Give any L&D team unlimited time and money, and every employee’s learning would be hyper-personalised: tailored exactly to their role, responsibilities, starting knowledge, and capability gaps.
Sounds ideal, right? But that often stays as a pipe dream, with most teams not having the headcount nor the budget spare to offer this level of personalisation.
Depending on your tools, there are ways to add layers of tailoring, such as adaptive learning pathways or interactive branching scenarios, but unless your department is swimming in resources, fully bespoke courses for every learner just isn’t likely.
There is another way to get a step closer, though: AI chatbots that sit within courses. Giving in-context responses, they answer learner queries as they work through the module, resulting in a more personalised learning experience – no extra course build needed.
Here’s how they work, and why it’s a feature to add to your wishlist ASAP.
Why learning needs a more personalised approach
Learners have grown used to content that feels like it was made for them. From Spotify Wrapped and personalised news feeds to the targeted discounts that now show up in a weekly shop, we’re surrounded by things that play into our individual tastes. And naturally, people are also starting to expect the same when it comes to their learning.
There’s a performance case for tailored learning too. People come into training with different starting knowledge, experience, roles, and learning needs. Take, for example, a new starter and a 10-year veteran sitting through the same compliance module. Even if they’re working through identical content, they aren’t getting the same value from it. One’s likely bored, the other’s underprepared, and neither is learning as much as they could be.
That’s why personalisation is important; it meets people exactly where they are and where they need to go.
👉 More from OL: How to conduct a learning needs analysis
The problem with personalisation
Fully personalised learning sounds great, but it comes with a huge caveat: it’s very expensive, not to mention slow to build.
A company-wide course within your onboarding strategy is a good example of this. Total personalisation might mean separate content tracks for different departments, seniority levels, or learning styles, each one designed, built, tested, and maintained. Multiply that across every course in your library, and you’re looking at a production workload most L&D teams simply can’t sustain.
This leaves L&D with a tricky balance to strike: learning that feels individual, without the workload piling up behind it.
How AI chatbots can make learning more personal
There’s a solution to making courses feel more personalised at scale. An AI chatbot, embedded directly into the course, can respond to individual questions as they arise. Rather than sitting outside the learning experience as a separate tool, it lives within it, ready whenever someone has a question, gets stuck on a concept, needs an example, or wants something explained a different way.
AI chatbots are especially useful for turning general guidance into role-specific context. For example, someone taking a course on handling difficult client conversations gets to a scenario that doesn’t match anything they’ve dealt with before. Instead of pausing, flagging a manager, or ploughing on regardless, they ask the chatbot directly and get an answer in seconds, with no break in the flow of the course.
For each learner, the course content remains the same, but the support around it adapts to whatever they need.
What this means for L&D
Chatbots may sound complex to implement directly into courses, but the good news is that the tech is already there. If you’re an Articulate 360 subscriber (or considering becoming one), AI Tutor, an integrated, learner-facing chatbot, is now available in Rise courses.
Designed to support learning, not shortcut it, it won’t hand over quiz or knowledge check answers either, so learners still have to apply their own understanding to prove they’ve taken everything on board.
When rolled out, here’s what it opens up for L&D teams and learners alike:
- Personalisation becomes achievable at scale, without loads of extra content to build
- Learners get support the moment they need it, rather than waiting on a manager or trawling back through a module
- Learners have more autonomy over what they explore and where they need extra help
👉 Related: Articulate 360 vs Adobe Captivate: which tool is better?
Where human expertise still matters
In-course AI chatbots are impressive, but none of it replaces the people behind your learning strategy. While a chatbot can clarify a concept or answer a question in the moment, it can’t coach someone entirely through a skills gap or make the judgement calls that come from understanding your organisation from the inside.
Even within the replies given by chatbots, human input is still crucial too. Articulate’s AI Tutor only draws on the content your team has fed into it, so learners are getting answers sourced from your own SMEs, rather than information that’s hallucinated or pulled from somewhere else on the web.
That’s the balance AI should strike in L&D: it speeds up the process, but a person always handles the thinking.
Give learners extra help, exactly when they need it
Every learner needs something slightly different, and now your Rise courses can respond. AI Tutor is live for Articulate 360 subscribers, giving learners instant support that’s tailored to their needs.
