Why Traditional Learning Doesn’t Cut it in a World of Rapidly Changing Technology

Ruban Phukan starts the podcast by sharing how he began his career journey at Yahoo! as a data scientist before the term even existed. Working directly with the company’s co-founder, David Filo, he saw how an organization can effectively manage large amounts of data to make data-driven decisions to scale a business. 

The experience inspired him to pursue his own startup in 2005 that catered to the Indian market. Ruban’s company leveraged AI in the early stages to collect valuable information about users to personalize their searches, pioneering an idea that is used across systems today. It was later acquired by a large travel company that spearheaded the success of his innovative technology in that region of the world. 

In 2012, he started his second venture, which catered to the industrial IoT market, creating a program to help businesses understand and optimize their machine data — a company he later sold in 2017. Ruban talks about how these experiences opened his eyes to the rapidly ever-changing world of technology and its influence on the workflow it has in other industries. 

He realized that traditional learning in many of these industries, which continue to evolve alongside the technology they utilize, presents its share of challenges. It ignited Ruban’s idea for GoodGist, an AI software that helps companies support, learn, and grow through a centralized platform that delivers specific learning modules to individuals based on their work requirements.

Ruban quickly realized that while technology is rapidly changing, teams don’t have the luxury of spending time learning about its intricacies. While online learning gives them a general understanding of the technology, it doesn’t provide insight into how to apply it to their work. They are expected to keep up with the changes but struggle to properly absorb the knowledge required to do their jobs to the best of their abilities.

Based on the information Ruban has found, one-third of an employee’s day is spent researching information online. This highlights that much of their time is dedicated to searching rather than applying, essentially eating away at productivity. A secondary challenge is that once that information is collected, the way it’s shared isn’t always ideal. People spend precious time continuously referencing the information, going back to the same material, and attempting to absorb it in a way that doesn’t always work best for them.  

The CEO goes on to describe how GoodGist leverages AI as a tool to maximize individual learning. It does this by directly asking intelligent questions that apply to the individual’s work so they can learn quickly and do their job effectively. 

We then discuss micro-learning, a learning style used on the GoodGist platform. Ruben explains that humans cannot consume a large amount of information at once and within a short period. It limits our ability to retain that information. He describes that technology has induced digital ADHD. Instead, micro-learning feeds the information in small bite-sized chunks. Allowing people to dive deeper into a topic, and progressively do that via micro-learning, offers a higher retention rate, adding that AI has elevated the ability to micro-learn topics effectively.

We continue the discussion by exploring the different formats in which GoodGist delivers the information, tailoring it to an individual’s learning style, whether visual or auditory. He is looking to further this on the platform by continuing his research on how individuals learn in specific industries and different parts of the world. 

We end the podcast with Ruban sharing that they are exploring GoodGist in the education space and confirming that they are running pilots with certain institutes.

You can listen to the episode below, or on Spotify, Anchor, Apple Podcasts, Breaker,, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Overcast, Listen Notes, PodBean, and Radio Public.

Find out more about Ruban Phukan here.

Find out more about GoodGist here.

Connect with Brains Byte Back host Erick Espinosa here.

Transcript

Ruban Phukan:  

Hi, I’m Ruban Phukan. I am the co-founder and CEO of GoodGist.

Erick Espinosa:

Ruban, thank you for joining us on this episode of Brains Byte Back. I usually like to start off the podcast by asking our guests more about their backgrounds. And I’m particularly interested in yours because I understand that you’ve been in the AI and machine learning space for quite some time. So with that in mind, can you share with us your career journey up until now?

Ruban Phukan:

Thanks, Erick, for having me on the podcast. It’s great to be here. So in terms of my journey, I’ve been in the field of AI machine learning for over 20 years. I started my career as a data scientist at Yahoo. This was even before the term data science existed, right? So we were known as data researchers back then. And I got the amazing opportunity to work with the co-founder, David Filo, himself, and got to learn a lot in terms of how organizations like Yahoo, with the amount of data that they have, right? How do they manage scale? How do you leverage that data to gather insights that can make really impactful business decisions? And I’m very proud because a lot of the research that we did back then added to almost hundreds of millions of incremental revenue opportunities for Yahoo. This was great because I was fresh out of college and just entering into the industry, and I got the exposure to work on such a large scale and large amount of data. And, like I also keep talking about is that working directly with the co-founder of a business, you get bitten by the entrepreneur bug as well. And so I started my first startup back in 2005, it was a company called Bixee. And we were one of the first vertical search company for the Indian market. And what we were doing back then is basically trying to use AI to create a user persona profile of what are the kinds of jobs that people look for? So, people who are in a particular industry, what kind of vacations that they would like to go for? What kind of properties do they buy? What kind of shopping interest do they have, right? So it was basically creating an interest profile of the user across different verticals. So that we can recommend useful information right away, rather than having to go on the web and get ads from all over the place. So you’re saying that let’s create an interest profile and give users very specific information when they’re searching for right. This was acquired by the Naspers Group of South Africa, who was starting a greenfield venture in India called IV boo. So, they acquired Bixee and the Bixee travel vertical eventually became big it transformed into what was called as ibibo, which is the number two travel destination in India. And that was acquired by make my trip which was the number one travel destination. So, after that, I started my second company, which was an enterprise AI company catering to the industrial IoT, right. 

So, this was like back in 2012. And the idea is that when industrial IoT started happening, there was a lot of machine data that was coming in, right? And most of the businesses even the large manufacturers, right, they understand text data, they understand all our business data, but machine data was hard to interpret. So, that is where we actually implement a natural language interface that we also had a patent for to help businesses query and get meaning out of machine data. So this was acquired by progress software of Boston in 2017. So one of the common themes that I have seen throughout my career when we work with large organizations or when we when I was doing my startups as well is that technology keeps changing rapidly, right? So and that requires, especially, I mean, more than any other domain now, almost every domain is a technology power domain, so everyone has to keep learning. But in the technology world we always have to keep learning new things. And more. So when you’re working on a new space, a new domain, like we were doing in the industrial IoT world, or when a company acquires another company, and they’re like, different technologies that are getting merged. And then, of course, both organizations have to learn about each other’s technology, identify compatibility and things like that. 

Now that learning cannot happen through the traditional means, right? So you cannot ask someone saying, hey, go on to this online learning platform and learn about how to apply this technology because most of this technology is very unique to the business, right? So the technology stack is unique to the business. What you need to learn to really make those integrations happen or apply technology is very unique, right? So it requires a completely different way of learning. So that was the genesis of GoodGist. 

We said, how we enable that, right? So when it comes to learning technology in a generalized way, right, so let’s say you’re trying to learn about AI, or trying to learn about cybersecurity and all of those kinds of very generic level, then, of course, the traditional online learning platforms are great, right. But when you are now trying to apply it at work, you need to get down to the specifics, which is very unique to the business, very unique to the technology stack that business owners, right? So then the learning cannot be in a generalized way, it has to be highly personalized to the individual, to the role that they’re playing and to the requirements of the role. And that is, what GoodGist does is that it helps businesses basically deliver very, very specific learning modules to individuals in the organization based on their work requirements. So this basically makes learning blended with work versus treating learning as a whole separate thing. So yeah, so in a gist, that is my personal journey from Yahoo days all the way to GoodGist.

Erick Espinosa:

So right now GoodGist is your current venture. You were always in the data field; in a way, it was kind of a consumer aspect of it, then you went into the industry aspect of it. Now you’re looking at serving what you realize is a niche because there’s a difficulty in the style that people learn. So when I was going through your website, which I was telling you earlier, that I think it’s super well designed, it actually speaks to the product itself, in terms of the layout, and explaining what the product is exactly. How do you sell this idea to most people, the idea of GoodGist? Because it’s kind of a concept. So how do you really just sell this idea when you’re first talking to potential new clients? Yeah.

Ruban Phukan:

So I mean, when we talk to customers, we try to, even before we talk about what GoodGist does, we try to understand the main pain point, which is, how are they learning new technologies and applying it at work today? And while we were even doing the research for GoodGist, we spoke to a lot of professionals in the industry saying that our online learning, the way that it’s delivered, or corporate learning, the way that it’s delivered today, is that helping them with the job, right? And this is becoming increasingly a problem today because it’s not just technology is evolving rapidly. But what that rapid evolution of knowledge is, is changing the business landscape in a way that organizations are now forced to execute much faster. So if you look at even larger enterprises, who would typically, let’s say, launch products in years or it would take years to launch a new product, now are forced to do it in like months because that is how things are moving. So this means that everyone in the technology space not only has to learn fast but also has to apply that learning fast. So which means that they don’t have the luxury to spend like, say, months trying to learn about a new technology In research about things and then apply that learning for work, right? So that is what we start with seeing that, given the technology landscape has changed. Given that now, businesses are mandated to deliver much faster, how are they solving it? How did well? I mean, the people who are actually working on delivering, how are they solving this within that organization. And a large part of the responses that we got is that, while online learning in the current form, helps them form a general idea about about technology, it’s not how they’re actually applying it for work. So when it comes to work, applying it for work, they have to either search for things specific to their needs online, then aggregate that information and apply right now; this is super time-consuming, right? Because if you look at the stats that most organizations talk about that almost 1/3 of employees day goes in searching for information on right. Now, while that feels like work, it’s actually not work. Because when like 1/3 of the day is just spent searching, and not really applying. It is a significant loss in productivity when you when you look at the hourly rate of highly paid knowledge of professionals in the in the industry, right. So their time when it goes in looking for information doesn’t help. 

The second challenge is knowledge management; it’s not about learning is that once they gather that information, how is that information shared within the organization? Most people, when they see a search online, find a solution, they just apply it and move on. Now, 10 days later, they have to refer to the same piece of information, or someone else in the team has to refer to the same piece of information, right? Which means that they have to repeat that search, which means that they are again, wasting, not wasting, but they have to go through the same cycle of spending time to get to the piece of information. So these are the challenges that we talk to organizations about: how are you managing knowledge? How are you managing learning on the flow of the job? And most of the time, there is no concrete answer. There’s they’re saying that yeah, I mean, we are doing because there’s nothing. I mean, it’s a pain that you have to endure. Right. So that becomes the starting point of our conversation about purchasing: what if there was a solution, right? What if AI can help in that? Right? Where you don’t have to look for information, you can just tell the AI what exactly you need to learn to get your job done. And instead of spending hours or days and weeks learning about new things, how about how does it how would it change their work? If they can do it in like matter of minutes, right? Or instead of having to spend hours doing research on technology, research of market trends, landscape, and competitors, right? Customers, if they can boil that research down into like, just minutes, by leveraging AI to do all of those work, right? What would that do to the productivity of an organization? How would that help? And more often than not, we set it up. And respond with we didn’t know that we could do that. So that becomes the starting point of the conversation. And then it goes deeper into understanding what the requirements are, and then how can we just fit into it a work schedule,

Erick Espinosa:

I think the way that most innovators’ minds work is that they identify a problem and they’re looking for a solution. And nowadays, especially for AI, the solution is efficiency. So AI, we’re finding it in a lot of different industries because it’s making workflow more efficient in all these different types of industries in a lot of different ways. And by the sounds of it, it sounds like what you’re trying to do is make learning efficient for individuals and for teams as well. That way, they don’t spend too much time repeating the same searches, so it kind of, you know, at the end of the day, saves them time on your workflow.

Ruban Phukan:

Yeah.

Erick Espinosa:

It soundsl like you also have a style because when I was looking at the website, there’s styles and learning and one of the things that stuck out to me was micro-learning and I saw that micro-learning is proven to boost retention rates by anywhere from 25% to 60%— which is a lot. And I remember hearing this term in the past. How it is micro-learning help you retain information, much more than regular learning?

Ruban Phukan:

Yeah, the concept of micro-learning is very deeply connected to cognitive science. So, as individuals, we are trying to process a lot of information together. And in a very short period of time, we cannot consume a large amount of information at once. And if we try to do that, the amount of information that we will remember and retain goes drastically down. And that is usually the problem today because we are in a world where technology has induced a sort of digital ADHD in everybody. So, the attention span has gone down. So we need to really get to focusing on the information that is required at that moment in time to get the work done. So that is where micro-learning plays a key role in that it actually distills down the information that you need to learn. Or that you need to make a decision at any given point in time into smaller bite-sized chunks. And then, if someone has to dive deeper into a topic, they can progressively do that rather than having to consume a lot of information at once. And that is also tied very closely with the problem of information overload. That is happening today because of the digital world. And now with AI, also enabling anybody to become a creator, anybody to become a writer, right? So there is a lot of information that is being added, digitally added online. So we’re having to parse that information all at once. And to make decisions becomes very hard. So this is the whole idea of micro-learning, and AI-enabled microlearning where it can help rather than expanding it can help distill it down to very specific pieces of information that are easier to consume.

Erick Espinosa:

Ruban, I consider myself a visual learner. If I go into GoodGist, do I have that option? Is it asking me what style of learner I am? How does that work, exactly? When I know that it’s presenting the information in the way that I know, I retain it much better.

Ruban Phukan:

Yeah, so we deliver the learning in a multimodal way. So whether you want to read a piece of information, or you want to listen to it more like a podcast or audio format, right? Some learners are more visual learners, like they have said that they want to watch it in a video format. So the platform dynamically converts that information into all those different modes. And it additionally translated to the language of the learner. So if someone prefers to listen to it, or read it in our native language, so they have the option of doing that as well.

Erick Espinosa:

Ruben, that sounds fantastic. And I wanted to ask you as well, what is the future of GoodGist? What’s in the pipeline? Down the line?

Ruban Phukan:

Yeah, so we want to get more specific in terms of how we solutionize it for different industries. If you look at the learning needs of a technology company, it may be very different from the learning needs of a healthcare company, the learning needs of a financial services company, right? And like you said, that there are different kinds of learners who have different preferences in terms of how they learn and consume information better. So we are doing a lot of research around applying basically cognitive science, applying understanding the learnability of different kinds of users. And across geographies because, again, how people learn in a particular country differs from country to country. So, we, I mean, one of the big focuses of us going forward is that how do we understand all those nuances, and then make the learning much better to individuals that helps them move forward faster. Because our primary goal is not just to deliver learning for the sake of learning. So it’s more about how do we convert that learning into application at work. So how do we make people more productive in getting their work done? And for that, what works well, to blend learning into the workflow of individuals? So those are some of the areas that we are actively working?

Erick Espinosa:

Have you ever thought about bringing this to the education space?

Ruban Phukan:

We are, in fact, and that’s the other extension, because we, I mean, when we look at this as a learning technology, we don’t want it to be limited to only the workplace. And it’s a great point that you mentioned about education, because there’s always a gap between education and then developing skills for work. Because education today that helps build that foundation. But then it’s because of the way that curriculums are built and how they evolve; there is always a gap between where the industry is at versus what has been taught at most of those institutions. So while we are not there, as a replacement to traditional education, we’re trying to augment that to help bridge that gap between learning in our educational institute and helping the students be ready for the job. And bridge the gap of what skills are required to make them progress on the work as soon as they enter into the industrial veteran.

Erick Espinosa:

Yeah because I think it would be valuable for education systems to review this style. I mean, eventually, I think they’re going to look at AI as an option to bring into the classrooms, you know, that they’ve done with computers in the past. So now that we’re seeing the power of AI as an assistant with learning and with a lot of other industries, then who’s not to say that down the line, we’ll see products like yours in the classroom.

Ruban Phukan:

Yeah. We are actually running a couple of pilots already with certain institutes trying to figure out how this can help our students in their learning journey, more in terms of the ability to follow through their classroom learning with this as a means of recalling information better. Because while they learn in a classroom on a more broad base, how can micro learning help them retain that information better and help them apply that information better? So we have already started doing a few pilots around that.

Erick Espinosa:

Rubin, thank you for taking the time to speak with me. Before I let you go, is there anything else that you wanted to mention to our audience that maybe we didn’t touch on?

Ruban Phukan:

Yeah, so I think it has been a pleasure speaking with you, Erick. Thanks for having me on the call. I think we already in an exciting phase of technology. Because it’s technology is no longer a tool, right? It has become like an intelligent partner. And as we harness the power of the intelligent partner more responsibly, learning how to do it well is important. Now, we are all continuous learners in our journey because of the nature of the world that we live in. So I think using technology to help us learn better about technology and getting us informed is one of the crucial things right going forward. So we are really excited about that, and we’re really excited to contribute to helping that.

Erick Espinosa:

I’m looking forward to seeing where GoodGist is in the near future. Thanks for joining the show. It’s people like you who are kind of carving this path of technology and its growth. And we always love hearing directly from great minds like yours. I appreciate it, Ruban. Thanks for joining me,

Ruban Phukan:

Thank you so much, Erick.

Disclosure: This article mentions a client of an Espacio portfolio company.