CYPHER is the AI-powered platform that transforms how organizations create, manage, and deliver training, making learning more efficient, scalable, and measurable. With its intuitive design, you can reduce training costs, accelerate course creation, and keep content always relevant—empowering your teams to learn faster and smarter.
In this episode, we speak to John Kannapell, the President and COO of CYPHER Learning, an innovative education technology company. We discuss the unique features of CYPHER Learning’s AI-driven platform, its evolution since its founding in 2009, and how it personalizes learning experiences for both businesses and educational institutions. The conversation highlights the importance of user experience, feedback mechanisms, and real-world applications of the platform, showcasing how it can transform the learning landscape. In this conversation, John Kannapell discusses the evolution of learning platforms, emphasizing the importance of customer feedback, market trends, and the integration of AI in creating personalized learning experiences. He highlights the need for businesses to view training as a critical component of their competitive strategy and explains how CYPHER Learning is adapting to meet the demands of various industries. The discussion also covers the balance between automation and human oversight in course creation, the future of learning technology, and the role of AI in enhancing educational outcomes.
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Show Notes
Takeaways
- CYPHER Learning provides an all-in-one AI learning platform.
- The platform significantly reduces course creation time.
- AI enables personalized learning experiences in real-time.
- User experience has been a core focus since the company’s inception.
- Feedback from users is essential for continuous improvement.
- Gamification enhances engagement and motivation among learners.
- The platform allows for scalable and efficient training solutions.
- Real-time updates to courses are now possible with AI.
- The integration of AI is revolutionizing the education sector.
- CYPHER Learning aims to deliver billions of learning moments daily. They provided 180,000 certifications last year in the beauty space.
- We listen to our customers first.
- We have to stay current and out in front of where AI and learning is going.
- Learning and training as an imperative for their differentiation.
- AI is a fantastic foundation to eliminate a lot of the manual tasks.
- We put every single course through additional AIs to ensure quality.
- Text, image, video is the progression of technology.
- How do we give learners agency in their learning?
- We’re at the very beginning of this AI integration in learning.
- CYPHER Learning is designed to help people navigate their specific industry needs.
Chapters
00:00 – Introduction to CYPHER Learning and AI in Education
02:53 – The Unique Features of CYPHER Learning
05:49 – The Evolution of CYPHER Learning and AI Integration
08:52 – Personalized Learning and the Future of Education
12:10 – User Experience and Feedback Mechanisms
14:48 – Real-World Applications and Case Studies
18:00 – Visualizing the CYPHER Learning Platform
21:09 – Incorporating Feedback for Continuous Improvement
26:49 – Scaling Learning Across Borders
30:36 – Understanding Customer Needs and Market Trends
33:22 – Balancing Automation and Personalization in Learning
36:51 – Leveraging AI for Quality and Engagement
41:10 – Future Trends in Learning Technology
Transcript
Beau Hamilton (00:02.981)
Hello everyone and welcome to the SourceForge Podcast. Thank you for joining us today. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton, Senior Editor and Multimedia Producer here at SourceForge, the world’s most visited software comparison site where B2B software buyers compare and find business software solutions.
Joining us today is John Kannapell, President, Chief Operating Officer and Board Member at CYPHER Learning and all-in-one AI learning platform. That’s ushering in the next generation of education. When that’s more personalized, scalable and built to give learners all the resources they need to succeed. So whether you’re developing onboarding programs, certifying employees, or teaching students, CYPHER Learning offers a platform that really is just designed to make your life easier and your learning programs are way more effective.
Automation plays a big role with this platform, but so does the real time insights and intuitive design, all of which we’re going to be talking about today. So let’s get right into it. John, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.
John Kannapell (00:58.242)
Thanks, Beau. Great to be here. I appreciate you making some time.
Beau Hamilton (01:01.701)
Of course. Yeah. Can you start by giving us a quick rundown of what CYPHER Learning is all about and just how it fits into the broader world of business and workplace learning?
John Kannapell (01:10.786)
Yeah, yeah, sure thing. So CYPHER Learning is an education technology company. We provide the most modern AI learning platform in the world and we deliver everything a business or an educational institution would need, right? In an all-in-one platform to deliver faster, more personalized and better learning outcomes for their employees, their students, they’re extended enterprise of partners and end users of their products or services. And we do it around the globe. So we’ve got a number of customers all over the world, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Siemens, NTD Data.
We also work with a lot of large educational systems. The entire country of Qatar, their ministry of education for the K-12 system, uses our platform for their entire public school system. Similarly in the Philippines STI about 130,000 students use our platform every day. And one of the top five graduate business schools in the country of the US uses our platform. And so we’re really scaling, you know, dramatically. And the types of things that we’re, you know, most proud of are the way that we’re able to serve, you know, those two different markets, business customers that think of L&D professionals, HR professionals, managers of a department or division, as well as department chairs or entire superintendent systems to help them engage their learners more effectively and more efficiently with our platform.
Beau Hamilton (02:53.185)
Wow. So yeah, there’s a lot of those, those are a lot of companies that I recognize. And I think that’s just a testament to the capabilities of your platform, you know? Those are some major world brands. I think that’s fascinating. And I know there’s a lot of, there’s all sorts of AI tools nowadays. There’s a lot of chatbots and agents in this space, but I know that not a lot of them offer this all-in-one platform that you guys offer for tackling the learning experience.
So I’m curious of what would you say sets CYPHER Learning apart from other learning platforms out there, and another AI education solutions out there.
John Kannapell (03:27.598)
Sure, sure. So unlike other platforms, we’re really a Gen AI first company. We have been on the leading edge of how we use AI to really simplify the entire learning life cycle. So we look at it from a persona basis and we start with an umbrella set of solutions called AI 360. And so what you can find in our product today that is really a differentiator is number one, we use AI to help course administrators to basically save, you know, if you’re a business, generally it takes you about 40 hours to create, you know, some, a course for an employee. Think about a compliance course or maybe an upskilling course in sales. Whereas on the education side, it might take 400 hours to develop an entire course. And so we reduce that down to minutes to build a course that is what we say 80% ready, right? For the course administrator or designer to be able to then take that framework, the content, automated skills, automated competencies, automated assessments, and automated gamification, all done in roughly about three to four minutes is what we’re seeing right now in terms of developing an 80% ready course. And they can configure, right, the elements and the components to make it more personalized, you know, for their specific needs.
We point the AIs at their content. We also supplement with third party content or web-based content. If they don’t have things like if you’re in sales, maybe it’s objection handling or managing a discovery conversation. And some schools need some supplemental content. We augment that with third-party. But again, the AI will bring that in and develop and deliver that course in minutes. And so that’s really been the first and most important use of AI is helping reduce the drudgery and administration of course building.
But we’re now moving into other personas like the learner. And so if you kind of think about where learning is going, one of the things that we continue to see is what we call learning in the moment, right? Most of us learned in traditional courses, right? Through elementary, high school, maybe graduate school, where you sat in a seat or, you know, learned at a distance for, you know, through technology, these long format courses. Now we’re seeing it go in the other direction with transactional learning, you know, a lot of people are using ChatGPT or Google to get transactional answers. But what we’re offering, right, our partners is a way to actually deliver AI-driven learning in the moment. So through their systems, right? Think about like Slack integration or other applications and engineer might be using developed code, we’re starting to deliver agents, right, that allow an employee or a learner to actually get information in the moment of executing a task and say, what’s the company way of actually doing this task? Or what’s the best practice around accomplishing this specific type of skill? So they can get that information quickly and get right back to work or go along that spectrum and do a series of micro learning where the agent, we take this really personally as we talk about agents, we talk about agency, right? Agency is, you’re not actually just asking it for help, but this agent is actually starting to learn more about you, your preferences. If you’re an employee, maybe it’s your job level, maybe it’s your skillset, maybe it’s your career path. And so those elements begin to allow the agent to work on your behalf in a proactive way to suggest things, like, hey, do you want to learn about how to become a manager every Tuesday at four o’clock? So you can start to actually plan skills progression and a career progression for yourself. So those types of persona-based agents of how we use AI to bring it into the environment where employees or learners are behaving every day and how we give them accessibility to these tools to make their lives easier, but also make learning enjoyable and more engaging and proactive is what differentiates us.
Beau Hamilton (07:45.581)
Okay. So yeah, there’s a lot of, a lot of unique strengths there you just mentioned. And thanks for sort of laying the foundation. I’m curious. So CYPHER Learning was, is my understanding was founded in 2009, right? Was it, which was well before sort of the, the generative AI revolution we find ourselves in. And I’m just curious, what, you know, I’m curious about the tech you built into the platform. Obviously you mentioned AI and the agents and, and, a lot of these tools that are really at the center of the industry right now. But at what point did it sort of pivot into becoming AI company and an AI power platform?
John Kannapell (08:22.38)
Yeah, yeah, that’s great. Well, automation has always been at the heart of our company. So our founder, Graham Glass, founded the company in 2009. He was an ex-CTO of a technology startup that went public here in the, actually the DC area, went back to teaching at UT Dallas and just found the toolkits that he’s using either from business to help employees or educate students were just not, you know, user friendly enough. They’re manually intensive. Even the learner engagement side was just, you know, making the learners do all the work, right? Find out where their course is, discover the syllabus, you know, really navigate through an LMS in a number of clicks to find, you know, where a group chat might be, for example. And so Graham’s mission was really to simplify a lot of that user experience. So that was the beginning. was like, make a beautifully designed and simple to use interface for both administrators and for students.
And so if you look at a lot of what CYPHER Learning has been awarded for multi-times over, it’s about our user experience. We’re the best LMS top on Forbes right now. We’ve got a number of awards for our user experience. So that started with just simplifying fewer clicks, fewer swipes on a mobile device to get to your information, but also around automation. And so there’s a lot of things that started in 2009 around the tasks like streamlining process for how you enroll a student or an employee in a course, how you get reporting on those things, how you send out notifications. These are a lot of things that many of the LMSs of the day from say 2009 to maybe 2020 didn’t really have great functionality. They were more Frankenstein, bolting things on. And I worked at Blackboard, I worked at 2U, so I’ve seen all of these platforms in my day. And when I saw this, when I came to CYPHER Learning, it was what I call an epiphany moment, you know, your mouth drops when you see the incredible set of automations that were already there. And then the addition of AI that allows you to automate those tasks even further around what matters, right? Around eliminating repetitive tasks, around the things that really give educators or the managers full control, but in a way that’s simple.
And so within the first week when I saw, you know, Graham gave me the first demo, I was giving demos. I mean, that’s how easy it is. And so it’s a very simple way of giving instructions to an AI or allowing you to use drag and drop interfaces to create the automations that you want to personalize your course or your learning moment for your end users. And then the system begins to populate those automations and make it super simple for you just to administer. And I’ll tell you one thing that’s interesting that we’re actually a, you know, about to launch is a course agent, right? That not only allows you to build courses, right? We talked about that, but actually have the conversation with your course. So imagine you’re a professor and you’re sitting down at the end of a semester and you’re trying to figure out, hey, what were the easiest parts of my course? What were the places that people got stuck the most? What was the pathway that some of our students used that really did well, right, on their exams or in my class? And what are the things I should change about those areas that might lift the comprehension or the outcomes of the students in my course? Can you make some suggestions? That type of conversation of talking to the course and getting feedback and then automatically enabling those changes to be made in the course is what we talk about when we think about simplifying the user experience of the administrator and all the other personas in that life cycle.
Beau Hamilton (12:10.651)
Wow, interesting. Okay, so it really just sounds like you, the you or your company was, was waiting for this moment in a sense, like working towards this sort of this goal of having this, this personalized AI, create these modules for you. And now we’re finally here, essentially, it’s been like decades in the, in the making. It’s sort of, it makes me think too of, I feel like I’m very sort of bullish and AI in the, the education space, because I just think of, you know, the, the school system locally, federally it’s, it’s, always continues to need, revisions and work. And like teachers are constantly stressed, having to deal with large class sizes and all sorts of different curriculums. and I think that having a personalized AI could be a beneficial thing. I think naturally there’s the, human connection that might be an issue and there’s other issues that arise, but I think being able to have a platform that caters individually to the student or to the, in this case, the business person, I think that’s really interesting. And I think there’s a lot to be gained from that.
John Kannapell (13:26.446)
Yeah, it’s, what’s incredible is if you think about it, you know, for, for the, you know, the entire human history up until probably 2000, you know, maybe five 2007, um, education was delivered with a person standing on the stage and talking to people, you know, from Socrates to right professors, you know, or teachers in elementary school. They were standing in the front room and there’s a class of, you know, anywhere from one to hundreds of people listening. And, you know, with the advancement of technology, you know, we started to put things online, syllabus, course content, you know, group sessions, right? Those types of things were making it easier on the teacher to get some of those things to happen outside of the classroom. But with the evolution of AI and personalization to your point, what’s really happening now is all of those things that became around for in the education space seat time, like are you sitting in your seat for an entire semester to get three or four credits for that course? Or are we actually able to learn and engage students at the pace that they’re demonstrating competency and allow them to continue right down that path and continue to have either more challenging right types of assessments or advanced skills in a particular topic? Or are you able to branch off, you know, groups that might be advanced, or maybe getting stuck on a particular topic into not only individualized lessons, but also group sessions, right? That help them all kind of learn at the same pace, so they’re not falling behind too much with the rest of the pace of the class.
The same thing is on the business side. So if you think about businesses, most people, when they think about training from business, they think about the annual compliance course they gotta take, right? To check the box and click that button and get through and hopefully they get the quiz right or they gotta go back and redo it. It’s a total waste of time and just awful user experience. And with AI now, what you’re able to do is actually personalize all of the training down to the individual employee, right? At scale and in an efficient way. We’re doing this for, you know, sometimes five, four, you know, dollars, some education students less than a dollar a student in delivering more personalized learning at that level, because the technology allows you to continue to modify, right, the hierarchy of a role and permission.
So I’ll give you an example is, you know, you haul as a customer of ours, they have, you know, national coverage for all of their different trucks and different types of long and short moving hauls. They have different types of locations and operations, different roles, right? In those companies. They’re now using our platform to tailor not only the overall master brand experience of what should a U-Haul customer have every time, no matter who they are or where they’re located down to the specific store format. So now we’re talking about parent hierarchy down to what’s configurable around my location. I’m a, you know, let’s say Portland-based U-Haul. I’m dealing with people going up and down the coast maybe, you know, for short haul. If I’m in the middle of St. Louis, maybe I’ve got long haul trucks. And so I have to have different types of training for those types of customer experiences and the people who maintain, right, manage and operate those facilities are gonna be slightly different based on the competition, right, and the types of services you’re providing.
We can now do that at scale and efficiently for the first time ever. Whereas before you had to schedule a training, get everybody in room, and maybe it would be relevant to maybe 10 or 20% of those people. Not to mention the fact that you can now update those courses in your real time. And that’s really important because as competitive markets change, you think about the industries that we serve, healthcare, financial services. We talked about education, IT and computer software, these industries are changing rapidly right now. Most of those businesses were updating their courses maybe every year before about a year ago. Now with our platform, they’re updating them three, four times or as needed as regulatory compliance changes, as competitors offer new products or services, as the market demand shifts right towards, self-driving cars, right? So there just isn’t a textbook that’s on that yet. And you have to keep up with that pace to have engineers who know how to develop them, you know, maintenance people know how to maintain them, and computer science technologies, you know, how to make all the, you know, things work inside them to be able to deliver, right? A safe drive for that experience. So that’s what we’re providing is a modern platform for people to keep pace with what learners need to have an edge and their businesses to remain competitive or the degree you get at an education is to be relevant, right? And the skills you have behind it to be relevant for the market.
Beau Hamilton (18:38.511)
Yeah. Can you, can you visualize, help me visualize what the platform looks like and how I would interact with it? Cause, I picture, you know, I picture more or less like, maybe a LLM chat bot service where I kind of plug in different prompts and I get different modules and visual information, but I’m curious, like other, any other aspects that we should know about in terms of like being able to interact. And you mentioned there’s group chats, kind of group activities, are there any, like what other features and, and, and visual like learning aspects are there for your platform?
John Kannapell (19:16.834)
Yeah, so if you’re a learner, right, what you’ll get access to is a beautiful interface, right, that has, and again, giving you a demo would be the best way to share this, but showing you access to the courses that you have, showing you access to where you are in the progression around those courses, what courses, you know, maybe you’ve completed and you’ve earned some type of credential or maybe it’s a badge if it’s a certificate, for example. There’s all kinds of things that are built in around leaderboards. So when I said automatic gamification, so with every course, we allow the professor or a manager to build gamification into the course itself to allow employees or specific learners to be able to see how am I progressing against Beau or John or others? Am I leading the pack? Because every time I complete a task or a module or an assessment where I get a 10 out of 10, I’m getting another award on the leaderboard. And so the manager, you know, and a lot of our business partners do this.
Yokohama tires, for example, as a customer of ours, they’re using our platform to reward their dealers who take courses on their tires and all of their products, to be able to learn more about how to present them at the dealership at retail. And when they complete those courses, they get great merchandise, coolers, hats, all kinds of cool merch from all the races that they participate in. And it’s a self-fulfilling, right? Gamified experience where you get great engagement and you get rewards for the behaviors that you want. And we see a lot of employers doing that, a lot of educators doing that, to make sure that people stay engaged. So you’ll see some of those elements as a part of it, but I think the most important part is, I mentioned to you the CYPHER Agent for learners. And so as you begin to engage in the platform, you’ll start to discover, hey, not only can I learn in a course, but if I have a question, I want to drill into a specific area in context.
So let’s say you’re taking a course on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, right? And I really want to get to know, you know, the ecosystem of the corals that are existing that are very unique in that area. And I want to drill into that with CYPHER Agent for learners. You can click on a button and say, hey, or on a specific link in the lesson, say, I’d like to learn a little bit more about coral growth in the Great Barrier Reef. And instantly it’ll give you an AI generated, you know, beautifully designed imagery, context, right, additional drilled down fields that allow you to have a context map to say, these are all the various areas that you might want to think about or learn about as you go forward. And if it’s a part of an educator lesson, it might say, hey, you want to have a challenge question on showing that you’ve actually retained some of this and show your manager or your professor that you’re actually earning extra points for going deeper into a specific area that you might be passionate about. So the toolkits that we have, allow learning along that spectrum, everything from what I call transactional, just-in-time learning, question-answer, all the way to long-form courses and micro learning moments all the way in between. That’s why we say that our purpose is to deliver billions of learning moments every day for our learners.
Beau Hamilton (23:01.499)
Well, I must say you did a great job explaining that because I’m a big visual learner and sometimes I get lost in just the verbal descriptions and that’s fascinating. I want to sit down and maybe we’ll have you back for a demo to kind of do a walkthrough because I think this is really interesting. And the Great Barrier Reef, I mean, that’s very relevant for me. I’m going to have to definitely study. I’m headed there in a week from now.
So I’m curious, what do you, the instant feedback from a learning perspective, but how do you get the how do you incorporate feedback from the people you’re educating? You know, because like, in a way you can you can tweak to get real time changes that users want. But there might be some more maybe fundamental changes to the platform that can be tweaked to improve certain aspects. So how do you incorporate feedback to just make the platform better?
John Kannapell (24:00.342)
Yeah, so a number of ways. So first of all, I mentioned that we just launched CYPHER Agent for learners. And so we have a beta group of customers who are actively testing this right now on web-based content. And so there are a breadth of customers that are from business and education that represent some of our kind of thought leader customers, ones who really want to be out in front and use learning and advanced learning technologies, as a competitive advantage. And so we’ve given them access to this product and we have a questionnaire that they’ll continuously fill out. We’ve got tracking on the types of things they are or not using, watching their workflows or on are they finding things easily? Are they stopping in certain places so that we can get better about how we introduce this product to a larger group of customers.
And then those that have actually participated in the beta, will be the first to participate in this CYPHER Agent for learners with proprietary content, which is really the exciting thing, right? So think about all the companies that might have learning manuals or operating processes that they need everyone to learn, but also stay up to date on because they’re launching new products all the time. And so the moment we begin to launch that capability to point the AI at proprietary content, now, all of a sudden, you’ve got the ability to get feedback from your customers on how do we present this just in time so that if you have an employee in the field that needs access to a manual and doesn’t want to scroll through the operating manual, but just wants to ask a question about a specific installation of a particular part, they can access on a mobile device, they can actually use voice driven technology so they can ask themselves speech to text recognition and get a verbal response back. So it could be a hands-free experience. And they can get the exact and approved process that the company has said, this is the way to do it in that moment. And think about how much time that’s going to save, right? A lot of these businesses to be able to deliver the certified and approved process in the moment.
Now, so that’s just the beta community. So we do a number of other things. We’ve got obviously a public roadmap that we share with our customers. We have quarterly business reviews with a lot of our larger customers where we share our roadmap. We understand where they’re going. I’ll give you an example. Cengage, who is a large publisher and a multi portfolio company owns a business called Milady. They’re the largest beauty professional training company in the U.S. They provide certifications for SEMA, which is the association for cosmetologists and industry professionals in the beauty space. And they sell training through our platform.
And so we meet with them continuously. They have, I think, I think they provided 180,000 certifications last year in the beauty space. We always want to know like, where are they going? What’s their strategy? How are they evolving? And one of their strategies is how do we serve, you know, more communities might be not just in the US and overseas. And because our platform translates automatically into 50 different languages, we’re ready for that, right? We’re ready to scale, we’ve got operations capabilities in those markets to be able to host and serve learners in those markets, as well as translate into languages that are relevant and localization to their specific environment. So those are a couple of ways we learn. We obviously get a lot of feedback from our customers through our website. We have phone numbers, emails, and other things. We have communities that we tap into as well. So we listen to all those things. But I’d say that the main thing is we listen to our customers first.
What are they telling us, especially those that really love us and want to continue to grow with us, they get some extra attention. We also store prospects. We listen to people that are in our sales consideration pipeline. What are the things that they need to really make the decision on going with us? I’ll give you one example, is we’ve done a lot of work on our integrations, right? So because we’re not a core, let’s say CRM, or an HRAS system, human resource information system, right? We have to play in that ecosystem really well because there’s a lot of data we have to make sure it’s real time, right? Who the employee is, what courses they’ve accomplished, what their title is, what their career progression looks like, did they complete this course or not for compliance, all it has to be exactly accurate. And so we have to make sure those integrations that we use, and we’ve got hundreds of them in our marketplace, you know, from Google to Workday to ADP to Salesforce to HubSpot, Bamboo HR, all of these systems that house and manage employee or customer data have to synchronize with our system. So that’s a key input from our prospects that, if we can be good at that, then we’ll probably buy from you. And the third is looking at the market and our competitors and where the market’s going, not only what they’re doing, but also where learning is going.
And that’s the most important part, because we have said we’re going to be the leading edge, right? AI powered and most modern and best learning platform there is around the globe. We have to stay current and out in front of where AI and learning is going. And so we’re looking two, three years ahead to know that probably by, I’d say the end of this year, everyone’s going to have probably an agent, right? Some type of agent, right? That’s going to know a little bit about you. see ChatGPT trying to get on your desktop, you see Siri and hey, you know, Google and Alexa all trying to be your assistant. We are focused on education, we’re focused on learning. And so if we can be in that space and be able to be the place that people say I need to learn something either instantly or over the course of time, we want to be the platform that they go to. And so that’s why it’s really great for us to, you know, see those future use cases coming, but also understand where AI can be a great enabler of how we reach those learners and engage them.
Beau Hamilton (30:14.595)
Now, is there a company or an industry that is not a particularly good fit for, for CYPHER Learning? Cause it seems like you’ve, work with, I mean, all sorts of different industries, all sorts of different schools and company sizes. Is it, is it, is your platform kind of catered for pretty much any sort of, business or industry?
John Kannapell (30:36.524)
Yeah, so I’ll start with the first question, is which who are we generally not working with? And what I’d say is, is any company that looks at learning or training as a checkbox, right? Saying, are we doing it? Okay, great. We’ve done it. It’s like the people that use those, you PowerPoint driven compliance trainings that you just click the button, right? That’s not our target market. What we’re looking for are businesses and educational institutions that see learning and training as an imperative for their differentiation, for their competitiveness in the market. And so what that means is that their market for a business is changing so rapidly, right, that the cost of hiring people with the skills they need is going up so fast, right? And the cost of not having the right person to seed, having to, you know, transition that, find someone else. The cost of that is generally, you know, 20% replacing costs versus re-skilling employees in place, right? Getting the employees the needs and the specific companies they need to do their jobs well.
And so a lot of the research that we have shows that most employees show up and they say, Hey, my manager just said, I don’t have the skills that, you know, we need to be able to do my job, but there’s no tools for me. There’s no answer, right? And so we fill that gap by giving those types of businesses, right? This own platform where they can use our platform as a differentiator to upskill employees in place and also give them career paths where they can continue to develop skills. So for example, training companies are a big part of our target market. We talked about higher education institutions, especially around continuing ed, right? Think about community colleges or things that you have to get a certification to be in a specific industry. Those are the things that are changing so rapidly. Healthcare, right? Financial services, technology. Those industries are going so fast that most traditional learning methods can’t keep up. And if they want to be in the top 5, 10% of their market, they’re going to have to find and upskill and re-skill the best employees. And that’s where we provide that competitive advantage.
Beau Hamilton (32:59.513)
Now, how do you sort of, you’ve touched on this, but how do you strike that balance between, let’s say, automation, personalized learning, but also ease of use and cost for your clients who are weighing other different options out there? Cause there’s a lot of other options, a lot of competitors. So how do you kind of balance all these different moving pieces?
John Kannapell (33:22.062)
Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, we always start with the standpoint that, you know, AI is a fantastic foundation to eliminate a lot of the manual tasks, but we don’t see it replacing human, right, oversight, as well as engagement in the development of the learning experience. And so to me, that’s why we always say, hey, when we develop a course, right, with our partners using AI 360 course creation, we say it’s 80% risk, right? You have to do the additional 20% to be able to customize and personalize it to you, but, literally 80% is cutting out, you know, hundreds of hours. If you’re an educator, you know, and in a business sense, it’s limiting a lot of the manually, you know, intensive tasks of pulling the content, converting it over, making it look nice, building all the skills and automation and assessments, gamification. So that’s the part that most people say, yeah, I really would love the help to be able to automate a lot of those tasks, but I want to be in control of what image is in there, how it’s presented, what the module progression looks like, what skills you’re actually mapping to. I have these sets of skills that are specific to my industry. I’ve got to use these.
Like we have a customer who’s in the natural gas pipeline industry and they have a certification called HasWopper, which is the ability to teach training for people to manage hazardous waste situations. So the training on the safety and protection of that pipeline to make sure it gets to the customers safely and securely. And what happens if it doesn’t, needs to be very, very specified because obviously a lot of governments and local communities want to make sure any risk of that is controlled and managed by professionally trained and certified people. And so we follow that skill set. But for other parts of it, we’re one of the first in the industry to develop what we call AI cross check. Which is, there are a lot of people think, oh, AI, know, there’s these hallucinations. It’s not always right. Yeah, we’re definitely early in the stages. There’s going to be some of those that happen, but we put every single course and every single piece of content that we create through additional AIs that are out available. We use multiple behind the scenes, right? To be able to cross check the quality and validity to make sure it’s accurately represented. If it’s not, we give that choice back to the customer right to be able to make those choices.
So that’s where human involvement is really important. You can’t trust it fully 100%. But if you’re involved and you have the right level of oversight and the tools like we have to be able to see, you know, where things happen, like asking the course, right, hey, are areas people getting tripped up? What are the things that might be broken in my course that I don’t see right now? That gives them the ability to engage and administer the course in a useful way, in a conversational way versus having to hunt and find where things live in other platforms.
Beau Hamilton (36:18.971)
Yeah. Okay. So you mentioned the, the hallucinations and I just, was thinking, I mean, that’s just the, it’s, it’s a big issue for anybody working with, with generative AI, but it’s especially big when, from your, from your platform’s perspective of, educating people. Because obviously you want to give them the most real factual information. you can. Do you, have you been developing your, your AI and tools in-house or have you, mentioned you partner with a few, other platforms that currently exist. What’s kind of the behind the scenes look?
John Kannapell (36:51.308)
Yeah. So, I mean, we use OpenAI, Anthropic, Claude, Sonnet, a number of others. Like we’re always testing new things. You images have just become, you know, much more on the forefront in the last, I’d say, month or two because their ability to take, you know, text-based direction and provide, you know, very rich and themed or different types of styles of image creation, we have all that already built into our tool.
So when you’re creating a course, we don’t say, you want to use this AI or that AI? We say, do you want your course to feature a cartoon style, photographic style, sci-fi style imagery in your course? And so there’s already a variety of different image creation capabilities because we knew this was coming and we offer that today.
But as it gets better, we can give those contextual instructions to the AIs behind the scenes to understand this is a course, it’s about this specific type of topic. It features these types of skills and competencies. And we’re looking for images that feature these types of things, either open on the open web through our customers own content, because they do give us lot of PDFs, Word documents, YouTube videos, anything that they want, we can ingest, and turn into beautiful courses or learning objects and then translate them. So there’s not a lot of back and forth. And I think that’s the main thing is, as you see in some of your day-to-day interactions of these standalone AIs, if you just go in and say, hey, teach me about this, or can you translate this Excel into some key findings? A lot of them struggle with more complex, you know, situations without the proper context for running. You see all of this work being done on prompt engineering. And that’s because the standalone AIs may not be specific to education or automotive or financial services. So you’re starting to see some breakpoints around people customizing AIs for specific industries or specific use cases, right? Like compliance, you know, for example, or a law firms specializing in that area.
So that’s what we see is that in order to deliver a seamless user experience, the value we provide is we’ve done the heavy lifting of knowing how to provide the instructions to multiple AIs to bring back a, hopefully, more than 80%, 90%, or 100% right response or something that’s at least in the zone where they can say, you know what, that’s pretty good. I would have done it a little differently, but I think that’s the right response for what I need at this point.
Beau Hamilton (39:43.715)
Yeah, keep working to that 100%. It’s interesting to hear all the different sources of information you take and gather. I’m glad it’s kind of reassuring that you don’t just focus on one sort of client company that you source your information from.
John Kannapell (40:01.804)
Yeah, and it’s going to continue to evolve. I mean, you see it every day, right? There’s new AIs that are coming out from a lot of different companies, obviously, the bigger ones with the, you know, more funding, and the larger data centers are going to continue to go general and wide in terms of their applicability. Whereas others are saying, you know, we’re going to stick with this lane around, you know, video creation, for example, as a specific type of media type.
Beau Hamilton (40:29.295)
Yeah, I was going to say, circling back, and we’re coming down to the last couple of questions I have for you. And I want to circle back on the future outlook and sort of what’s coming down for the industry. We have the video, or we have the photo creation tools that are really kind of amping up. You have the text base. They’re really getting good about being able to manipulate and get output accurate text, which has always been a problem.
And I think the next big thing would probably be video. You have project Sora. I believe you have Adobe Firefly. It’s called, you have these different kinds of public facing tools for video. Obviously that’s going to require a lot more processing power. And so it’s, it’s, you know, but I think that’s the next, the next logical step. I’m curious, like, yeah, what kind of trends, what kind of things are you keeping an eye on specifically that you’re looking to maybe adopt in this space?
John Kannapell (41:23.5)
Yeah, well, first of all, you’re right. I’ve been in technology for 25 years and it always goes through the same progression. Text, image, video. Text, image, video. And then, right, there’s, okay, well, what’s the blended experience of those things and how do users engage in that type of environment with the combined, right, set of assets that are there? And so we’re going through that right now in terms of the specialization of AIs that are out there. And so those will evolve quickly, right?
So from our perspective, we continue to focus on the learning life cycle, right? What does it take to deliver the most engaging, most personalized and most efficient way of learning, you know, to our end users and how do we do it in a way that gives them an edge? That’s going to be our guiding principle as we go into the future. And so how that becomes, you know, more powerful is as we start to look at all the different personas involved in creating that learning experience.
How do we make their lives easier? How do we make their jobs more delightful in terms of not only developing the learning content or the learning moment or the micro learning object, but also how people engage with it. We just talked about a couple of ways, voice driven. That’s becoming a much more prominent way that people interact with technology. Most people have those in their homes now, at least one, right? Hey, Siri. Hey, Alexa. You know, all of those experiences. My phone just went off when I said that. Yeah, you have to be careful. It’s always listening. But the point is, is how you deliver, right? Hands free learning is definitely something that we’re looking at is is when people talk in different languages, you have to be able to understand the context of what they’re asking for, right? Contextually, you know, through IP and their accent or their dialect. And you have to be able then translate that into, right, a response, right, that’s tailored to the specific individual.
And so when I say that, and I talk about agents, we always go back to that agency thing. How do we give learners agency? And the way you do it is you start to build memories, right? Memories of what did the learner tell me about themselves proactively? I’m John. This is my job. These are the skills I have today. These are the things I need to do well to be, you know, good in my job. But this is my career path. These are the things I want to learn more about. And if you tell the agent and give those types of instructions, then you’ll be able to have a proactive relationship where the agent will work on your behalf to bring you things, right? In the method and in the modality and in the timeframe, that makes the most sense for you. Sundays at 10 o’clock in the morning, do you want to spend 30 minutes learning about your ocean reef, right? Offside the Great Barrier Reef, coral structures. Great, that’s awesome. I’ll get in touch with you every Sunday at 10 o’clock. We’ll do a quick lesson and you’re going to progress through this careers map or this skills map as you learn more about coral reefs to the point where after lesson five, you’re going to get a badge in, you know, being, I don’t know, coral reef bow in the gamification.
And so those types of things, if you just think about them, right, work for you. But if you go down to the K-12 space, you might have someone who’s struggling with math. And because we have the ability to do conversational learning, and we know a little bit about that learner, let’s say they love Minecraft. And so now we can say, okay, great. Beau, you said you love Minecraft. We know you’re having trouble a little bit with, you know, maybe division. We’re gonna teach you division through Minecraft and the entire lesson then becomes personalized around your specific interests So you know that I’m engaged, you know I like it and it’s Translating it into a language that makes sense for me and makes it fun right for me to learn and so those are the things that will start to become even more personalized through agency and those people and learners who learn the most about how to actually continue to engage in this way, to be continuous learning, will be the ones who progress the fastest. And so that’s where I think, as people understand traditional learning and what’s changing, that will start to evolve as well.
Beau Hamilton (45:52.987)
Wow. Interesting. There’s so many interesting things to talk about. And I imagine this space, just is a lot of fun to work in, know, see working with all these different clients and seeing all the different use cases and learning about learning about all the different ways to learn about a company and different moving pieces a part of the economy that the companies you don’t even industries you don’t even think about and realize that exist. That’s exciting. You mentioned CYPHER Agent is that something that is currently available now?
John Kannapell (46:26.914)
Yeah, so CYPHER Agent for like the AI 360 is the umbrella, right? CYPHER Agent is one of the delivery mechanisms that we’re branding, right? So CYPHER Agent for course creation is available now. We’ve got a couple hundred customers who’ve been using it for more than a year now. And we’ve got great case studies that are on our website that people can read about what educational institutions are, you know, amazingly, you know, developing courses, thousands of courses in a month to really advance their enrollment opportunities into new markets or new student populations. NTT data is saving 24 work days a month through our platform of being able to create courses and refresh them more efficiently. And we’ve got tons of an ROI calculator on our site that shows if you have this many courses you develop a year, this many people developing those courses for this many learners.
What would your savings be on those types of things versus your current and using our platform? And so all those things are possible to be able to share with customers. But I’d say the best thing is we’re at the very beginning of this. We’re definitely learning a lot about how people are using not only what we have in place, but what’s coming. I mentioned CYPHER Agent for Learners. That’s the next generation of, it’s in beta right now. It’ll be publicly available to all of our customers sometime this quarter as we move into proprietary data. And then some of the other ones I mentioned, the course agent conversation that’s coming probably late Q2, early Q3. There’s a lot of other things that we’ve got coming, but I think the main thing is, if you think about the personas of that learning life cycle, we’re using AI to make all of their lives easier. And that’s where we’re heading. So you can expect more from CYPHER Learning.
Beau Hamilton (48:20.443)
For those curious about the platform and want to get in touch with you and your team, where should they go?
John Kannapell (48:25.944)
Sure. Well, CipherLearning.com is the best place to start. We designed it in a way that helps people navigate right to either their specific industry or to specific use cases that they’re trying to accomplish. If it’s onboarding employees, if it’s training their channel partners, if it’s upskilling employees in place, all of those use cases are available right off the homepage. And you can see the customers who we’re engaging with that are having success in those specific either use cases or industries. You can see some of the results around the specific return investment they’ve been able to deliver, but also request a demo, which is the best way to get to know our team, help us understand your use case, what are the big challenges you’re having and how we can best help and support you getting to the future of education with CYPHER Learning.
Beau Hamilton (49:19.769)
Awesome. Well, hey, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to sit and talk with us about CYPHER Learning. I want to try and get a demo for everyone here on SourceForge. I think that’d be great. And just kind of walk through everything you mentioned and see it firsthand. I think that’d be great.
All right. Well, that’s John Kannapell, President and Chief Operating Officer of CYPHER Learning. Thanks again. I really appreciate it.
John Kannapell (49:35.938)
Happy to do it anytime, Beau. Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.
Beau Hamilton (49:40.472)
Thank you all for listening to the SourceForge Podcast. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton. Make sure to subscribe to stay up to date with all of our upcoming B2B software related podcasts. I will talk to you in the next one.