513 — Articulate goes all in on AI: our reaction

So first of all, the announcement from Articulate.

So they ran this big swanky event called Articuland.

Articuland.

I think that's how you say it.

Very much modeled on the style of Apple keynotes.

So various speakers came out and walked in front of a massive screen.

And there was lots of lights and music and exciting things going on.

And lots of aspirational language about changing the world.

And I think what's really interesting about it is that they seem to have annoyed basically everyone with this event and with the announcements that they made.

So Articulate, for those who don't know, have built their entire business by creating tools that help professional learning designers create high quality content and products.

Full disclosure, MindTools Canoe are a customer.

We use Storyline and we use Rise.

We have various thoughts on both those tools, which I may or may not get into today, depending on the direction of my conversation with myself.

The big news, basically, is that they have automated the bit that their customer does.

So the big pivot is, I think they see that there will be fewer and fewer learning designers in the world because everyone is automating the production of content.

And I do mean everyone, Mind Tools Kineo also has various tools that automate the production of content.

And so there's probably fewer customers in a world where you are targeting learning designers specifically.

And therefore, Articulate have pivoted to target operational teams, of which there are a lot.

So procurement, sales, product, etc.

All of those people who in the past would have had to come to the L&D department and say, can you build me a course? And the L&D department goes, no.

Maybe, eventually, but we don't have enough people and we don't have enough budget.

Now the answer is yes, you can build it yourself.

You can use this thing called Articulate.

And all of that has been driven, of course, by AI.

So what was announced? First of all, we have Articulate 360 AI, which is like an evolution of the existing package of Rise, Storyline, Review, their review tool, and Reach, which is their distribution mechanism.