and adapted to their ability. Then they don't. They are not bored. They don't zone out or don't struggle and kind of decide that they're not good at math or all of these, stories.

Yusuf Saber

We, you know.

Richie Cotton

That's very cool. And I like that there is still a human involved into in deciding what to teach, who are making use of like, human expert, but then it's just in the delivery layer. That's where the AI works. Because AI is good at changing tone of voice or other things like that. So subtle changes. Now, to explain your point about, making people care about the context reminds me one of the early courses, we made on Datacamp.

Richie Cotton

It was a Python course, and it included, a data set on Galapagos finches. And this was like a really famous scientific data set from, like, Darwin. And it's, like, crucial to his theory of evolution. It was like safe choice. And we got overwhelmed with feedback. Everything was like, I don't deal with Finch data. I'm trying to, like, add a click through rate or whatever.

Richie Cotton

And like, everybody hated this. And so actually students really need something that's connected to like, why they learning, like whether it's related to their job or something like that to, to actually, make them want to do this. So, I like that idea that, you are worrying about what students care about. So are there any other benefits around personalization?

Richie Cotton

I mean, you mentioned a few.

Yusuf Saber

Yeah. So, I think that the one that, I always go to is when people have a reason to care, they're engaged, they pay attention. So I think by connecting to the problems that they care about, then that's kind of the highway to engagement is to show them how this can help with the problem that they are currently focused on.

Yusuf Saber

That's one I then two, I think, out of the time, people move on. Well, they haven't really understood. And then that gap can build up and then quickly they like stop learning because they get this improve. I'm not good enough for this. And that's really sad because they aren't good enough for it. They just missed some, building block.

Yusuf Saber

And then everything that builds on it is suddenly like unintelligible. And they, they can continue. So by preventing those gaps from forming as early as possible, we can make it a lot less likely that someone will give up for no real reason just because they they missed the point. So I think these two reasons are, I think pretty powerful, like motivators for delivering content in this way.

Richie Cotton

Obviously. Yeah. I mean, engagement is such a huge challenge. When you're learning anything, like it's always something better to do or a different deadline, or maybe stuff is too easy or too hard, or there's always a reason to give up. Making sure that people actually continue is, is very important.

Jonathan Cornelissen

Totally. And maybe to to link this to I think Andre Creperie recently talks about this on, on another podcast, kind of talking about how it's much easier to stay motivated if you have your private tutor, because they adapt in so many ways. And it solves one of the fundamental problems. I think online education has had, to a large extent, where, engagement has always been kind of the key problem, to solve in online education.

Jonathan Cornelissen

And then if you look at companies like Duolingo, that from a financial point of view, are doing really well, but you could argue from it from an educational point of view, they've essentially chosen the route of saying, hey, we're going to gamify the experience and kind of, move away from learning, and move towards gaming, but in a way that doesn't necessarily benefits the educational aspects.

Jonathan Cornelissen

And I think what this technology ultimately now enables is to, to drive more motivation, but in a way that is aligned with better learning, just like, like an individual tutor with two. And that's the first time that's possible. It's something even at Datacamp, our engagement has always been way higher than other kind of passive learning platforms. But at some point you hit a ceiling where you have to kind of make it easier and gamify it more, and you have to start sacrificing learning if you want to increase engagement.

Jonathan Cornelissen

And we've always tried to tie that line because our focus is ultimately on making it as effective for a learner. And for every hour you spend on data and making it as effective as possible, but then maximize engagement within that. I think with the new technology and what what Yousuf has built, you don't really have that trade off as much anymore.

Jonathan Cornelissen

You can actually make it more relevant to the learner, to their goals, which is more engaging, but also more more helpful from an educational point of view. So I'm super excited that these two worlds are kind of starting to go in sight now, which wasn't true. Two years ago.

Richie Cotton

Yeah, absolutely. And certainly I like gamification in general, but like if you're just doing some education because you got a passive aggressive message from an owl, I like, you're not really into it that, you know, as you can learn things, it's great.

Jonathan Cornelissen

It works, but there's limitations. There's point at which, like, you actually want to drive engagement by making the learning more relevant, and more effective.

Richie Cotton

Absolutely. Wonderful. I'd like to take a step back and sort of see how we got to this point. So, you I mean, can you tell me why did you build up to metagame with.

Yusuf Saber

So I've always enjoyed teaching is something I've done since, I know, middle school. So I would just start this, small teaching activities and try and, you know, help people somehow through it. It's actually how I met my wife. It was, while teaching a coding class to business students who wanted to learn coding. And in almost every, you know, organization that I worked since, one of the things that I was on the side was start, some sort of learning set up where people could come and build data skills with her and to support their work or to transition into a career in data.

Yusuf Saber

And, you know, one thing we we almost always used, data Camp as one of the tools for, for the learners. So it's, it's amazing to be to be here, I guess all all through it, it was like small scale. And I was wondering, like, what? I'd love to build something here, but I couldn't see. How different would that be from what's already out there.

Yusuf Saber

Like, there was no like, yeah, we could build content that's, you know, slightly better in some ways. But there was like it always felt, it wouldn't be adding much like there is already, you know, data camp that's doing a great job, for instance, on content, on interactivity. There is for, for a lot of other areas, you know, I could go to, to Coursera, I could go to, you know, Udemy and there's like plenty of, of, stuff out there.

Yusuf Saber

And we thought maybe it's like the physical aspect where we could interact with people directly and kind of teach in that way. And for a long time we left it at that. Like it would probably be something that we do in person where we can do something that's unique and different. Until GPT came out in late and it felt okay, now there's a chance we could do something different.

Yusuf Saber

So we started working on Optima a few months after that, and the idea was, can we build something, where the learning can connect to someone's context, what we just discussed, and adapt the pace to, to whether they're following or they're struggling. So that was kind of the problem we set out to solve. And for the first nine months, we tried four versions of three versions of Optima.

Yusuf Saber

This is the current one is the fourth, and they're all like a step towards that. But it wasn't still quite right. I think we're still too hung up on like the classic way of doing things. So we still had AI on the side. Essentially, we tried to have a do more and more, but I think the the YouTube slash Coursera model was like too strong to to beat.

Yusuf Saber

At least it had too much of, of, grabs one or an imagination. And then, it took us a while to kind of reimagine things, very differently. And that's where we latched on the idea of instead of creating content, we create the ingredients that then make up the content, and then we have the AI actually deliver the content in real time, because that's the only way, static content just doesn't leave any space for us to personalize or to adapt the piece.

Yusuf Saber

So we the content has to work dynamically for us to be able to do these things in a meaningful way. And it took a few months to get that to work. I think today's technology is pretty powerful. I think there's so much, more that we can do with it, but it doesn't kind of give that up easily.

Yusuf Saber

Like, people have to work really hard to try and make it work. And it's so new that I think, I don't think we really understand how to to use it to maximal effect yet. So for quite a while it was not reliable enough to actually have actual learners, learning with it. And this changed in February of, of this year with the release of cloud sonnet .

Yusuf Saber

And for the first time, it actually worked like we could have a learner learn for an hour without any, like, serious glitches. It was amazing. And we feel okay. We we have something here. Let's try and put it out there. So, we had a few really, great organizations that kind of sold the idea and wanted to be part of it.

Yusuf Saber

And then we started having their teams kind of learn on it and adapt it to their feedback, and it evolved fairly quickly over those, first few months. And I think it was maybe or months in, after that inflection point, when we met. Yeah. And the rest is history. I guess.

Richie Cotton

That's cool. Yeah. And I love that it started with you teaching, groups of people using data. Yeah. Yeah. So, Brilliant. And the fact that, you had the idea first and the foundation models, the underlying technology wasn't ready. But in the last few months, it's now hit the point where it is a viable thing. So,

Richie Cotton

Yeah. You were at the cutting edge. All right, so, you mentioned the two of you. I'd love to hear more about the story. So, perhaps joking. Just how did the two of you, end up meeting? Yeah.

Jonathan Cornelissen

From my perspective, it felt like very coincidental. And especially the timing, I think was was kind of really fortunate. I'd never been to, Dubai, where a YouTube channel team is based, and, we have one of our clients, Emirates, who who is organizing a conference. And, I was going there essentially to meet with them and to meet some of our, our government's clients in the region.

Jonathan Cornelissen

And I remember there was one specific meeting, I'm not sure I'm allowed to say which company, but one of our clients there that, historically was very happy with Data Camp. They started grilling us and they started asking all these questions of like, why isn't it more personalized? Why can't we customize this a little bit more? Why isn't it adapting to the learner?

Jonathan Cornelissen

And so we started talking about it okay. What what should the vision be. How can I be used. And I was I was very aligned on their their vision. But in the back of my mind I was thinking I agree with them, but nobody's been able to make this work yet. And so it turns out the company that we were visiting, one of our clients, it turns out they just had seen a demo of Optima.

Jonathan Cornelissen

And so that that got them really excited about the kind of, AI learning engine that optimize created. And so one of the people there mentioned, hey, there's there's this founder also in the education space, maybe the two of you should meet and, I didn't know I didn't actually connect the dots at the time, so I didn't know.

Jonathan Cornelissen

That's why he he suggested for us to meet so almost didn't, didn't take the meeting. But the last meeting I had, right before I left Dubai, was with Yusuf. And as soon as I saw the demo, I was like, whoa, this is incredible. This is like, not to sound arrogant, but, like, I've rarely seen product experiences where I felt like, hey, this is better than what data I'm currently has.

Jonathan Cornelissen

And this was one of the first times where I was like, oh, wow, this is actually better. Like, this is what we aspire to build. But but here's, here's a team that actually has already made it work and has created this, this kind of magical experience that that adapts to the learner in so many different ways. So as soon as I started them, I was like, wow, this is incredible.

Richie Cotton

I know it feels like there were just like so many layers of channels happening there that this is like, kind of a miracle. The two of you got together one.

Yusuf Saber

Let me maybe add a couple of layers. So, two days earlier, I had had a surgery. And, there was a chance that I wouldn't make it. So I was going to stay in the hospital for, two days, but with the possibility of extending by a third. So this extended by the third, then I would have missed it because it was in a different city.

Yusuf Saber

So I was in Abu Dhabi and and we were supposed to meet in Dubai, but it's.

Jonathan Cornelissen

Busy. I didn't know.

Yusuf Saber

That. Yeah, but luckily I went out on time and it was the, the only meeting I, I took, because I had to stay because of surgery just at home for the next two weeks. So I only came out to to have this meeting. And I'm really glad I did.

Richie Cotton

Yeah. That's, absolutely fantastic that. That's good, actually. Yeah. Made it possible to take the meeting. Okay. Cool. So, all right, I'm excited about now, how do I get access? Maybe. Joe, do you want to talk?

Jonathan Cornelissen

So as of today, you have our introduction to SQL course, our introduction to AI course. There will be many more courses and every free user, every, subscriber has access to those courses. If you're one of the, one of our enterprise and corporate clients, you can get access as well. But, you should get in touch with our team.

Jonathan Cornelissen

All our BB clients will be getting access reasonably fast, but, not everybody is as excited and open about AI compliance questions and all of that. So we're doing a gradual rollout towards our our BB customer base, in the next few months. I think by early next year, we should be in a position to open it up for all the clients that are interested in it, kind of getting access.

Jonathan Cornelissen

But for now, for individuals, you can just go to website and look at our introduction to SQL, introduction to AI. There's many more courses coming. And they'll be going live in the next few weeks and months.

Richie Cotton

All right. So for individuals just log in to Datacamp start taking the courses straight away. Brilliant.

Jonathan Cornelissen

Absolutely.

Richie Cotton

And I guess if you're, business account and yell at your customer success manager and they'll sort you out.

Jonathan Cornelissen

Yep, yep. All right.

Richie Cotton

Wonderful. Cool. So, I'd love to know, a bit about, like, what courses you're building out. So what curriculum areas are you working on the moment yourself?

Yusuf Saber

From beginning, we've been focused on on data and AI. So the first areas we are getting out are, the core, data, skills we're focused on, data manipulation. So this is, you know, how to manipulate data with SQL, with, Python pandas and with R, so these, these three, the second area that we have invested a lot in is AI engineering.

Yusuf Saber

So if someone, who is, a software engineer or in, data science or analysis and wants to transition into being a data engineer, we've built a program. So it's a series of six courses that they can take to, transition into a capable data engineer. And we kind of, took, our best learnings working on the platform.

Yusuf Saber

And we put that into these courses. Plus, of course, the, state of the art, techniques that people are applying. So these are the two areas that we will be focused on during, you know, Qand early QAnd then beyond that, we are still in discussions, but the the area that we are, most likely going to focus on are, AI literacy and classical data literacy.

Yusuf Saber

So these are focused on you know, a primarily nontechnical audience. And we think that this new approach to learning can be really beneficial, especially to, to those, because the variance in their background is, is huge. So you have people who've, you know, never seen a spreadsheet before or have people who have worked, you know, with spreadsheets for a long time, just have never done like measurement and metrics and analytics before.

Yusuf Saber

But they are quite familiar with, you know, accounting for, for instance, so this can adapt quite a bit. So digital literacy can, can we like to think of it can become a lot more interesting, and a lot more relevant to the person and deliver it this way. So at the moment, this is kind of what we are thinking about.

Richie Cotton

All right. That's cool. I mean, yeah, certainly SQL, Python, Alpha, data analyst, data scientist. And there might be a little bit of a hot roll at the moment. I can see where you're building out. Great curriculum. And I do love the idea that personalization is incredibly important for data literacy because, yeah, you're right. There's so many different people, regardless of their job, that they need some kind of basic data skills.

Richie Cotton

But how do you explain that to them? It's going to vary a lot. So yeah. An interesting area to watch.

Jonathan Cornelissen

Maybe, maybe one thing I want to add, because we, we we didn't get to that yet, but I think as, as you have explained, you're kind of disentangling the content the learner experiences from kind of the ingredients, the examples, the theoretical content and so on. And that enables to kind of improve the experience for for the individual learner.

Jonathan Cornelissen

And make sure it's, it's relevant to their context, to their skill level and so on. One thing we haven't talked about much, which which I think is another benefit that is not yet working, but will be working at some point next year, is you can now also personalize and customize this to specific organizations. Right. Like if, if, if I'm a large organization and I want to and I have certain guidance towards my employees around, say, AI literacy, certain AI policies, certain technology choices that we as a company want to make.

Jonathan Cornelissen

The fact that you disentangle the ingredients from the delivery of the content now also enables you to customize that experience for learners, that organization A versus learners, the organization B. So I think there's so much more that will become possible because of that disentangling of kind of your core content and the delivery of the content that, even for the existing curriculum, where we're moving over some of the popular data courses or some of the new AI literacy courses, it's not just that the new curriculum will become available, it's also that there's an infinite amount of versions of that curriculum that that will emerge over the next year.

Jonathan Cornelissen

So that's maybe an important thing to stress, because historically, when you talk about launching courses, people still have this mindset of, oh, it's a static thing. That's kind of the same for everyone. You're you're kind of lounging swim lanes where, where then there's a whole lot of different versions of that course that will emerge. So I just wanted to stress that, because that's kind of a new way of thinking about the content.

Richie Cotton

Absolutely. And I think, for, like the BB, like the corporate learning is, is incredibly important to understand which bits of the same in which bits are different, because I think a lot of times when you go to an organization that the learning management teams like, okay, and he's trying a thousand people on this particular thing, I've got these learning objectives that I want people to hit.

Richie Cotton

And so the learning objectives are going to be the same for the course. Yes. But it's just the way those learning objectives are kind of fulfilled. What the way is explained that's going % to learner. Yeah okay. All right. So actually maybe on that note, do you want to tell me a bit, through a bit more like what the, what the experience is for companies, who are going to be using Optima.

Richie Cotton

Is the admin experience going to change? Is the learning experience going to change, on a corporate level?

Jonathan Cornelissen

So in the short run, not that much will change. And then early next year we're going to start rolling out, the AI optimize experiences for all our BB clients. But the admins will stay in control and they will be able to decide, do they want people to see that optimal experience? Are they not ready yet? And the important thing I want to stress is that in for some time, we're going to have a dual content creation engine where we'll create courses in both the old DTM formats, as well as in the new Optima formats at I native formats, if you will.

Jonathan Cornelissen

And so for for a while, we'll, we'll, we'll have that kind of duality. That being said, I do believe the kind of AI native experience or the optimal experience is the future. And, and if you think about all the benefits from an LMD point of view or kind of a data leadership point of view, they're only going to grow over time.

Jonathan Cornelissen

So to give you a few examples, you can, you can set certain goals for the organization. And the AI tutor can become aware of these goals. So just like you have a profile of a learner and the AI is aware of of of that learner and their goals, the AI tutor will also become aware of the organizational goals.

Jonathan Cornelissen

It might become aware of the tech stack of that organization. It might be aware of the AI policy of that organization. And so you'll have not only personalization for the learner, but you'll also have customization to the enterprise. And you just can do that in kind of the old world. You have to enable AI to to reap those benefits.

Jonathan Cornelissen

Another example that I'm personally really excited about is you can create a content ones, and these newer models especially, they're becoming pretty good at many languages. So now you can have the delivery in in five, ten, maybe languages. Once the models get good enough in those languages. But you only have kind of one core piece of content that gets created and it's automatically available in, in, in so many different languages.

Jonathan Cornelissen

So while we'll give the admins control and we won't push this on anyone, I do want to stress that I think we have to work with our clients and have to figure out how to enable this, because it will be very powerful for a lot of, corporate learning programs.

Richie Cotton

Certainly, I'm lots to take in and lots of very exciting features, I guess. Coming soon. So I love the idea that you've got this sort of corporate level context or doing fancy context engineering here, as well as, like the personal level. But I guess the headline takeaway there is that the courses on Datacamp, they're not disappearing overnight.

Richie Cotton

That's telling me that.

Jonathan Cornelissen

And Will will continue to ship really high quality content in the old Datacamp experience for the foreseeable future. At some point, because we're still innovating here, we're still figuring this out. At some point, we'll flip a switch and we'll we'll go towards the AI native, experience first. Maybe the last thing I'll say, because we're a very data driven company in general.

Jonathan Cornelissen

It's part of our DNA, part of our culture. It's not only what we're preaching, we're not just pitching here that this is better. We are now testing this with this kind of real learners. And the early results confirm what you kind of intuitively expect, which is like people just enjoy the experience better. And there they feel like it's it's more more for them uniquely for them.

Jonathan Cornelissen

And and it drives engagement up. It drives conversion up, to, to converge, to kind of payments and so on. So, so in the data, you'll see the improvement as well. And this is an early version. So I think, I think this is going to get way, way better over time.

Richie Cotton

Okay. Yeah, certainly customer satisfaction metrics are incredibly important to help. We're, paying attention to folks. But so, one of the recurring themes on Data framed is that one of the challenges of enterprise AI adoption is around data privacy. Joe, you mentioned that all the AI feature can be turned off, on at a sort of group level of corporate accounts.

Richie Cotton

Yes, if you wanna talk me through, like, what sort of personal data is being used, by Optima and, like, what are the privacy features that you've created?

Yusuf Saber

Yes, absolutely. So we have done, quite a bit of iteration on, to understand what pieces of information about a learner truly make a difference. And we realized that it's actually pretty few. So with three pieces of information, we can deliver the objectives that we want. That's the first one is just understanding which context they come from.

Yusuf Saber

So the role and their industry. So that really gives so much information. And just knowing that this is let's say data analyst in the aviation industry for instance, is already like very, very powerful. Second is what are they working towards. So any idea on like, a challenge that they're tackling the need, the kind of like, you know, someone in marketing who's working on to say, user onboarding, that's really like very, very useful.

Yusuf Saber

And third is something about their background so that they have, studied, statistics in, in school or they are, doing this course in an application in Python. But, you know, they, they did or a while back. So by knowing that we can when we're explaining in a new concept that's challenging, we can say, oh, that's equivalent to this thing that, you know, from.

Yusuf Saber

And then suddenly it makes a lot of sense. So just by knowing these three pieces of information, we can do most of what we set out to do. So that's what we look for. Anything in addition to that may maybe may be valuable. And that can also be added to the profile. But we don't ask for it.

Yusuf Saber

So we keep these three points completely randomized, like we avoid, keeping names of particular projects or clients or companies. And the learner's first name, that's so it makes the conversation a lot more, kind of reachable when the teacher knows learner's first name and it can appreciate them for their achievements using their name. People have consistently found this to be a lot more relatable than when it's just, arbitrary.

Yusuf Saber

And so that's kept in only one place. It's an encrypted for, profile of the learner. And when someone, let's say, wants to remove that or they have access to it, they can go and see it at any point, they can remove it if they choose to. So that's completely under the control of of learner for organizations.

Yusuf Saber

They can provide, bulk context for their group so they can say, you know, this is we have these hundred people. This is kind of a sheet that we've exported from, you know, one of our H.R systems, which has, some essential information about them that we think will be useful. We can work with that. But, only if the organization is willing to, to do that.

Yusuf Saber

It kind of speeds up the process. It actually can already start with quite a bit of context, and it doesn't have to ask the learner for it, but that's only if the organization is, on board with sharing it.

Richie Cotton

Okay. So it sounds like there's actually relatively minimal personal information in there. I guess if you really worry about the I knowing your name because lie about what you called. But I do like that it's a nice personalization feature there. Okay.

Jonathan Cornelissen

Maybe to jump on that because I think there's two levels for this. I think there's one level is what you just described, which is you want to kind of minimize the kind of sensitive information that we're storing while maximizing the impact it has on learning. I do think there's, as this space evolves, there's going to be a question whether the kind of deployment model of learning platforms changes.

Jonathan Cornelissen

Because if you think about static content, that's not very customized or not very personalized, the kind of delivery model is you have a central platform that everybody gets access to, and it's different from, say, if you want to deploy snowflake, where yes, that's going to happen on your own infrastructure, kind of cloud, prem or a single single tenant at the very least, that's not really been something that you've seen within kind of the educational technology space that much.

Jonathan Cornelissen

And I think there's an open question to whether eventually as, as you get more personalization, more customization, what are that kind of deployment model changes from kind of a multitenant to a single tenant setup? I think the jury's still out, and we're going to be working with some of our largest clients to figure out, like, what they're comfortable with, because even if we kind of minimize the amount of information that we gather there, there's a question on at what point does this cross a threshold where people are no longer, kind of comfortable with that information being out there?

Richie Cotton

Okay. I mean, well, I guess like the extreme version of the personalization then is you're learning, you're doing exercises against, like, a real company data set.

Jonathan Cornelissen

Exactly.

Richie Cotton

Yeah. And at that point you want it.

Jonathan Cornelissen

So the extreme version is you have absolute customization and personalization, and you have a version of this that gets deployed within the infrastructure of a large organization. And you're essentially having your personalized, customized learning experience on top of the actual tooling that organization uses. I think that can be very, very powerful, but it will flip the deployment model completely because nobody's going to be comfortable with that.

Jonathan Cornelissen

If it's kind of all that information goes back to kind of optimized servers or they become servers, and we're at the very beginning of that kind of trend. So I think the jury's still out on how that shakes out. But I think that's what this technology is ultimately going to enable. And I think there's definitely going to be a lot of interest in that.

Richie Cotton

That's a very cool future. I feel like we're creating some big tickets there for the, engineering teams to come there, some, big infrastructure changes. Yeah. Hopefully they're not listening to this episode to find out just yet. Okay. All right, so, stepping back from, the technology, it feels like this is going to change a lot the way you've run, a big corporate learning program.

Richie Cotton

So I'm wondering, like, how do you approach this differently? You maybe want to take a stab at this to begin with?

Yusuf Saber

We found this quite a bit when we work with organizations. So first is, who is keen on, on learning. So people who are, like, genuinely interested in, in and being part of the program and picking the right courses, programs for them to be part of. I think once, they start and they are, you know, part of the program, there is a whole wealth of depth and understanding that someone running the program can, can benefit from.

Yusuf Saber

So before I could just see, like the progress or kind of how far they have come. But now if I want to understand, like why did certain people drop so I can get an understanding of, where they confused about the content from the nature of the questions they ask. So when we learn to ask questions with these questions, gets, labeled, so we know is this a question where someone is curious and digging deeper, or this is a question that someone is confused about the content and not fully understanding, and then is just following up so they can get a sense of, why is someone, like, not not continuing with the

Yusuf Saber

learning? They can see how they like doing this. Like the way the learning happens is a conversation. So it the learner needs to be, to do their part to, to contribute to it so that the teacher will deliver, a piece of knowledge, will give them something to work on or to think about, and then they need to kind of respond.

Yusuf Saber

And then the next turn will start. And it's kind of like a turn based game where they are playing together and a learner who is engaged. The responses make it very clear they're who is just, you know, passively trying to move, move this along. That's also very clear. So as someone who is running the program and invested in its success, I think they can get, far more valuable information and then they can act on that by, you know, having conversations with some of these learners, by kind of thinking through the, the goals and motivations that, that, people have for continuing with the learning or by maybe rethinking what people are learning and

Yusuf Saber

whether that's directly relevant to them. Yeah. So I think that that can be quite helpful in making these programs succeed.

Richie Cotton

I love that you got these richer data sources now because I guess, traditionally it's like someone either passed an exercise or they didn't. Maybe it took them a few attempts. You got a little bit of data on, like how much content people, completing, but the, the conversational data is going to be an even richer source for admin so they can make better decisions about, their learners.

Richie Cotton

Actually, Joe, do you have anything to add on that on the way you approach? Running a training program?

Jonathan Cornelissen

I think we were at the very beginning, but just to build on what what use of, just said I think the maybe an easy mental model is imagine you're kind of a large financial institution and you're you're looking to upskill or maybe more learners. What this eventually looks like is, is, is kind of the equivalent of those people now not only have a private tutor that will kind of work with them to get them to the learning objectives, but from the organizational point of view, they have a way to ask questions to all these, like say there's private tutors.

Jonathan Cornelissen

These hundred thousand private tutors can now report back and say, hey, this is kind of what we're hearing. This is the type of stuff people are struggling with. This is the skill level of this group versus that group. And so Datacamp historically has built out assessments and it's part of these learning programs. And, and they're very heavily used.

Jonathan Cornelissen

And, and I think that's still going to be very valuable. But the world we're moving towards is a world where you're going to have so much more information and that can help you kind of, be way more effective in kind of driving change within organizations. And, and the biggest challenge with kind of these, these new technology ways and AI is no different is is usually the human components.

Jonathan Cornelissen

And it's not only the skills humans have to acquire, but it's it's it's all just struggles around the skills. And I think the benefit of the system is it's going to give the people that try to drive that change so much information on what's working, what's not working, and how they can improve their programs. I know that's a very high level, vague answer, but but I think to some extent we're still building this out and and this is yet to be played out, but it's going to be super powerful.

Richie Cotton

Absolutely. I mean, certainly whenever we run that like learning and development, webinars, they come there's all these big questions around, like, how do I, demonstrate that I've got return on investment from the training program? Because, like, every old person, they've got to, like, justify the training to their manager and have that extra data, and that's really going to help, with that.

Richie Cotton

Totally.

Jonathan Cornelissen

And that's actually a great example. Like all the the tutors will know, the tutor will know why somebody is on the platform, what projects they're seeing value in. And so and this goes back to the earlier question on, on kind of what data should we store and how kind of do you think about security and privacy? Because there's going to be a trade off there where the more information we store, the more valuable that's going to be for especially these larger organizations, but also the more risk.

Jonathan Cornelissen

And and so we have to change our security posture. And we have already changed our security posture to, to kind of take care of that data in a very responsible way.

Richie Cotton

Wonderful. So much exciting stuff coming down the pipeline. I'm looking forward to it. But, can you tell me, like, what are you most excited about in the world of AI? Yousef, do you want to go first?

Yusuf Saber

I think the the the more powerful the the models become, the harder the problems that we can tackle. So I think the point that we started with in the beginning is that we're still quite a bit of a distance from competing with the best human teachers, just that discerning eye for where the learner is and what they're dealing with and, ability to fill the gaps that they might have.

Yusuf Saber

I think the better the most become. The, the more of that that we can approximate. So this year, I think, has given us some pretty powerful leaps. I think it's just it's very hard to imagine that, like, the was, was just out this February, and now we already have, you know, which is, significantly more powerful.

Yusuf Saber

So we can only imagine, how, powerful the models, we're working with would be in, in early next year. So that next wave of models, I think will be, what it takes to breach some of the hardware problems. So now we're mostly focused on the delivery, but we have two more frontiers that we want to be working on.

Yusuf Saber

So the next one is we call it instruction design. So, imagine that we've already decided on what are the concepts and techniques that should be taught in the course. But then we spend all of this time thinking through, you know, the examples, the exercises, the, you know, designing the data sets and the problems people will work practically on.

Yusuf Saber

So all of that, the concepts, things have already been set. They're right there. And we're just thinking through what are the right elements that we need to put together to support the delivery of that. So we think that's a problem that it can can really help with. To so far it's mostly been assessing this. So the human content creator still doing most of the thinking, most of the work and like delegating some tasks to the AI.

Yusuf Saber

But we think that within, early should be at a point where we can flip the rules. So the AI would, the instruction designer would get the concepts and techniques that have been, designated for a particular course or lesson, and then it would do the work to design all of the necessary assets from, you know, examples, analogies, exercises and so on.

Yusuf Saber

And then the human creator would, verify those and give their feedback, and they would iterate once or twice. And then the final frontier is like the curriculum design. So what are the right concepts and techniques that should go in the course so that it fulfills the, ignited set of objectives for a particular audience? So now as a course creator, my part would be to define the audience very clearly as well as the learning objectives.

Yusuf Saber

But then my AI curriculum designer would, you know, scour vast, amounts of knowledge to identify the right set of concepts and techniques to include in the course. And then the human course creators part would be to validate that, give feedback, and then the course can proceed from there. So then the, the, the journey from, seeing a particular audience that has particular knowledge needs going from that to having a course that can be delivered can shrink significantly from where it is now, in the order of magnitude of, of months to days.

Yusuf Saber

And we think that this can all be possible within, So that's like really, really exciting.

Richie Cotton

That's very cool. So, you kind of you. I wouldn't say so, but you get in there having self the learner experience and now is like, can you solve a teaching experience for me it like I've created. And of course, you know, just finding the right dataset can be a challenge. Like it's kind of like to have like the right features in there is going to show something interesting.

Richie Cotton

You got the right license for it. And it's got to be like relevant to enough learners. So yeah, that that's a big challenge. It can be a huge time suck. So just being able to automate some of these sort of things, is incredibly important. Cool. All right. Joe, what are you most excited about?

Jonathan Cornelissen

A couple of things. I think, first of all, I agree with what what Yousuf said. It's kind of like going from kind of reimagining the delivery to also reimagining the content creation, I think will be super powerful, something we we didn't touch upon yet. That, I think actually is really important too, is if you look at the history of interactive learning in the history of Data Camp as well, it's like to build these active learning experiences was kind of customized to a specific vertical.

Jonathan Cornelissen

So Data Camp was kind of doing this for data science and analytics. And we built kind of specific interfaces for a vertical. Duolingo did it for language learning, could get immediate it for web development. But I think what's it what's important to kind of realize if you take a step back is a lot of the technology that we're developing now and a lot of the technology Yousuf was talking about is really generic, and it will work for any type of learning for any type of topic.

Jonathan Cornelissen

And so what I'm really excited about is obviously in the short run AI skills, AI literacy, AI engineering, AI skills for people in different functional roles. That's our priority from a from a curriculum perspective. However, in addition to that, I'm also excited that we're building a system that can focus on active learning, focus on learning by doing for a broader range of topics.

Jonathan Cornelissen

And I think this technology enables us to build out really high quality education for any type of continuous learning within a professional setting. And that's what I'm super excited about, kind of our ability to kind of go broader in, in, in the medium to long term, as well as a result of kind of this technology and, and yeah, I think there's tremendous potential because in a lot of verticals, there actually isn't a platform that does learning by doing.

Jonathan Cornelissen

And so there's, there's only kind of passive video based education in a lot of these verticals. So sort of delta with what we're creating here is, is huge and will yield like much better educational outcomes for sure.

Richie Cotton

So we're going from day to camp to everything camp.

Jonathan Cornelissen

Yes. We will have to think about the name of.

Richie Cotton

The goal, right. Yeah. Get registering those domain names.

Jonathan Cornelissen

Yes, yes or no announcements on that front today. But maybe one other thing. I want to circle back to, because I'm very excited about that, is the ability to deliver learning in many different languages, I think is also very powerful, I think. And, I live in the US now, and you kind of forget how much, how many people in the world would benefit from education.

Jonathan Cornelissen

That's not in English. I think the number is in the billions. And and so I also feel very strongly that this is another kind of democratizing force, because you can build really high quality experiences, really high quality education once, and you can now scale it to way more people. And so I think that's the beauty of, the advancements in technology is that it kind of continues to democratize the best kind of educational experiences even further.

Richie Cotton

Oh, yeah. Certainly. I mean, with translations, the, it's been possible to create content in every language, or at least like the top most popular languages, but it's still a little bit fiddly. And the the technology can do a tipping point where we can sort of make that real.

Jonathan Cornelissen

It very much feels like it's at that tipping point. My mother tongue is Dutch, and there's only million people in the world who speak Dutch. And it's I've been testing those models in Dutch and they're they're surprisingly good. So if it works for languages that are only spoken by million people, my assumption is it's it's going to work for for a lot of languages around the world.

Jonathan Cornelissen

And that's super exciting.

Richie Cotton

Yeah, yeah, maybe we'll even get like Data Camp Inkling on Monday night. So, Youssef, can you tell me, what areas of the curriculum is your team focusing on at the moment?

Yusuf Saber

Yes. So we are starting with, two areas. So first is one core, classical data science area, which is, data integration. Then inflation in SQL, Python, pandas and R, as well as AI engineering, software engineering. We developed a program which will probably be about six courses, where we have kind of poured all of the learnings we've had building the platform as well as, you know, the, the cutting edge, you know, techniques that have evolved over the past few months.

Yusuf Saber

So that is a program for someone who is a software engineer, or, you know, a data engineer who wants to get into AI engineering. They can take that program and the, emerge as a, you know, carefully engineer, able to build, you know, some of these Elm enabled products. So that would probably be our focus for, the next, you know, to months, and then the next, phase for us, we'd probably be focusing on we're still kind of thinking through it, but most likely it would be a focus on, both AI literacy and data literacy.

Yusuf Saber

So here we are targeting a much wider audience. That is mostly nontechnical. And, the aim is to fill this gap has traditionally been massive gap. And we think the courses that were done before, where, you know, just classical courses. So they were quite static. And especially for these areas, the variance is, is very, very wide.

Yusuf Saber

So if someone is, let's say a software engineer who wants to get into engineering, the variance is not not that much like the, the, the foundations, are pretty similar. And people tend to kind of, know them in a, in a fairly similar way, but for, teaching, for example, data literacy, you have people who have never checked with data before to people who have, you know, done some accounting.

Yusuf Saber

So they're familiar with these, with like, working with, with sheets and with, with numbers, but not maybe with, like, measurement and some of the statistical concepts and then people who, you know, are familiar with those, but not to a sufficient degree that they can, you know, work with them effectively in their company. So we think that this new medium can allow us to deliver these, courses around AI literacy and data literacy in a way that adapts much, most of the learning.

Yusuf Saber

And in this particular case, that can be, pretty valuable. So at the moment, this is kind of, where we're thinking about the content roadmap.

Richie Cotton

Okay. Yeah, certainly I can see how SQL, Python are very important. If you want to be a data analyst or data scientist. And yeah, focusing on data manipulation makes sense because everyone has to do that. And then of course AI engineering. Very hot topic. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of people interested in that. All right.

Richie Cotton

Thank you yourself. And thank you, Jonathan. Great.

Jonathan Cornelissen

Thank you. Richie. Great.