The race to digital skills

If you haven't yet downloaded our latest report, it explores the nature of learning for individuals in the digital ecosystem and the practical challenges for the businesses trying to support them and achieve a variety of goals.

Rapid changes in their customers’ behaviour have forced many companies to rethink every element in their go-to-market strategy, generating enormous demand for new skills and knowledge on the workforce.

In response, Econsultancy conducts ongoing research to identify a framework for upskilling that reconciles both traditional and digital approaches.

Here are some of the findings:

• Digital skills need updating at least monthly, say 6 in 10 professionals
• Training ranks above hiring as quickest way to add digital skills: report
• The five types of professional learner and what they mean for upskilling programs
• How does an organisation of learners become a learning organisation?

Chatbot controversy

The US National Eating Order Association (NEDA) has come under severe fire for plans to shut down its human-run helpline and replace it with a “wellness chatbot”. Tessa, the chatbot in question, was swiftly disabled after it was revealed that the chatbot gave users dieting advice that involved counting calories and striving for a deficit of 500-1,000 calories per day. The move to close down the helpline came shortly after the NEDA’s paid staff voted to join a union. (Vice)

Despite the plethora of generative AI stories currently filling the headlines, this is not one of them: an NEDA spokesperson told Vice’s Motherboard that “this is a rule-based, guided conversation. Tessa does not make decisions or ‘grow’ with the chatter.” While it’s slightly reassuring that Tessa didn’t spontaneously produce this advice, it begs the question of how the NEDA’s chatbot rules permitted these exchanges.

We recently took a closer look at the guardrails being put in place by two companies as they test generative AI chatbots for customer service: read the full piece on Econsultancy.

Generative AI lands on Photoshop

Adobe’s Firefly AI art generator landed on Photoshop last week with the addition of a new tool called ‘Generative Fill AI’, which allows users to isolate part of a picture and generate a completely new backdrop for it, or alternatively to remove that part of the picture while keeping the background intact. The new capabilities are still in beta, since apparently Firefly “still struggles with human hands and facial features”, which have confounded many an image generation AI before now. (USA Today)

One interesting thing about the announcement is how Adobe has chosen to approach the problem of potential deepfakes created with its software: Adobe embeds metadata into every creation, including details about what role AI played in making the final image. Firefly also heads off one of the major criticisms of generative image AI, namely its copyright-questionability, since it’s trained exclusively on Adobe’s licensed stock image library.