---

What happens when AI makes creating learning content easier than ever? According to 7taps co-founder Ezra Charm, that's when the real work of learning and development begins. In this episode, Ezra joins the Powered by Learning team to discuss why the future of L&D is about more than creating content—it's about driving engagement, improving performance, and measuring impact.

 

Show Notes:

From the rise of the "LMS-less learner" to the role of AI in modern learning strategies, 7tap’s Ezra Charm shares why learning professionals have an opportunity to become more valuable than ever. Here are some of Ezra's top takeaways.

• AI is shifting L&D's role from content creation to performance improvement. As authoring becomes easier, learning professionals can focus on driving behavior change and demonstrating business value. 
• Organizations don't have a content problem—they have an engagement problem. Success depends on delivering learning when and where employees need it, not simply creating more courses. 
• Learning should meet employees where they work. Today's "LMS-less learner" expects learning to be accessible on any device, in the flow of work, rather than requiring a trip back into the LMS. 
• Microlearning works because it's grounded in learning science. By respecting cognitive load, spaced repetition, and mobile-first behaviors, organizations can improve retention and application. 
• The future of L&D is measuring impact. Learning teams that can connect training to business outcomes will move from being viewed as cost centers to strategic business partners.
   

Learn more about 7taps

Read more about d'Vinci's partnership with 7taps

About Ezra Charm:

Ezra Charm is Co-Founder and COO of 7taps, where he's spent years building the brand and go-to-market engine for the microlearning platform. A marketing leader with deep startup experience, he's known for challenging conventional L&D thinking and pushing teams to focus on business outcomes over completion metrics.

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.

---

Transcript:

Susan Cort: The future of learning isn't about creating more courses. With the help of AI, it's about creating more impact.

Ezra Charm: Cutting out the mundane work and being able to focus on , this more difficult thing out there, and, and I think like a lot of how we structure our development roadmap at 7taps is it's not doing the work for customers, but it's giving them the tools to have confidence in the stories that they tell.

Susan Cort: That's Ezra Charm, co-founder at 7taps Microlearning. Ezra joins d'Vinci's Jenny Fedullo, Beth Buchanan, and me to discuss how AI, microlearning, and smarter learning technology are helping L&D teams shift their focus from creating content to driving measurable performance.

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 [00:01:00] 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's Jenny Fedullo and Beth Buchanan, and our guest Ezra Charm, founder of 7taps, a platform that helps organizations rethink how learning is created, delivered, and experienced. Over the past several years, d'Vinci has worked with clients to incorporate 7taps into broader learning strategies, and we're really excited to continue growing that relationship as an official 7taps partner.

We're also excited to welcome you, Ezra

Ezra Charm: Thank you.

Jenny Fedullo: Ezra. Good to see you.

Beth Buchanan: Welcome, Ezra.

Ezra Charm: Thanks. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Susan Cort: Well, thanks for joining us. Start off by telling us a little bit about yourself, 7Taps, and your role at the company

Ezra Charm: of course. My name is Ezra Charm, and I'm one of the co-founders at 7taps Microlearning. , We are a software company based in West Palm Beach, Florida, and [00:02:00] I'm not far from there at the moment. What we offer is a software as a service application that helps our customers create fun and engaging content, and more importantly, deliver it , and drive that engagement on the content. So it's not just, it's not just creating content, it's really thinking about how they get the engagement they want from their audience so that they create great things, and then they can really figure out how they're gonna get their audience to, to interact with it and trust it and really come back to it over and over again as opposed to you know kind of see it as like a burden.

And, and instead of it being training, it's more like learning. It's more something that helps them achieve.

Susan Cort: Sounds like it could be a game changer, that's for sure.

Jenny Fedullo: Yeah.

Ezra Charm: Yeah.

Jenny Fedullo: So Ezra, I know I met you a little over seven years ago. I think it was at the Learning and HR Tech Solutions conference. I was immediately sold on the value, couldn't wait to get back to the team and say, "We, [00:03:00] we should start using this. Our clients, this is gonna bring such value." What stood out wasn't just how quickly we could develop content, but really its potential as a performance support tool.

That's where I saw it immediately. Then, I know, like Susan said, we've had the opportunity to work closely together. We've worked with a lot of clients to incorporate 7taps. As I've watched the platform grow, it seems like there's been an evolution, right? From simply creating content, creating microlearning, to rethinking how learning is reaching people. me from your perspective, how has that been, you know, an intentional evolution, and how would you describe kind of your vision for 7taps today?

Ezra Charm:

Yeah. So you know--  there has been an evolution, but I think like if I ask our founder, Kate, what she intended when she first came up with the concepts of 7Taps she was always thinking past things like rapid authoring and really considering how an audience interacts with this content as opposed to just like has content created. I think part of our evolution is when we were first approaching the market we didn't know who to talk to about how you deliver content, but we knew who to talk to about how you create content because the learning and development space had a very clear, there's there's like instructional designers and learning and development people, and they cared very much about how content is created. And so rapid authoring became an easy conversation to have because we were good at that I think we always really excelled around delivery. So the magic of 7taps for me is that 7taps course can be accessed on any device at any time, and you don't have to pre-configure that device. It just instantly opens, whether it's an iPhone or a laptop or, you know, an Android device or anything, or an iPad. It'll work on all of them, and there's a there's a uniform experience across all of them. And not only it'll, uh, will it work, but you're able to track how learners are interacting and how they're progressing through this content.

So that, that was always kind of her vision, but I think like we didn't know how to tell that story five years ago. The story we knew how to tell then, which was what the market was looking for, was how do you create something that's production ready really quickly? Because that, at the time, that's what the market was looking for. I think like the market's changed quite a bit since then. Uh, and, and I think it's gonna change. Like when I talk to customers now they they're still shopping for rapid authoring, but one of the questions I ask them is like, "What do you think you're gonna be shopping for in three years?" Because like when you buy software and you make a commitment to a platform like 7taps, it shouldn't be like, "Oh yeah, this is gonna [00:06:00] help us for that."

You should have some type of vision for it. Like, you know, this might, like over three years, how might this change? And I think, you know, uh, content creation is, is something that's getting disrupted by, um, by AI. It's, it's just-- and, and it's because, uh, you know, uh, like if, if it's good at one thing, it's good at spitting out a lot of words, right? So like it's really good at that. And, and it's good at like it it's good at like kind of like I have, I use, um, you know, different AI tools and like my Claude knows how to talk like me at this point. It knows how to act like me because I've interacted with it so much.

So like it can almost write better than I can. Um,

Susan Cort: So this could be Claude we're talking to right now and we don't know if we're...

Ezra Charm: I can say potato if, if you want to, you want confirmation that I'm not an AI. It's really remarkable in that, in that it can really kind of uh mimic a [00:07:00] person and over time really understand how that person communicates. I think there was some comedian who once said that like he was working maybe on Saturday Night Live or something like that, and he said like their writers wrote him better than he wrote himself. Like they, they, like, they eventually... And, and like, I think in some ways, you know, Claude can write me better than I can write myself.

Like, it knows so much about me just 'cause I lean into the tool so much. And so, I think like that's becoming more and more common , in that, you know, these tools are great at writing natural language. That's what they're purposefully designed for. And a lot of learning and development comes from how do you communicate an idea in the most effective way possible?

And effective is probably the fewest words possible, like using brevity and really being careful with how you explain something. So, you know, when I talk to customers or [00:08:00] prospects, I ask them like, "What do you think is gonna happen in the next three years? Do you think you're gonna still look for rapid authoring or do you think that there's something else in your stack that's missing that would help you really drive engagement across this content?"

And for the most part, I think people are starting to get it. They're starting to realize like they don't have a content problem as much as they have an engagement problem. Like there's, there's like a few reasons why training doesn't work. It's like it never reaches the people that it's supposed to reach. It doesn't actually change their behavior. Or that it's just unengaging. Like those are, those are kind of the problems. But it's really not the content doesn't exist. That's not really what our customers have a problem with. It's really like more of, are the people who it's supposed to help engaging with it?

Is it helping them so that they trust it? And is it accessible to them when they need it most? And so those are like the things that I know Kate, as our, as our founder really cares about the most. And, and that's [00:09:00] really the path that we're going down in terms of how we help our customers.

Jenny Fedullo: So is that part of the, the evolution is I think five years ago you said when you kind of were founded, was the problem bringing content to market quicker, creating courses more quickly, and now the problem is how do we access more quickly or, or in different methods.

Ezra Charm: I, I, you know it's funny, like I think we, we, we always thought about the access. So like we always thought about the delivery to learners, but I think that the market wasn't ready for that conversation. I think we were ahead of the market in that sense.

I think at the time the market was very ready to have a conversation around rapid authoring. Um, you know, the, the AI tools were not as prolific as they are today. And a third of the magic that 7taps has is that you can create something production ready far faster than you could with some of the legacy authoring tools.

And, and that's-- it's, it's a [00:10:00] clear value that we have. And I think we leaned into that value to establish market presence and to develop early customers and to develop a following around the product. We think about part of my job is to think about sustainability for the company and for our team and think about

How do we build like, even short of, I would love to build an iconic brand, that's obviously the goal. But short of that, how do you build something that has like a good product market fit and is protected from disruption? That, disruption that's out there and that's affecting a lot of authoring tools. And, and the answer there is not better authoring, it's really thinking about how you offer more than authoring. It's really thinking about how... and you know I research this a lot on how companies build a moat around themselves to protect themselves from, uh, particularly in the tech space where, you know, companies are being disrupted by AI.

Jenny Fedullo: Mm-hmm.

Ezra Charm: That's true. And, and the way you do it is you, you find ways to offer value where [00:11:00] outside of just like the base layer of rapid authoring, you think about how you become part of the company's delivery infrastructure so that they're using you for more than- rapid authoring. They're also using you to get these messages to the learners, because that's much harder to do with some of these AI tools.

And then also how you help them measure the impact that this stuff is havi- having. Because that's, again, harder for AI tools to quantify. And I think like also it's very healthy for learning and development to move outside of the comfort zone of creating great content, and really accountability for how this impacts an organization and how an organization might measure the impact of this. I'm very optimistic about the world of learning and development. I think a lot of people aren't right now. When I like go on LinkedIn, there's like a lot of you know, kind of messaging around, "Oh my God, it's all being disrupted by AI." But I I don't really have that view.

I think it opens up so much more capability for learning and development teams [00:12:00] to do things bigger than create great courses. So creating great courses it's just like the base layer. It's like you create great courses, but your intention is not just to, just to create a great course. Your intention is to change the behavior of an organization, to have an impact. And I think for many years it was measured on how great a course was and how engaging it might be

And now I think with tools kind of, making great courses easier to create, it now opens up doors to do things like how do we make sure that it drives engagement and how do we measure the impact that a great course has?

Jenny Fedullo: I agree. It makes those, you know, Bloom's Taxonomy, the lower level learning objectives, you know, easy to, to create. So now we as instructional designers can really get into those higher-level learning objectives that truly impact and tie to performance outcomes. So that's, that's where the fun is, right?

That's why we're in the profession, is to really impact performance. [00:13:00] So I agree. It's disruptive, but I think there's so much potential there.

Ezra Charm: Than just where the fun is. That's where the job security is.

Jenny Fedullo: Yeah

Ezra Charm: You, don't have job security if you create a great course. You have job security if you can prove the impact of the great course. So, uh, to me it's very exciting

Jenny Fedullo: Yeah. So Ezra, you've talked about the LMS-less learner. That's a tongue twister. So what does that mean, and, and why is it such an important concept for learning professionals to understand today?

Ezra Charm: I think, um, you know, when you buy like a shiny LMS as a learning and development professional, you get very excited about this piece of software, and you pour your heart and soul into it, and you forget that you're the only person in the organization that cares that much. You forget that, and it's easy to forget that.

I, you know, I'm a software person. I've been my whole career, and I, I know, - you, you can really love a tool, right? And, and then I jokingly say to our, some customers that, you know, your learners are not waking up in the [00:14:00] morning excited to go log into an LMS. And it's a sad reality.

Like, you know, they're, they're just not. It's hard to get somebody excited to go log into an LMS. And so I think that's one thing to consider is , how do you engage people? How do you engage with people without forcing them to do things in order to engage with you? So, how do you kind of meet them where they are?

And then, and then the other thing is like the LMS is really nicely designed for somebody that sits in front of a desk and that has some time blocking ability to go and log into an LMS. And, you know in the actual world, that's a very small percentage of people. Like, most of us don't have jobs like that.

Most of us, you know, run around like crazy, and we, we don't have the time and space to go log into an LMS to continue our development, and we're either a field salesperson or we're a desk-less worker that never sits in front of a computer. And how do you reach that person? And I know, , for some of our early [00:15:00] customers, the answer was "Well, you know, a couple of times a year, we pull them all into an office and force them to sit in front of a computer."

I think for the average learner, if you're gonna tell them like, "Okay, you have to go and take training on this and this day, and you have to be in this place to take training," they're approaching it with half their brain shut off.

And because it's like a day where they don't have to be working and on, and so they're, they're not working and they're kind of off. I don't know if it's universally true, it's just, like, kind of my feeling. And, and I think, like, for all those people, like, it's like you're, you're, you're reaching them, but you're not reaching them at the ideal moment.

You're not reaching them when this learning is actually needing to be applied.

Jenny Fedullo: Yeah,

Ezra Charm: they have to remember this stuff and then go back to their job and apply it. And so there's a big disconnect there, and I think we could do better. Um,

Jenny Fedullo: Yeah

Ezra Charm: like, part of our message and market is that we help you reach all the people that your LMS doesn't. And whether they have a login or not maybe they have a login and maybe they haven't logged in since [00:16:00] those two weeks of onboarding that they did two years ago which is often the case.  And so like kind of meeting them where they are is part of our mission as a company.

Jenny Fedullo: Love it. As we've partnered with clients to use 7taps, uh, as part of broader learning and performance support solutions, Beth has had a front row seat to, to a lot of those implementations. Beth, I'd love to bring you into the conversation.

Beth Buchanan: Thank you. Um, well, I keep thinking about engagement because that is like core to any kind of learning, LMS or, uh, you know, a different platform. And, um, you've made the argument that, you know, the LMS-less learner needs to be engaged in sort of a different way.

So why is 7taps so engaging? Can you make the case for us as to how this really amps up the engagement? And I know that you've mentioned before the sort of intersection with marketing and learning, and I'd be curious to hear [00:17:00] that brought into the point as well.

Ezra Charm: Absolutely. This is, again, I, I have a ton of respect for Kate and, and it was really something that she saw, which was the way people learn is changing, and it's still changing. I know for myself, like when I go to learn something, I don't sit myself in front of a laptop and I don't go and you know uh, I don't go and pick up a World Book.

Like, that's not what you do anymore, right? Like when I was a kid, that's what we

Susan Cort: Yeah.

Ezra Charm: was first picking up a World Book, and

Beth Buchanan: Oh.

Ezra Charm: and then it became, and then, and like now if you pick up a World Nook, I think like everything's really out of date and wrong, which is kind of interesting,

Beth Buchanan: Yeah

Ezra Charm: the, the world, you know, evolves quickly and, and we learn things and we learn and like the realities change a little and the world changes. Um, so now -- when you ask most people how they learn, they pick up this device. This is the device that people are learning on,

Susan Cort: The, the phone. It's the phone, yeah

Ezra Charm: Yeah. The, and for people entering the workforce, I, I forget the exact stat, but for, for teenagers today, something [00:18:00] like it's a crazy number, like 87% of American teenagers consider this their primary device, the thing that they lean into the most. The other thing that we kind of saw was that when people are doom scrolling through social media, they're not just doom scrolling, they're learning. That's what you're doing. You're like my algorithm is pretty tuned into, like, fun hikes around California right now because that's what I've been doing for the past few months. And I'm learning about all of these opportunities to go hiking in different national parks because that's what I care about.

And that's what I'm doing. Like, when I'm scrolling through there and, and kind of shutting off my brain I'm kind of cultivating ideas in my mind about - experiences I might want to ha- to go and do.

I don't think we give that I, I don't think the industry was giving that enough credit, and I think Kate really saw that there was a fundamental change happening. I think if you look at the way 7taps functions, it taps into a lot of that behavior that people were doing [00:19:00] already. And I think that's where we were really ahead of the curve is like we really, she really did a lot of analysis on how people were acting on a device like a phone and how it became so, like I, I could sit there and scroll through hikes and like two hours will go by like this.

Like it just happens so quickly. And um, and I, I think like there's some magic there when you can say like, okay, it's used for a lot of brain rot, but how do we kind of tap into some of that, like that kind of I don't even know what to call it, just like this behavior that people have, and try and use it to drive a better outcome.

And I think that's really part of our mission is, is to figure out how people are learning and what are the behaviors that people feel comfortable with. And the more a learner or an audience feels comfortable with learning.

Like I can tell you like if you go log into an LMS and you try and take some of these complex courses, it's not that comfortable, and I don't know that it taps into desirable difficulties as much as it taps into low [00:20:00] engagement and like maybe not the right format for the way people learn today. And um, and she saw that we could do a lot better.

She saw that there was an opportunity to leverage that format for good instead of just for brain rot, and I think she really nailed that point.

Susan Cort: I have to ask you, 'cause you've just been saying the word “taps” a lot in the last answer. This is a great opportunity to have you share what 7taps means. I think people would be interested in understanding that.

Ezra Charm: Absolutely. So , part of our, uh, message to the market is that, if you can get a message across in, in a minute uh, and you can get the same message across in 30 minutes, you should do it in a minute right? You should really like kind of deliver one message and deliver it well. And the name 7taps comes from cognitive overload happening at five to seven pieces of information. So when you sit somebody through an hour-long e-learning or an hour-long webinar the expectation is that they'll remember five to seven different points, and that's just because that's the [00:21:00] way we all function. Maybe some people will remember a few more points, but when actually like a month later and they go to apply it, you could feel comfortable that they're gonna remember five to seven different pieces of information that you got across. And so if you're dumping 50 different things that people need to know in one e-learning, really selling yourself short and you're selling them short.

It's doing everyone a disservice. And, and that's where kind of the name 7taps comes from.

Jenny Fedullo: Yeah, so

Ezra Charm: you can't do it in 7taps, like you're just like, you're, you're just overwhelming people.

Jenny Fedullo: Right.

Susan Cort: That's great.

Jenny Fedullo: like a real tie to cognitive load theory, right? So how much when you were creating did you tie... Was science influencing the, the original design? Was it...

Ezra Charm: It's very influenced. -- We were very fortunate in that, um, that like our early prototypes, we were giving away 7taps for free for about a year, um, or year and a half, uh, before we monetized the product at all. And we attracted some really interesting attention including a researcher at [00:22:00] University of Toronto who ended up writing a whole thesis and a whole bunch of research around what we were doing and kind of like this intersection between adult learning and corporate learning tools and how you kind of break out of that mold.

And so there's a lot of research that she's written on our site. Her name is Nidhi, and we have a lot of respect for her. And then there have been a few others, people that have popped up who. But I can tell you, like Kate is, uh, she spent her entire career, um, kind of in, in learning and development.

Jenny Fedullo: Mm-hmm.

Ezra Charm: I was always like a software person that's the part I helped with, uh, although I've learned an awful lot about learning and development over the past few years. And I think I have a background in marketing, which kind of helps a

Because , it really applies to adult learning really nicely.

I can tell you, like -- she really poured her heart and soul into figuring this out and making sure that it was founded in, not just scientific theory but like scientific fact. I mean…

Jenny Fedullo: Yep.

Ezra Charm: A lot of 7taps has to do with  spaced repetition and just remembering that, , you can deliver a message [00:23:00] really well once, but if you do it three times and you do it in a way that's respectful of an adult learner, so that you're not asking them to take the same course three times until they quiz out on the question properly, but like kind of reframing things, giving them scenarios to apply, , and really doing it in a way that's respectful of their time so that they trust it and, and they'll, and so that they'll keep coming back to it, it's gonna become much, much stickier.

And I, I think like, you know, spaced repetition and, and addressing cognitive overload, these are not theories, these are facts. Like this is the way the adult brain works. And, we really spent a lot of time you know, applying that in the product and thinking about how we kind of, you know, apply these principles and make sure that, that our customers can use this and as foundational in how they create learning.

Beth Buchanan: One thing I've been thinking about as you've been talking of the best ideas seem so obvious once they're, uh, once they're implemented. Do you know what I mean? Like this [00:24:00] idea of the cognitive overload and the simplification? And it's sort of this almost proof of concept of how great of an idea it is.

Ezra Charm: You know, it's very funny because like a- after we built these first prototypes, some people like were making, and they still do, like make like quick, you know, Claude code copies of 7taps. And what they're telling us is, "Your great idea is our idea," right? So it exactly happens like that because it, it is obvious like, uh, but it wasn't obvious five years ago, and there were no,

Beth Buchanan: And in that the model.

Ezra Charm: I can you know, there were no products in the market five years ago that were kind of thinking about, you know, this overlap between how adults are changing the way they learn and, and how we might and how we might kind of, uh, tap into.

Susan Cort: Tap into it.

Ezra Charm: Yeah.

Beth Buchanan: Well, one thing that does exist is most corporations, larger companies, even smaller companies, they do have their learning ecosystems in place, right? So I'm, I would imagine you're, um, talking with a lot of clients who don't necessarily wanna give up [00:25:00] their job aids and their LMS and their courses and, you know, this body of work that they've created to do their training.

But they might have a place for 7taps anyway, or, you know. How do you sort of, um, clients about where, how 7taps sort of fits into that ecosystem?

Ezra Charm: Yeah. And the answer is carefully, I think. I you know the one of the things we never say is, "Everything you're doing is wrong." And we don't feel that way. Uh, like it's not-- like you're-- every company needs a healthy learning ecosystem, and it's more than one product. One of the things that I notice in this industry in particular is that there's very little collaboration or ecosystem around, or like that companies have developed around their technologies, and they don't bring other people into their ecosystem well. And they don't-- like, we have this great partnership building with d'Vinci, and I think like the industry has been kind of bad at that I come from a cybersecurity data protection market where, you know we [00:26:00] had go-to-market efforts with our primary competitors because we were solving problems together even though we had our own self-interest.

And I think that's much healthier for an industry. And so what we have always been very careful about is how do we play nicely with others? How do we make this plug into a learning tech stack that's been around and being built on for 20 years and still add additional value that, that maybe they're not getting out of the tools that they're getting today?

And how do we do it in a way that's really respectful of the space and I don't think anybody is doing anything wrong for the past 10 years. I think there's opportunities to kind of uplevel and, and that's, that's always the tool we wanna be. So we work nicely inside an LMS.

You can, you know, deploy 7taps courses as SCORM if you want to. We can send data to an LRS. You can, you can think about how, you know, if you have an existing eLearning, you use 7taps for like a reinforcement campaign so that it's not just a one and [00:27:00] done. And we really try to figure out a space for ourselves where it made sense for a company to add an additional tool because they saw additional value without having to tear anything apart.

We put a lot of effort into that, into becoming, you know an ecosystem player. And, um we just launched this learning and development coalition with a bunch of other technology partners so that customers can see how five different products in this space might help them achieve a better result and help them, you know, evaluate five different tools that are all complementary, and really trying to build ecosystem in the learning and development space, because I think it's really healthy. Um, not just for us personally, but for the space as a whole to have, technologies that interact well with each other and that you can, really round out what you're doing with a whole bunch of different tools. If you're building a software tool that kind of answers all the problems, everything you're doing is a quarter or halfway there.

You're not tackling any one [00:28:00] individual problem. And so you know, we are a niche player. We do one thing, we do it really, really well, but we don't answer all the problems, and we're not, we're not the answer to all of the gaps learning and development has. I think we really kind of do... what we do and we do it well and we also really fit in nicely with a with a good L&D tech stack.

Beth Buchanan: And , when 7taps is being used effectively in an organization within the ecosystem, what kind of indicators are you seeing that is working? Like, like the engagement is there, the behavior change is happening. Do you have any indicators you would share with our listeners that, you know this is really making a difference?

Ezra Charm: I think like, you know, we're in this transformational space where we want, people to be very proud of the work that they're doing and we want people to tell amazing stories about the work , that they're doing. And so one of the things that we've done really nicely is we have this microlearning conference that we run, quarterly [00:29:00] where we give our customers kind of a platform to share their successes with microlearning and 7taps in general and create discussion around that.

It's a virtual conference, and we have three different customers that join us. Like the last conference we had Best Friends Animal Society and Advent Health and Philips Healthcare, and they were talking, the whole conference was about saving people and puppies with microlearning.

So I, I think like just,

Susan Cort: Doesn't get any better than that, right?

Ezra Charm: it really does, and it just tugs at all, you know,

Jenny Fedullo: Aw.

Ezra Charm: You can save cats with it, too. So like whether you like dogs or cats, it's... And, and so like these are amazing organizations, all of them, and they're all, they're all thinking about how they may have like kind of broken out of the mold of we've always done it this way to introduce something new to drive a better result. And one of the things our customer success team is incredibly good at is figuring out what is the status quo with our customers? Like what does it look like [00:30:00] today if they continue doing what they're doing? And then what if they could layer in something else? How would they measure it, and how would they measure whether it's successful or not? And helping our customers think about that as opposed to just thinking about, you know, rapid creation or content. Like, how do you measure whether this had an impact?  And then once they're able to tell a story about that, give them a space to go brag about it on microlearning conf because , that really kind of shows the impact and it shows how they achieved it and what hurdles they had to overcome, like whether it was integrating this into their tech stack or getting executive buy-in or, or how they, you know, changed the way they delivered and instead of, you know, pulling people back into an LMS, they just start texting learners because learners are on their phones.

And, uh, I think like all of that helps, us tell our story better and it really helps our customers tell the story of their success because it's, it's their success. We're a tool that they're using, but it's their success.

Beth Buchanan: Mm-hmm.

Jenny Fedullo: So [00:31:00] So Ezra, in this, in this moment of, of disruption, right? It's an opportunity for organizations to really rethink training, performance support, knowledge sharing. Knowing that, what excites you the most about where we're headed, where learning technology's headed in the next few years?

Ezra Charm: I think what excites me the most is that, is that, know, the, the role of people is becoming more and more important. I don't know why it was. It's al- also something that I don't know why it wasn't this way always. Like, companies will invest so much money into marketing to attract one additional new customer, but only a fraction of that to elevate one additional salesperson.

Where one additional salesperson can have a much bigger impact than one additional customer. So like, I like, I think if you compare marketing budgets and, learning and development budgets, there's some real misalignment there. And um,

And I, I think part of it is that marketing was better at - attribution and saying like, "Well, you gave me this [00:32:00] money, and I put it to work, and we got these customers," where learning and development has traditionally not been so good at that. And, I think that's what excites me the most. I think the role of people is becoming more and more important. The role of people who are knowledgeable and trustworthy is gonna become more and more important. And I think that having a team that's well-aligned is gonna become more important than ever.

And I think that's something that a lot of people might overlook and, and they might say like, "Well, you know, course creation is becoming so easy, so I'm in deep trouble," when it's just like, learning and development is gonna move from building onboarding programs to figuring out how this top seller in an organization is so successful, and how do you bleed that out across the board, and how do you get more people aligned that same way.  I don't have this doom and gloom look of the world. I think I- Sure ... I have an optimistic view. I also went through like a whole bunch of change in my own career. So I've been a marketer my whole life, and I started off as a pixel [00:33:00] pusher where, you know, like all other marketers, where before the days of marketing automation and WYSIWYG tools and all that stuff we were pixel pushers, and we couldn't measure anything.

And, and so we also marketers got fired quickly and, it was like there was not a lot of job security. But then tools helped us attribute this better and really helped us understand the impact that we were having and helped us tell a better story about our impact and also cut out a lot of the mundane work. So like the mundane work might be the work that you do into like polishing a course so that it's, , production ready, and maybe you can do that much quicker, and that opens up space to do the work that we talked about, which is the difficult work, the work that AI can't do, which is what is the impact this is having and how do we drive that impact organization wide. And I think as soon as you unlock that, learning and development moves from a cost center to a profit center, and I think it's there. And that's what excites me the most is that right now if you ask [00:34:00] any executive "Is learning and development, is your L&D team a cost center or a profit center?"

They're all gonna tell you it's a cost center. And, and, and that's why, you know, when a company stops hiring, they cut learning and development first.

Jenny Fedullo: Yep

Ezra Charm: I think like there's an opportunity to switch that conversation and say like, yeah, you know, like that's... And, and very similar to, to the path that marketing took, where it moved from a cost center to a profit center, and it really was some technologies that drove this change that some companies that cared enough to turn their customers into the champion, into the hero, right?

So like it's that hero's journey that, that kind of happened. And, and I, I went through that myself personally where I learned how to use tools like Google Analytics and marketing automation tools like Eloqua and Marketo and others to really figure out how marketing was driving this bigger impact in an organization.

And, and to me, like if, if learning and [00:35:00] development teams tackle that, um, they are the next heroes within every organization, and the time is now for that because people are the most important asset any company has.

Jenny Fedullo: Yeah, I love that you said that. I mean, we-- if you're familiar with Jim, Jim Collins and the Hedgehog concept. So our hedgehog at d'Vinci is, you know, hu-human-centered learning. We're doubling down on that, right? We're more important, the learner is more important than ever. These tools are gonna help us better, it, it's the human right at the center of it.

Ezra Charm: Cutting out the mundane work and being able to focus on , this more difficult thing out there, -- And, and I think like , a lot of how we structure our development roadmap at 7taps is it's not doing the work for customers, but it's giving them the tools to have confidence in the stories that they tell.

And, I also, I mentioned I come from marketing , and a lot of like what marketing attribution is,, it's a story that you're telling. It's not a reality. Like , all, all uh, [00:36:00] models, they're models, which means it definitely could be true, right? But is it the truth? No, it's a model.

It definitely could be true. And I, I think learning and development needs more stories that definitely could be true, and they need the space to tell those stories. And I think like that's, that's the position we're in right now.

Susan Cort: Well, you're definitely doing that, and I'm hearing you all talk about the disruption, and I think sometimes disruptions are good. I think this is a positive disruption for learning and development and, and certainly, uh, Ezra, you and 7taps are playing an important part in that, and we're, we're glad to be partnering with you.

And we're also excited that you took the time to talk with us today and share a little bit more about 7taps with our listeners. So, thank you

Ezra Charm: Thrilled to be here. Thank you.

Jenny Fedullo: Thank you. Enjoyed it.

Beth Buchanan: Thank you so much.

Ezra Charm: Awesome

Susan Cort: My thanks to d'Vinci's Jenny Fedullo and Beth Buchanan, and to our guest and partner Ezra Charm from 7taps. If you have ideas for a topic or guest, please reach out to us at poweredbylearning@dvinci.com. And don't forget that you can subscribe to Powered by Learning wherever you listen to your podcasts.