Last week, I shared several blog posts about Advantexe’s observations and perspectives on the 2024 ATD Conference in New Orleans. We received a lot of great feedback and by far the most popular and discussed concept was about the gigantic shift toward AI-enhanced learning and development.

One of the most exciting parts of ATD for Advantexe was our in-booth business simulation contest where participants ran a business simulation we created just for the show. We had tremendous participation in the challenge and great results from participants.

As an experiment, we took a minute to feed all of the simulation results into the new Chat GPT engine and asked it to turn the results into a blog.

The result is frightening and fascinating. The world of learning and development as we know it is about to change forever.

Everything from this point forward in this post was created in less than 10 seconds by AI.

Advantexe is pleased to share with our Learning & Development colleagues our third in a series of thoughts and insights from the floor of the ATD International Conference and Exposition.

Day 3

1) The Community of Learning and Development

Sadly, it was the last day of the ATD Conference in New Orleans. What a great week to reconnect with clients and colleagues as well as meet exciting and new people who have the same interests in talent development.

One of our many conversations from this morning really stuck out and is worth a topic of conversation for this blog. We met an up-and-coming L&D leader who shared that this was his first show. He was extremely impressed, excited, and a little overwhelmed.

“I am so happy to be here with all of these amazing people. What an incredible chance to meet new people and share ideas about an industry and job I am so passionate about. You can never underestimate the impact of building a community as you build your career of developing the best training and development for your internal stakeholders.”

Advantexe is pleased to share with our Learning & Development colleagues our thoughts and insights from the floor of the ATD International Exposition and Conference. Each day we will share three megatrends and provide some insights and observations.

Day 2

1) Understanding the inherent bias of AI

@tarynfoye, Advantexe’s Director of Business Leadership Solutions attended an informative session on the interesting and potentially harmful impacts of the current way AI talent development solutions are being developed.

Here are some interesting facts:

• 12% of AI researchers in 2020 were women
• 80% of AI professors are men

The implications of these data are profound. As AI continues to proliferate in the world of talent development key stakeholders and decision-makers need to understand that it all has built-in inherent bias. As we know, all humans have implicit bias and if humans feed data to AI engines, the AI data is inherently biased.

Here are a few thoughts on the impact and implications of these AI-supported biases:

Advantexe is pleased to share with our Learning & Development colleagues our thoughts and insights from the floor of the Association for Talent Development (ATD) International Conference and Exposition. Each day we will share three megatrends and provide some insights and observations.

Day One

“We have the only real AI”

The Advantexe team arrived on Saturday in New Orleans to set up for the Conference kickoff on Sunday. As we were setting up, we took a quick glance around the Expo Hall and there was one very significant trend: everyone thinks they have the only AI-driven HR solution. I literally saw 2 companies with booths right next to each other claiming they have the only solutions with “real AI.”

The takeaway from our perspective is there are a lot of Training and HR solution vendors making a lot of claims without really understanding what their claim is, or worse, what the AI solution really is. It seems like they are throwing the words out there to see what sticks but as most L&D organizations have learned, real AI is not easy and there must be a well-defined application.

One of the best sources of inspiration for my blogs is actual learning moments coming directly from the classroom. This afternoon one of my teams engaged in a very complex high-tech industry business simulation asked for a “micro-lesson” around the concept and importance of the Contribution Margin. I shared some insights with the participants, and I promised I would turn the conversation into a blog.

What is Contribution Margin?

At the highest level, Contribution Margin is a financial metric used to assess the profitability of a product, service, business line, or an entire business.

Conceptually, it presents the amount of revenue remaining after variable costs have been subtracted, which contributes to covering fixed costs and generating profit.

Here's a breakdown of what you should know about Contribution Margin:

• Definition: Contribution Margin (CM): Is the difference between sales revenue and variable costs.
• Formula: Contribution Margin = Sales Revenue - Variable Costs

Key Concepts

Here are two important key concepts related to understanding Contribution Margin; variable costs and fixed costs:

• Variable Costs: Costs that vary directly with the level of production or sales volume (e.g., raw materials, direct labor, sales commissions).
• Fixed Costs: Costs that do not change with the level of production or sales volume (e.g., rent, salaries, insurance).