About this podcast episode

In this episode of the Agile and Action Podcast, Bill chats with Bhavneet Chahal, Co-founder and CEO of GoSkills, about how AI is reshaping online learning and development. Bhavneet shares how GoSkills took the bite-sized learning approach seriously way back in 2013 and why it still holds strong today. Instead of hour-long snoozefests, they focus on 3 to 5 minute lessons that come with cheat sheets, quizzes, and exercises. Bhav also explains how their platform integrates AI to help trainers build courses, generate lesson plans, and even make course titles pop. But she’s quick to add that AI should assist, not replace, human quality and insight.

Bill and Bhav discuss how AI isn’t a threat to structured learning but actually helps enhance it. While ChatGPT and YouTube are great for quick answers, structured platforms like GoSkills offer guided learning that actually sticks. They’ve rolled out tools like Genie and Ask AI to boost productivity and personalize the learning experience without losing quality. Bhav shares her thoughts on how AI can help not just with content creation but also strategy, marketing, and even spotting hidden opportunities from raw data. Her hot tip for trainers and instructional designers: learn how to use AI to polish and sell your course, not just build it.

What You’ll Learn

  • Why micro-learning still wins in adult education
  • How AI can help you build and market better courses
  • The difference between using AI for quick answers vs structured learning
  • How GoSkills uses AI to find trends and shape future content
  • Tips for trainers to stay competitive using AI tools in course design and promotion

Transcript

(transcripts are auto-generated, so please excuse the brevity)

[00:00:00] Introduction and welcome

Bill Raymond: Hi, and welcome to the Agile and Action Podcast. Today I’m joined by Bhavneet Chahal, Co-founder and CEO at GoSkills. They are a leading platform for online education. Hey Bhav, how are you today?

Bhavneet Chahal: Hi, Bill. I’m great, thanks. Thanks for having me on your podcast.

Bill Raymond: Yeah. I’m really excited for this.

Bill Raymond: We met a very long time ago because we were working together building a Microsoft Project training course, and this is many moons ago. Then recently we started working together again because AI is becoming so popular and we’re both getting involved in that space, and I want to know what’s going on in the instructional design and online education field.

Bill Raymond: So I thought it would be a good time for us to reconnect. Before we get started, could you introduce a little bit about yourself and what GoSkills is all about?

Bhavneet Chahal: Absolutely. So my name is Bhav. I’m the co-founder and CEO of GoSkills. We are an online education platform. We create both bite-size courses for career advancement, as well as a learning management system for companies to create their own training, their own incredible bite-sized courses to deliver internally.

Bill Raymond: And I think you’re a little bit ahead of the curve with the bite-sized training because you know, I see that everywhere now, but yours aren’t just shorts. They’re really focused on a particular topic. Can you talk a little bit about what those bite-sized pieces are and how that fits into your overall strategy for adult learning?

[00:01:35] Origins of GoSkills and micro-learning approach

Bhavneet Chahal: I think we can say we pioneered, micro-learning back in 2013 when we launched GoSkills. The reason we created GoSkills was because I took an online Excel course and, it included some hour long videos and PDF downloads and I just didn’t think it was a very, effective course.

Bhavneet Chahal: Right from the beginning, we knew we wanted very short three to five minute videos. That’s the bite-sized component. Each video also should come with something supplementary, like we call them cheat sheets. So just the written information from the video as well as, an exercise so that you can apply your knowledge from the video.

Bhavneet Chahal: And a short three question, multi-choice quiz. Again, just to make sure you, took a knowledge check that you have the full understanding from that, that three to five minute video. And all our courses are broken down into these bite-sized lessons.

Bill Raymond: That’s great, and I think this is super useful for someone like myself who is a trainer because you know, very often we’re training in person and we already prepare all of that content and what have you, and whether it’s in person or over zoom, kind of the same thing.

[00:02:50] Benefits of bite-sized learning

Bill Raymond: Maybe the training is a few hours long, and so everyone’s there learning together, having a conversation, but when you’re staring at a screen, you don’t really want to look at it for very long. I heard there’s a stat out there, and I’m not really trying to, you know, call out any particular company, but my understanding is that a lot of the, if you will just pay $15 for this training courses. Some of the more popular ones are the ones that are like 15 hours or 30 hours, and you don’t get that guidance as a trainer to make sure that you have valid course material, exercises, cheat sheets, sample material that you can work with. And I really value the relationship that I’ve had with GoSkills because

Bill Raymond: You formalized it so that it makes it a lot easier for us as a trainer to really think through what we’re going to develop for that three to five minutes. It’s not like you just press the record button and say, here’s what I’m gonna teach you. You really have to think through it.

Bill Raymond: And then I think the person taking the training gets that same value out of it because it’s been thought through to a level that maybe it’s not noticeable until after you’ve taken the course.

[00:04:10] Course development methodology

Bhavneet Chahal: Yeah, absolutely. We care deeply about the pedagogy of the course, so we do ask our instructors to create the outline first, with each lesson having one very clear learning objective.

Bhavneet Chahal: And then we are quite prescriptive with the format as well, so we do try to enforce that three to five minute rule as best as we can. And then all that supplementary material as well, because we think that that’s a nice format to learn online.

Bill Raymond: The obvious, what do we call it, the elephant in the room? aI is kind of” right now, at this moment, a big thing. And that big thing means that there’s big changes and those changes happen very quickly and there’s a lot of capability now in an AI model to just say, “Hey, I wanna learn something about this topic.”

Bill Raymond: And you can just type that in, go into ChatGPT, for example, and say, I want to learn about gardening, or I want to learn this product, and it will walk you through it. Some people will do that. I think other people maybe like to be in person or talk over Zoom and other people just want to be able to consume the content.

[00:05:23] Impact of AI on online education

Bill Raymond: But I’m curious for you, what are you seeing in the space right now in the learning and development and educational space? And what changes should we expect as AI continues to, blossom the way it is?

Bhavneet Chahal: When ChatGPT really came out with, their product, we immediately went into like, oh no, what do we do?

Bhavneet Chahal: People will just go to ChatGPT for all their online training, but actually taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture, we realize that that’s not really the case. There’s a similar parallel with YouTube. You could also go to YouTube and search for something very specific and get your answer immediately.

Bhavneet Chahal: And both AI and YouTube and I’m sure there are many other examples where you need that very specific point just in time learning. Then you can get that answer. But what we provide are structured, guided pedagogical courses. So we take you through an entire topic from the basics, right up to an advanced level in a very structured and guided way.

Bhavneet Chahal: And I think, if you’re just going search into, an AI product for a particular question, you’re not going to get that, holistic view of your skills and how to grow your skills.

Bill Raymond: Companies are starting to incorporate AI into every little bit. Every little nook and cranny of their products. Absolutely. So it changes really fast. The products maybe even change their look and feel or a new feature suddenly gets added. I’m curious, are you seeing those changes impacting what your customers are looking for and how are you thinking about addressing that?

Bhavneet Chahal: If

[00:07:06] GoSkills’ AI integration

Bhavneet Chahal: you don’t add AI capability, you will be left behind. In terms of GoSkills, we’ve added three AI products into our platform. The first is what we’ve called Genie, and it is a content assistant in our course builder.

Bhavneet Chahal: As part of our learning management system, you can create your own courses. We’ve got a product called a Course Builder and we fully integrated Genie into that product. So it helps you create, from, the title of your course to the syllabus, even down to the content. So, you can put in the lesson objective for that particular lesson

Bhavneet Chahal: And it could spit out a video transcript and a quiz and tons of content, and it just makes content creation so much easier for both our instructors as well as instructional designers or L&D managers looking to create custom training for their teams.

Bill Raymond: So I really like this idea of the Ask AI capability and it’s grounding itself, is what I think I’m hearing to use an AI term. It sounds like, rather than try to answer any question anyone might have, it’s focused on the training. And in all fairness, you shared this with me when we were prepping for the podcast, and I went ahead and asked some questions myself, and it was kind of cool.

Bill Raymond: I went into a course and I said tell me how I can do this, that, or the other thing. And not only did it respond, it responded like the trainer, as you said, but it also gave me links to the relevant course materials so I could watch it or follow up with the cheat sheets. I think that was a really cool experience because it’s not trying to answer any and every question, it’s trying to focus you on learning for that particular topic.

[00:09:07] AI-powered course assistance

Bhavneet Chahal: Yeah, exactly. We have scoped that just to the course content so that it doesn’t go out and get information that might be inaccurate or it doesn’t hallucinate. It is just scoped to that particular course. And we have fully integrated that into the platform. So if you are struggling with a particular lesson and it knows that another lesson might help you with a foundational understanding, it’ll link to that.

Bhavneet Chahal: So yeah, we’re very excited about the Ask AI product and I hope it’s the first step in many to create really personalized back and forth type training in an online on-demand way.

Bill Raymond: With the Genie product now, and this is the one that helps the trainer build their course material more quickly.

Bill Raymond: You know, we see a lot of material out there that goes out into the wild. I guess I would just say open up LinkedIn or go to some, less popular news sites or blog sites, and you’ll see a lot of content that after you start reading it for a bit, you start to notice that it’s just AI. It doesn’t feel like a human wrote it. Maybe it caught your attention initially with some catchy one-liner or something, but then you just lose interest because you’re just noticing all those signs. And I’m curious, what are you thinking about in terms of keeping the quality up there for your training?

[00:10:37] Maintaining quality with AI-generated content

Bhavneet Chahal: Yeah, that’s a great question. We don’t want AI slop, in our training materials and, that tool is meant to help instructors to generate content, but it should not be the final product. It’s really hard to start with a blank screen. And so this will help you almost brainstorm ideas for what you would like to cover in your course and how you would like to cover it.

Bhavneet Chahal: But, we don’t expect you to use what it delivers as the final product. You definitely need the human curation, the human eye for quality control. And also usually it’s instructional designers or SMEs, subject matter experts creating these courses so they know what to include and what to exclude.

Bhavneet Chahal: And so that job is not going away anytime soon. Because I think that human curation element is crucial.

Bill Raymond: Yeah. What I’m finding is that they’re really good for, what do I call ‘em, like explainer videos, you know? Here, just explain this topic to me so I can understand.

Bill Raymond: I have taken a few courses that were generated fully with AI and can tell you for sure, it started to get a little rough to continue watching it.

Bhavneet Chahal: Yeah. Another thing that we found our AI product that Genie does really well is, creating course titles or lesson titles that are really, they have a hook so that it makes you want to click onto that lesson and read on. So I think it’s that creative writing aspect that’s nice.

Bhavneet Chahal: SMEs, they’re excellent at what they do. They, they’re experts in their fields, but they might not have the best way to hook an audience or, the sales and marketing tactics to get someone to enroll into your course and then get through the entire course.

Bhavneet Chahal: And I think, Genie and AI polish on lesson titles and things like that. Can really help make the course a lot more engaging and put the learner deeper into the course.

[00:12:47] AI’s role in content engagement

Bill Raymond: That’s actually a really good point because AI is actually trained on the world’s knowledge, and one of those skills, those capabilities that a lot of people write about is how to engage people with content, how to be a good salesperson, how to be a good marketer.

Bill Raymond: This is why I think most people don’t necessarily write a good resume because it’s hard to sell yourself. You get kind of in the weeds as to what you do, and it’s hard to pull back and say, who is my audience?

Bill Raymond: And then how do I engage with them? So having that actually, I think is a super valuable tool. And that’s also training someone to think differently about how they write their content in the future too.

Bhavneet Chahal: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s a really nice way to use AI to polish a course, and to really make it marketable.

Bill Raymond: I have a, BillBot that I call it, it’s trained on all of my writing. And I have it just do a check for me. Is this writing like me? Because sometimes we just wake up in the morning and we’re in a bad mood and sometimes our content that we write, whether it’s an email or a piece of training material or an article or blog, whatever it might be, sometimes it just comes off the wrong way and you’re not being authentic because you’re in some sort of a space and it grounds you on that. And it’s the same thing with content engagement as well, because you can just say, you know what? I’m really good at teaching this topic, but I keep using technical jargon that maybe people don’t know yet.

Bill Raymond: And so AI can help smooth that over and say, well, wait a minute. You’re creating this course that’s going to teach the topic, but why are you using it right now when people may not even know what it means?

Bhavneet Chahal: Yeah, exactly. I think you’re so good with, the substance of the topic and your deep knowledge on a topic.

Bhavneet Chahal: AI can come on top of your content and transform it into something that’s more applicable and nicer for a wider audience.

Bill Raymond: Now, I am curious because of all of the changes going on in the world and people trying to figure out what their job might look like in the coming weeks, months, or years.

[00:15:10] Future of skills and learning

Bill Raymond: What are some of the important things that people should be looking for when they’re taking a course? What are some of the things that you are looking to do at GoSkills to make the courses more valuable?

Bhavneet Chahal: We’re seeing a lot of demand for AI style courses, with AI and new technologies, you do have to keep updating your skills, learning new things.

Bhavneet Chahal: I think the most productive people, in months or years, will be the people that can fully leverage AI tools in their workplace. So whether that’s Copilot or some other, coding tool, you become so much more productive with your sort of sidekick.

Bhavneet Chahal: If you don’t learn how to use AI in your workflow, I think you will be left behind. So it’s essential to remain competitive and relevant.

Bill Raymond: I think one of the important things here as well to think about with AI is that it’s not just about creating content, it’s about using AI to improve what you’re doing. So you already mentioned like polishing a course, maybe identifying, ways to relabel things, but also identify gaps. So you can use AI to simply identify gaps in your content strategy, in your marketing strategy, in your sales strategy. You can have it, analyze that and create

Bill Raymond: new, concepts and ideas for you. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to use it to create content. You can use it to help you identify new market opportunities and ways to improve customer satisfaction. And I think that’s one of those skills that we keep talking about prompting, which is so important.

Bill Raymond: And we talk about AI being embedded in these products, and you need to know how to use the prompts. But at the end of the day, find those gaps, find those things that maybe other people aren’t talking about that’s going to add more value to the person that’s purchasing your content.

[00:17:16] Using AI for business strategy

Bhavneet Chahal: Yeah. Speaking of, using AI for the strategy, that is actually what we’ve been doing. We fed OpenAI’s ChatGPT product with our, demo requests data. So anyone, looking for a demo on our website. And it produced this report, which was truly mind blowing because it just showed us, it was synthesizing a lot of data, which we had seen before, but hadn’t synthesized in the way that it had done for us.

Bhavneet Chahal: And it brought out, like you said, opportunities, industries and, shows us demand. It even said things like, oh, there’s demand for AI products and aI courses. It’s still low compared to your flagship Excel, but it’s increasing at a higher rate.

Bhavneet Chahal: So, you know, it helps us predict what our customers want and what type of courses we should create. And yeah, it was just, it was incredible to use the AI product in that way to help us analyze big data and illuminate opportunities, within our business.

Bill Raymond: That’s a great example of where AI, I think is coming in very handy for people that know how to use it.

Bill Raymond: I keep looking at it, as like the 80/20 right now, a lot of people are still learning prompting. That’s the 80%, the 20% are using it to do what you are talking about right now. And usually those are people that have a mindset of, okay, is it okay if we just ask AI to, to go out there and figure something out and be okay with however it responds and be open to change.

Bill Raymond: And it really does give you a lot more visibility into how people might be perceiving your product despite what other data you might have.

Bhavneet Chahal: I was really surprised because it was so basic data as well. It was just, an Excel sheet that we got from our developers. And yeah, we used, ChatGPT’s o3 model, which is excellent at analyzing data.

Bhavneet Chahal: And it just produced this really beautiful report. And then actually, my co-founder put that report into NotebookLM, which is Google’s, note taking product, and it created a podcast of the report, which was mind blowing so I could listen to the report as if it was a podcast to help me digest all the information in a much more easy way.

Bill Raymond: Sometimes it’s easier to just put on a headset and listen to the results rather than try to read through it all. And what’s nice about those types of products exactly, is that it’s a conversation, right? That NotebookLM you were talking about, are two people chatting about the data that they learned and giving the insights in a way that we are right now in the podcast.

Bhavneet Chahal: Exactly, it’s just so much more relatable to mm-hmm. And I feel like it’s more, you remember the data and the content. So much more when you hear it as two people talking as opposed to reading, you know, the information on a Word doc.

Bill Raymond: Yeah. Now this podcast is for people who are leading in the agile space and looking to new capabilities, and of course AI is one of them.

[00:20:43] Tips for instructional designers

Bill Raymond: a lot of instructional designers, and you may not call yourself an instructional designer, but guess what? If you are standing up at a user group and giving a talk or going to conferences and sharing what you’ve learned, and if you are presenting material every day, guess what? You’re an instructional designer and you’re teaching people, I think whether you’re formally doing that as part of your title or you’re doing this as something that is just core to how you present information to people, I would love, Bhav, if you could just take a moment and reflect and give someone that might be an instructional designer some tips, some takeaways that they can use starting today, maybe that would give them a leg up in how they might create their material moving forward.

Bhavneet Chahal: I think I’d go back to what I said earlier about using AI to polish the course and to market it better. With our Genie product, when people use it, I can see the course titles just look so much more enticing.

Bhavneet Chahal: You want to keep reading to see what the course is about. Even the course overview, those are basically sales documents which I think AI does a really good job at putting together. It’s one thing to create amazing content, but it’s another to sell it. And, that would be my tip for instructional designers to use AI to help them market their courses, in terms of titles, lesson titles, hooks, and even maybe create a marketing strategy to get it out there so that people will take the course.

Bhavneet Chahal: You can create the best course out there, but if you don’t know how to market it, no one’s gonna take it. And, you know, it’s kind of wasted, so, yeah, I would say that that would be my hot tip for instructional designers.

Bill Raymond: Thank you very much for that. And obviously I’m going to also say if you think that you have a good course, then you should reach out to GoSkills.

Bill Raymond: I found that you are all very open to accepting someone’s pitch for an idea and working with instructional designers like myself. I want to say right now, this is not a sponsored podcast. This is us talking because you and I built a relationship those many years ago, and we still have a relationship today and we’ve been collaborating on creating AI instructional design content, and it’s just a joy to work with your company and I really appreciate you for that.

[00:23:25] Closing remarks and contact information

Bhavneet Chahal: Oh, thank you Bill, and it’s a joy to work with you. I love that we have such a long standing relationship. I’m trying to remember when was it that we met? What year was that?

Bill Raymond: I think we decided it was when I got back from Japan, probably in 2012 or 2013.

Bhavneet Chahal: Crazy. Yeah.

Bhavneet Chahal: We started GoSKills March, 2013. Well, we incorporated those skills in March, 2013, and I think Microsoft Project was one of our very very early courses. So yeah, we love working with you, and that’s why we contacted you again when we saw that you were doing AI things. And yes, we’re always on the lookout for instructional designers, content experts. If you love presenting on your topic.

Bhavneet Chahal: And we’d love to do that, in a more scalable way, please reach out to us.

Bill Raymond: How can people reach out to you?

Bhavneet Chahal: You can reach out to us, by emailing us at info@goskills.com or if you want to reach out to me personally, you can connect with me LinkedIn. We have online forms on our website we’re a very small team, so we see everything that comes in.

Bill Raymond: Wonderful. I really appreciate your time today and it was so fun talking to you. It’s always great to see you again and chat.

Bhavneet Chahal: Thank you so much, Bill.