AI Literacy for All: Mike Kaput on Building SmarterX’s AI Academy

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Our guest Mike Kaput of SmarterX takes us inside the new AI Academy, a membership-based learning platform for organizations and individuals. Find out how their AI Academy delivers AI literacy for all—through frameworks, certifications, and personalized learning journeys that help organizations roll out AI training responsibly and at scale.

 

Show Notes:

Mike Kaput, Chief Content Officer at SmarterX, explains how they are creating and distributing learning experiences in a fast-moving environment. Some of his key points include:

• AI literacy is step one for everyone. Every role needs a baseline understanding of what AI is, what it can do, and how to apply it—before tools or advanced use cases.
   
• Teach frameworks, not prescriptions. Because AI changes fast, focus training on durable  models and  principles learners can reuse as tools evolve.
   
• Blend evergreen with “live” learning. Pair on-demand eLearning courses (Foundations → Piloting → Scaling) with timely elements—Academy Live sessions, weekly gen-AI app reviews, and community—to keep skills current.
   
• Make it measurable and meaningful. Certification paths include quizzes and final exams; departmental/industry tracks signal practical, job-relevant competence (with digital badging on the roadmap).

About SmarterX:

SmarterX is an AI research and education firm and parent company of AI Academy, The Artificial Intelligence Show, and Marketing AI Institute. Learn more about the AI Academy.

Listen to The Artificial Intelligence Show

About Mike Kaput:

Mike Kaput is a marketing and business AI expert, speaker, and author. In his role as Marketing AI Institute’s Chief Content Officer, he uses dozens of powerful AI tools daily to increase productivity and performance across hundreds of use cases. And his actionable talks can teach you and your team how to do the same thing. Mike’s talks help companies of every size in any industry to capture massive productivity and performance gains using practical AI knowledge, use cases, and tools. They also make AI approachable and accessible for professionals at every level and in every function.The result is that companies in every industry—including The Financial Times, Vimeo, and Vodafone—have come away from Mike’s talks armed with everything they need to start building a competitive advantage with AI.

About Powered by Learning:

Powered by Learning earned Awards of Distinction in the Podcast/Audio and Business Podcast categories from The Communicator Awards and a Gold and Silver Davey Award. The podcast is also named to Feedspot's Top 40 L&D podcasts and Training Industry’s Ultimate L&D Podcast Guide.
 

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Transcript:

Susan Cort: Understanding, using and adopting AI in the workforce requires ongoing education by team members. That's the goal of Smarter X and their new AI Academy.

Mike Kaput: The first and most important step every company needs to take is to really make sure that every single person is literate at a base level. And so the whole AI Academy spun out of the idea of we need to be delivering that type of education to as many organizations as possible, as quickly as possible, um, as and as widespread as possible.

Susan Cort: That's Mike Kaput, Chief Content Officer at Smarter X and the Marketing AI Institute. Mike will talk about the AI Academy and share how they are creating and distributing learning experiences in an ever-changing environment.

Next on Powered by Learning.

Announcer: Powered by Learning is brought to you by d’Vinci Interactive d’Vinci's approach to learning is grounded in 30 years of innovation and expertise. We use proven strategies and leading technology to develop solutions that empower learners to improve quality and boost performance. Learn more at dvinci.com.

Susan Cort:Joining me now are d’Vinci CEO Luke Kempski, and our guest of Smarter X in the AI Academy, Mike Kaput. [00:01:00] Welcome Mike.

Mike Kaput: Hey, thanks for having me.

Luke Kempski: Oh, so great you could join us, Mike.

Mike Kaput: Happy to be here.

Susan Cort: Well, Mike, a lot of our listeners are probably used to listening to you on your podcast, but they may not understand your background and how your company's set up. So tell us a little bit about that so we understand more about you and also your company.

Mike Kaput: Yeah, for sure. So sometimes people hear me as a co-host on the Artificial Intelligence show, but you know, we also have day jobs working for a company called Smarter X. I'm the chief content officer and I'm the co-host of that podcast with our CEO and founder Paul Rader and Paul not only started Smarter X, but also a company called Marketing AI Institute that I also work for.

And together those two brands put out AI Academy, which is an online learning platform and membership for any professional that wants to learn how to use AI in their work regardless of their industry or function. So in one way or another, we've [00:02:00] been doing this AI thing since way back in 2016 when Marketing AI Institute started, we have a flagship annual conference called the Marketing AI Conference. We have a bunch of other irons in the fire of all sorts of live events, virtual events, and all sorts of initiatives that we're using to kind of fulfill this mission of AI Literacy for all, which is kind of our tagline, kind of our North Star. So we've been doing this for a long time in a lot of different ways, and aside from the podcast, I'm.

Using AI every day to do a range of marketing and business tasks, and then teaching a lot of people hopefully how to do the same.

Susan Cort: Well, that's great. We've enjoyed watching your journey and the journey of the company. In fact, uh, Luke and I have both took the training early on through our parent company, JPL, and, uh, both of us are fans of the podcast. So it's, it's great to have you on and learn more about what you're up to.

Mike Kaput: I appreciate that.

Luke Kempski: Yeah. And uh, definitely congratulations on the launch of your AI Academy, uh, by Smarter X. It's [00:03:00] really, um, you know, that's a big venture and it's definitely taking what you created in your earlier versions up to another level. So excited, deep dive into that a little bit. Uh, first, why don't you talk a little bit about the connection between Smarter X's mission of AI literacy for all, and the idea of the next generation of AI Academy that you have.

Mike Kaput: Yeah, so the AI Literacy for All tagline kind of came out of this,  you can almost call it a manifesto that we published at the beginning of 2025 that our CEO and founder Paul kind of felt really strongly about getting out there based on everything we'd been seeing and talking about. And we actually called this page on our website, which we can include a link to the AI literacy project, and the whole idea is that AI is changing everything about everything of knowledge work, whether you're a marketer, whether you're a salesperson, whether you're an operations, it, whatever. who does any type of [00:04:00] knowledge work is going to be profoundly impacted by AI and not enough people.

Despite all the hype, despite the headlines, not enough people are seriously talking about what do we do? To upskill and level up our teams to be able to work with this new technology effectively so that they benefit, we benefit, and we don't run into this huge issue that we see coming, which is that AI is a very real danger of making people obsolete in certain roles or disrupting certain industries. Preparedness is key. And our whole thing we kept coming back to again over the kind of almost a decade now of doing this in one way or another is that literacy is key. AI literacy, by which I mean like a fundamental understanding of what this technology is, what it can do, and how to apply it to your work.

That's not like a big technical endeavor necessarily. It can be for anybody from an intern to an executive. There's ways to use these tools in really , profound ways and [00:05:00] to approach them profoundly, um, in ways that can really accelerate your work. And so that's kind of the whole idea behind AI.

Literacy for All is the first and most important step every company needs to take is to really. Make sure that every single person is literate at a base level. And so the whole AI Academy spun out of the idea of we need to be delivering that type of education to as many organizations as possible, as quickly as possible, um, as and as widespread as possible.

Luke Kempski: Yeah, that's, that's excellent. And you know, the Powered by Learning audiences, learning and development leaders and people who are responsible for, um, integrating learning offerings that they create or that they bring in from other sources. Uh, so there, there definitely would be a lot of interest in, um, like. How you took the world of AI and created a curriculum that you see as kind of really a good connection for, those learning leaders to bring into their [00:06:00] offerings to their organizations. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Mike Kaput: The curriculum in some ways has probably been on our minds since day one of doing anything with understanding AI. It's like the education that we would've wanted to have throughout our entire journey. And also the education that we see a need for based on, you know, all the other work we do, all the events, the consulting, uh, the advising with tons of other organizations.

So the way we've kind of approached this is, at least right now, there's kind of a core. Section that's live right now as part of AI Academy. That's, uh, an AI Foundations collection. So there's an AI Fundamentals course series that's eight different courses. There's piloting ai, which is the next stage.

After you learn the fundamentals, you learn how to actually execute high impact pilot projects, and then should you so choose, or when you're at the phase. Of going beyond that. Then they're scaling ai, which is another seven core series to kind of expand your use of [00:07:00] ai. So that's kind of what we see as the backbone curriculum here, and those are updated quite regularly.

They were entirely reinvented for the launch that we just had in August, but those are designed to be as evergreen and timeless as possible. Though though nothing is timeless in ai

Susan Cort: It, it's already changed since you started talking so.

Mike Kaput: but Yeah. Which is terrible. 'cause I'm creating a course right now. I'm like, oh, do I have to go see if I have to change anything between now and then? but we do, uh, augment all that with a number of specific courses in departmental areas, so like marketing, hr, sales, et cetera, and then industries, so professional services, healthcare, et cetera, to kind of round all that out, we're doing a bunch of what we call Academy Live Events and really timely events.

So Academy Live is a bunch of different live learning experiences and classes that are coming out regularly that's kind of addressing that. [00:08:00] How quickly AI moves. And then we're doing a weekly gen AI app series, uh, that reviews generative AI apps that hit the market. It's designed to be a super quick turnaround.

So we mentioned something one week the podcast. The next week there's a review of it, so we're working in all these different ways. Kinda a long story short. Not only provide backbone, timeless education, hopefully, or at least based on first principles and things that don't change, and then all these other educational options for all the stuff that's always changing.

Luke Kempski: That's really great how you're to get in front of the, the, the idea that you know that some of your training will, will endure longer and some will be up to date. Can you talk a little about the learning experience for the different,  both the different kind of foundational courses plus the specialized courses plus the Academy live. Like what, what's the learning experience like? Like, and how did you go about [00:09:00] creating those learning experiences?

Mike Kaput: Yeah, so we think of all of this in terms of like learning journeys, and that was a big motivation for the entire reinvention of AI Academy is before we had really, really solid education and courses and we had a few kind of tracks or paths you could go down. But really we realized if we wanted to hit AI literacy for all as the mission, we had to essentially reinvent an education experience that eventually will have totally personalized and customized AI Powered learning journey.

So we're moving towards that. We've got a number of phases of how the education. Experience and platform is rolling out. We're moving, uh, this fall to an LMS called Docebo that's going to enable extremely personalized AI Powered learning journeys. We're rolling a bunch of features out with that, uh, over time, but the way we kind of think about this is we've got these core courses that are all kind of on demand, learn at your own pace.

Tons of practical [00:10:00] exercises, tons of practical resources, but then. The live events are going to be much more, get the community engaged, get the learners engaged. We have a dedicated community as well for our learners. We have live AMAs with Paul, our CEO. so it's kind of attacking this almost from a bunch of different angles with the understanding that there's a very real chance you get all this stuff by getting an AI mastery membership.

We have 12-month memberships you can buy. Some of the courses individually, but really the key is these AI Mastery memberships, an individual or an entire business can sign up for a year. We do a ton of business and team licenses with some of the top companies out there. The idea here is you may not take all of this stuff right?

You may learn in different ways. You are going to be at very different places on your AI journey than the person down the hall from you in the office, right? So we're trying to really attack this with as many formats and [00:11:00] modalities of education as possible to try to make sure there's something for everyone.

I could very well see someone only, for instance, attending the AI Academy live events and getting a ton of value outta the membership after they take the initial courses. I could see other people, myself included, I would probably, you know, kind of binge through all the courses as, as fast as I could. I think.

So uh, we definitely have to account, we're trying to get much more data driven and AI Powered with figuring out how do we deliver. A very tailored experience to an individual learner given what AI now makes possible.

Luke Kempski: Great. And I know, um, that, talk a little about how you thought through the idea of certifications and maybe like how you handle other maybe lighter. intense, journeys through a particular, uh, subject area.

Mike Kaput: Yeah. Right now we've got the, the core upfront, um, core series that we have are all certification course [00:12:00] series. So the big ones like the AI Foundations. Fundamentals, Piloting, Scaling, those are all certification courses. Just to really show like those are the three backbone courses where when I would think of baseline AI literacy, not only would I want someone to know what is in those courses, uh, and be able to apply it, but I'd want obviously proof that they had done it.

So that's kind of the motivation there. All the a, we have an AI for industry as AI for department series. Those are both certification, uh, series. We're releasing one of those roughly every month. Um, so that's ongoing for the next or so. We also thought it was really important to include certifications for those just to show if you're looking for work in an industry, trying to make a move that you have. Some specialized knowledge of AI for whatever your kind of particular domain expertise is. Beyond that, the other, those are what we would call long course series. They're multiple courses anywhere from roughly, probably like four to eight courses. You know, you're looking at. [00:13:00] 4, 5, maybe even seven or eight hours of content in each of those.

Uh, and then the one-off courses that we'll have coming soon, there's going to be plenty of other one-offs, like AI for business, AI for executives, AI for careers, all different types of. and tracks that'll be more one-offs without as many certifications. So it's kind of, some of it will adapt, I think, as we like, we're, we have such a high velocity right now of interest from different businesses who are signing on their teams.

We're onboarding a ton of people. So I think as we get more data to, on exactly which areas people need the most help in, uh, we'll also be able to adapt kind of in real time, hopefully.

Luke Kempski: Great. And then, um, in order for, uh, a learner to achieve the certification, is there an assessment involved? How, how do you handle that?

Mike Kaput: Yeah. So in for instance, in any course series that has a certification, you go through the courses, there's a series of quizzes [00:14:00] throughout each of those. Uh, once you complete those, there's a final exam that basically tests your knowledge of. The course material, once you complete that, you get the certification.

Um, we don't right now have a way to say like, did you complete all the practical, uh, steps and exercises? But there are a ton of those as well. So if you are motivated, you're not just getting that certificate, you'll actually done things with AI during the.

Susan Cort: In addition to the certificates, are you looking at doing any kind of digital badging related to the completion of the courses?

Mike Kaput: We are there is, there are plans for that, especially outside of the certification courses. There's a whole kind of plan being worked on by the academy team for, uh, digital badges in different contexts where that's still a little ways out right now, but yeah, definitely.

Luke Kempski: Okay. Excellent. Yeah. And I, I, guess talk a little about the creation of the learning experiences. Like what kind of tools are you using to, to [00:15:00] create the self-paced courses and you using AI to help you with those, uh, fit that course creation?

Mike Kaput: Oh my gosh. Yes, we are. Um, and it's, it has been an invaluable companion. It's really cool because it's actually, not that we haven't been doing this for a long time, but it's just another evolution of like all the stuff we teach, which is, we're not sitting here - AI to click a button and produce, you know, content that's kind of slop or like just do stuff quickly. Where AI has shined during this process and been honestly jaw dropping has been as a real thought partner. Uh, we have a number of different AI tools trained on our pedagogy and learning principles that we've created. So everything that is created, whether it's right now, it's me and our CEO largely creating, um, the core content based on our expertise.

Because I've been with the company since day one, back in 2016. We've kind of been on this journey of learning all this stuff together. But eventually we'll be [00:16:00] bringing in, more people in different domains. teach courses as well, but we have literally like a Gem and Gemini GPTs, a bunch of, uh, other tools and prompts actually make sure we adhere to a common pedagogy and learning principles and that every piece of content is on track with those.

Those are a hundred percent human created and they're deeply informed by almost a decade of trying to figure this stuff out the hard way. So that's been really, really cool. Um, just working with some of the smarter, uh, models that have come out recently as again, thought partners and trying to figure out, you know, using a bunch of context of like, here's the transcript from my last course.

Could you help me say this thing a little more succinctly? Or could we come up with a few different examples for different ways people learn. So it's been really, really interesting. I have to believe we do a lot of work with higher education institutions. Kind of just like talking with [00:17:00] them, advising them.

I have to believe like some of the stuff we're doing would be really interesting to them as well, because I would, imagine building a curriculum or creating a course moving forward without any AI help.

Luke Kempski: Okay.Yeah. No. And I haven't heard, uh, anyone talk about having a, you know, a custom GPT, if you will, or some version of that that really contains specific learning principles like you described. You know, are you, are you able to kind of dig, give us a little bit more on what those learning principles are and how, how that aids you?

Mike Kaput: Absolutely. So I can actually, I'll just pull it up really quick right now to look at a couple of the rules, but, um, yeah, so the idea here is we have this whole long kind of pedagogy that, um, largely driven by our CEO. That said like, okay, here's some background. So in all the imagine kind of a window with all the rules in a Gem and Gemini or GPT and ChatGPT, what have you, not only are we including a [00:18:00] ton of context about the business, basically, like everything we have just talked about would be contained in here, either as documents or as part of the prompt in terms of just here's the overall background on the business on AI Academy, what we're hoping to achieve. Then there's all these types of learning principles that focus on exactly what we think based on kind of our hypothesis of what our, our customers need.

The whole AI literacy thesis and the need for that is in there. There are specifics like, look, one big thing that we. encourage and teach and stick to is, you know, very often we teach frameworks, not prescriptions. AI moves so fast. I, I honestly can't really tell you long term exactly how to solve what to do or how to solve this problem.

It's going to change. So I, I want to teach you more a framework of how you can perpetually solve it for yourself and keep evolving your approach to it. So there's quite a bit of content. About that in [00:19:00] there. And also a number of principles that are really, really important in terms of, I guess what I would call ethics or responsible ai. very easy to get into AI education that is like what people might call like quote unquote AI first, which is like something being thrown around a lot in Silicon Valley. I think where it kind of means like, hey. AI is gonna take a lot of people's jobs. You better figure out how to use it or your jobs on the chopping block. That's never really been our perspective and approach that we acknowledge that plenty of companies will do that, but we have encoded into. least, uh, into our assistant to, uh, uh, for pedagogy and principles. We've encoded into it quite a few things around. Here's how we think about responsible ai. At every stage, we are trying to augment people, not replace them.

We are trying to encourage their AI literacy, not figure out ways to automate them. So stuff like that has been critical as well. I've literally used this [00:20:00] thing. Over at this stage, it's probably been over a hundred thousand words of conversation and content and scripting, and it has challenged my thinking at every step of the way and said, Hey, this is on track, this is not.

So it's been extremely, extremely helpful.

Luke Kempski: Uh, yeah. And also I know in your, uh, design principles that you talked about in the, uh, launch, uh, webcast, um, there there's a focus on kind of real world case studies as being part of the learning. And you talk a little bit about that. I know. Must, you know, it's challenging to kind of. No, like because of the way AI is being adopted to actually find and, um, learn from existing case studies that get far enough along that you're, you're able to adopt them, I guess, or, or really learn from them.

So how, how are you incorporating that into,

Mike Kaput: Yeah, that, that's definitely a perennial challenge because finding [00:21:00] them is not always. Difficult, but validating if

Luke Kempski: yeah, there you go.

Mike Kaput: is difficult. Them becoming outdated is difficult. So I guess the way we approach it right now is based on kind of our contextual experience of having done this for a while. We're really just trying to. Pick case studies that show your average knowledge worker what's possible. We're not sitting here and saying, look, this one cherry pick case study means AI can do everything. It's more like, Hey, like a good example. I'm working on, for instance, right now, the AI for Healthcare Course series and one case study we often go to is the uh, pharmaceutical company.

Moderna signed like an agreement with OpenAI. They had this big partnership, the case study. you're a pharmaceutical company or a healthcare company, I'm not sure if you could just like flip a switch and like duplicate what they did. The point of it is they gave every single employee a chat, GPT Enterprise [00:22:00] license and every single function built their own GPT.

So I don't know if you'll get their results, but the point of the case study is. didn't just give it to it. They didn't just give it to their data scientists. They didn't just give it to the researchers. The whole point was, look at the results they achieved when like finance, hr, operations, marketing, et cetera, we're all taught how to use this one tool and given training, not just handed a license.

So we do try to go deeper and say like, okay, it, the case study is the tip of the iceberg to kind of get you a little hooked. But it's like, what is the deeper lesson here that you can take away from it?

Luke Kempski: it's also an application of the framework, if you will.

Mike Kaput: Right.

Luke Kempski: Yeah. Yeah. No, it's such an exciting time, um, to be a leader. I think in terms of, you know, trying, you have to lead and provide direction, but you also definitely need to empower and provide the tools to the people doing the work, or you're not going anywhere because they have to drive a lot of the real [00:23:00] applications in, 'cause they're closest to the work.

Mike Kaput: It’s the entire thesis behind everything we do is like we've, uh, I've heard horror stories from companies I really respect who are really smart, who some very motivated people, and they've, you know, bought 10,000 licenses to an AI tool, which cost a million bucks a year, all told, and they didn't teach anyone how to use it. And then they're wondering why people are like, afraid of ai. They're wondering why nobody's using it, and it's just, it's, it's way worse than I think people realize there.

Luke Kempski: Yeah. And um, I guess, you know, there is a ChatGPT Academy, I, I believe there's probably a Gemini Academy of a sort or a Claude Academy depending on what tools, people or organizations are adopting to provide learning. How, how are you distinguishing what offering from Smarter X with your AI Academy versus kind of those tool specific academies?

Mike Kaput: Yeah, so we have so many plans for all sorts of [00:24:00] tool specific content. We've already got that coming out with like that Gen AI app series I mentioned. We're gonna be doing master classes and deep dives into all the core technologies. But from kind of day one, realized like we can't just go all in on one technology with how fast things move.

Uh, there's no problem with having a Chat GPT Academy, Gemini Academy, et cetera. We see a lot of that as complimentary because we're not teaching only one platform or tool. Uh, so we definitely recommend often to our learners, like third party resources too, and courses that are like, we're not the be all, end all of, you know, all AI education, but our approach has been just focusing again, kind of on. What are, from a first principle’s perspective, what does AI literacy mean? And it goes far beyond just learning deeply how to use ChatGPT, that's a huge thing. If you, if that's all you do, you're doing very well. Um, for the true kind of long-term organizational level [00:25:00] transformation we think needs to happen and we think is coming. It's not just gonna be, you have some ChatGPT power users, it's going to require reinvention at every level of the organization. So that's kind of broadly how we think of it, but it's definitely a balance because you definitely want to make sure there's plenty of content and instruction around the current tools people are using every day, especially because. model companies and the companies providing tools are getting better with this, but I think they've historically been pretty poor at describing exactly how to use their tools. If you're not, say, a developer, right?

Luke Kempski: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And uh, I guess, uh, in the launch webcast, I think Paul mentioned he called. What you're doing from a business standpoint, an AI academy as a service.

Mike Kaput: Yes.

Luke Kempski: Uh, and, uh, that I think really hits at the idea of, you know, ongoing and subscription and, um, continuously updated [00:26:00] with, uh, with, you know. Keeping one step ahead of what, what an organization needs. Um, can you, can you talk a little about the business, uh, both the business positioning and also the, um, business model for how you make this work as an entrepreneurial organization?

Mike Kaput: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, AI Academy as a service is very much though it's kind of like a fun, trite term. It's like that's very much the business model is this idea that building your own AI Academy, even if you had a perfect curriculum and perfect knowledge of all this stuff, which very few people do, would be prohibitively time consuming and expensive and out of date.

We are uniquely positioned to build this and continue building it. So it's very attractive to say, hey, we will, uh, sell you a yearly license. They're all, again, aside from the individual courses you could purchase, really the business model is selling 12-month AI mastery memberships to either individuals or to teams, and we have [00:27:00] team pricing team licenses. Our goal, our vision, is to be selling team licenses to every organization on earth, because once you have. Team licenses. What you get for that is not only the exist, not only like static existing content, you're getting literally multiple things coming out every single week that are keeping you at the cutting edge of ai.

So yeah, the subscription, it's not even just a course model, the subscription model, it's really almost like, yeah, it's in it's ai, uh, intelligence as a service as

Luke Kempski: Yeah.

Mike Kaput: of like you're getting like weekly AI briefings essentially that keep you up to speed.

Susan Cort: Mike, probably a lot of organizations. Know they need education, but they may not know what they need and how can you help them kind of navigate the offerings that you have, the services that you provide, when so many organizations may not know exactly what they need for their team.

Mike Kaput: Yeah, so the good thing is, the way we've structured it right now is that. Because everything is included with the [00:28:00] single AI Mastery membership. You're going to get all of the AI fundamentals, piloting, scaling, et cetera. We provide right within the platform kind of guidance on which ones to take. The way we roughly think of it is you, every single person should take Piloting AI, Scaling AI, even if you think that your team is more advanced than your average person.

That's great. Could very well be right. But we find it's helpful to kind of get everyone aligned and then we kind of see it from there as that whole personalized learning journey experience that we're building out. Where based on the data we have on you, based on conversations we've had with you, based on what our system will eventually be able to tell about you, we can then direct you to the exact type of learning that we think might be the best fit for you moving forward.

So right now that's like, Hey, go through all the foundational courses, then go start picking. for departments or industries as the case may be based on your domain. And then also make sure you kind of, [00:29:00] uh, pick and choose as you need the Gen AI app reviews and the AI Academy live events based on your different domains and interests.

Susan Cort: Definitely sounds like there's something for everybody, for sure.

Mike Kaput: There is.

Luke Kempski: Yeah. And, uh, you mentioned also a community, uh, talk about how the community works. Is it, um, both learner to learner, organization to organization, and, you know, it sounds like you have plans to go beyond just you and Paul delivering the courses. Connect all that, both where you are now and where your, what your vision is.

Mike Kaput: Yeah, so there's definitely going, going to be much more coming for on the community front. So right now we've got a private Slack community for members. We have a public Slack community through marketing AI Institute as well, where a lot of members kind of double dip in both those. Um, we are considering some different community platforms to really make this much more robust and much more de a dedicated effort.

Um, but right now people have gotten a ton of value out of exchanging ideas in [00:30:00] Slack. It's just individuals at this point. Um, so, but I think as, especially as we bring on more teams, I think what we're aiming to do is definitely looking at how community can work within the organizations themselves, but also we're looking at, uh, user groups as well for different types of technologies.

Uh, almost have the community be driving some of the expertise that's needed. To foster AI literacy because we are not experts on every single tool that has ever come out or will ever come out. We use certain technologies more than others. There are others out there that are actually way more qualified to be educating our learners than the people within Smarter X on any given day.

Um, so we're kind of planning a bunch of what I guess I would call community led. Outside instruction as well down the line. We we're still finalizing our plans there, but we'll definitely be having outside instructors from our community and community groups continuing education as well.

Luke Kempski: Okay, great. Is there [00:31:00] anything else in your, uh, roadmap, um, for the AI Academy that you want to talk about or share with our audience?

Mike Kaput: I mean, I think right now we are heads down on creating tons of AI for departments and AI for industries courses. We've gotten AI for business executives and careers three different series coming out, like I said, literally every week. We've already done a few weeks of them. We have the Gen AI app series, the regular demos of Gen AI. Tech we are just about ready to launch our AI Academy live experiences and classes. I don't know what the exact cadence of those will be yet. They'll be regularly coming out. So all of that stuff is more, more than enough to be going on with and we're super excited about it.

Luke Kempski: Yeah. Any, uh, any plans around, um, using, having kind of AI driven, coaches or AI driven? Um, very specific. that learners can interact with a particular AI to [00:32:00] mentor or help, uh, coach and develop their AI skills.

Mike Kaput: Yeah, we have, uh, we've talked about what's possible there, and I think once we get through transitioning to the new learning management system, I think there's a lot that becomes possible there. That's going to be really interesting to explore because I would, I would argue that's probably long, long term, the future of education, right?

As we're all gonna be taught at some point in some way by some type of ai augmented. Service or platform or agent?

Luke Kempski: Yeah, that combined with the social interactions that go along with, uh, with instructors and colleagues and a community is definitely, uh, where, where it will be going. so. Uh, anything else that you wanted to bring up today, Mike?

Mike Kaput: Uh, no. I would just say if you are interested in checking out what we've got on offer, just go to Academy.SmarterX.AI. You can learn all about this stuff there. I'm pretty easy to [00:33:00] find on LinkedIn as well. If you wanna shoot me a message, if you have ever have any questions about what we do or just AI in general, happy to.

Happy to always chat.

Susan Cort: Well, Mike, we really appreciate you taking time away from your very, very busy schedule. We know that you're in the middle of of developing this curriculum and we can't thank you enough for talking with us and also for. What you and Paul do to blaze the trail. It, it's really a, a great resource and, and we're thankful for all that you're doing to support organizations around the world.

Mike Kaput: All right, anytime. I really appreciate getting to talk to you and your audience.

Luke Kempski: Yep. And congratulations again on your launch of the AI Academy.

Mike Kaput: Oh, thank you.

Susan Cort: Thanks to d’Vinci, CEO Luke Kempski, and our guest, Mike Kaput from Smarter X and the AI Academy for joining us today. If you have a suggestion for a topic or a guest, please let us know. You can reach us at PoweredbyLearning@dvinci.com and don't forget that you can subscribe to Powered By Learning wherever you listen to your [00:34:00] podcasts.