As AI advances, human skills matter more than ever in the workplace

In every organisation, there are people who carry tacit information in their heads.

Think of a fictional but experienced employee. Let’s call them Casey. They know where the important files are in the system, when and how to fill out essential paperwork and the best way to engage with each client.

But what happens when Casey leaves? Or when someone new joins the organisation, and needs to know what they know?

“Organisations rely hugely on tacit knowledge, which is deeply embedded in people’s lived experiences and is often difficult to capture,” says Paul Conneally, co-founder of start-up Slick+.

“When people leave it’s a huge cost for the organisation to deal with inefficiencies, replication and reinventing the wheel as new people are on-boarded. And as the world of work continues to change, particularly with remote and hybrid working, this challenge of tacit knowledge is even more significant.”

Culture and outcomes, then AI

Enter Slick+, the Sligo-headquartered company whose platform allows people to make short ‘explainer’ videos and share tacit knowledge within organisations.

AI offers enormous potential for easing this vital but hard-to-capture knowledge out of people’s heads and into a ‘living library’, notes Conneally, but he argues that it needs to be in the background while humans create connections.

“We set up Slick to bring knowledge sharing and the human connection together, so that people can trust and connect with each other in a meaningful way, sharing information that is both personalised and contextualised,” he says.

AI has emerged as a powerful tool for organisations to gather, synthesise and present tacit knowledge, but Conneally stresses that it is the human connection that matters.

“We need the power of AI and social learning behind that, but we believe it should not be at the forefront. That’s intentional. AI is an incredible technology, but at the end of the day it’s still a technology and a tool, and for sharing knowledge effectively there is no such thing as a silver bullet, no one-size-fits-all tool.”

Instead, the focus for Conneally is on how to work with the people and the culture of each organisation, understanding the nature of the problem they want to solve and asking what change they want to bring about.

“At Slick+, we focus much more on the outcomes than letting everyone know that AI is involved,” he says.

“I’m not convinced that saying we’re ‘AI powered’ is going to win us more customers. People are much more interested in the outcomes, the value that you will bring, the benefits you will bring. They want to know that we will solve their specific organisation’s issues around tacit knowledge in a context-specific and engaging way, rather than pointing to AI as the solution.”

Organisations and workplaces are changing, he adds, and simply throwing AI into the mix is not enough.

“To create an employee experience that people enjoy and that will help them to innovate and grow, organisations can’t just continue to do what they have always been doing but just plug AI into it,” says Conneally.

Instead, he believes smarter thinking and design, coupled with AI where appropriate, is the route to more flexible, attractive work cultures.

“Gen Z and newer-generation employees expect modern technology such as AI and they expect greater flexibility and autonomy in their work. At the same time, it’s best for organizations to develop collaborative, knowledge-sharing cultures. The optimist in me would hope that good design focused on outcomes rather than only on the latest AI will really help to accentuate the human side of work in the future, rather than detract from it.”

AI, but in the back room

Once the humans are on board on the Slick+ platform, AI can come into its own to help personalise the content, says Conneally.

Slick+ uses AI to help users create engaging content with tele-prompted scripts, to curate playlists that make sense to the people working in the organisation and to gather data about the platform’s use and impact.

“There’s a huge amount of data that organisations can capture about tacit information, including not only that living library of wisdom, but also what employees themselves are keen to learn,” he says.

“AI can help organisations to understand those priorities people have within this otherwise unseen, everyday knowledge. And you can explore this information through strategic lenses, depending on what is important for your organisation. That might be digital transformation, sustainability, inclusion, community building – you can build that into the platform as well and discover how people in the organisation are contributing to the higher level of strategic goals.”

Seeing around the corner

As entrepreneurs, Conneally and Hegarty focus on evidence, and Learnovate has been a core component of them getting the measure of the landscape in learning, both today and tomorrow.

“As people with a strong interest in this space, we would have been very aware of Learnovate as one of the few entities in Ireland that was really pulling together some excellent evidence-based research around learning in the workplace and particularly looking at the future of work,” says Conneally.

“We have long been looking at the future of work and the role of technology there, trying to see around the corner to how things are potentially evolving and what the best-case scenario is.”

He cites Learnovate’s network, events and webinars as an inspiration in Slick+’s vision of enabling an engaging and inspiring culture of collaborative learning.

“We want people’s experience of work to be enjoyable, where people can create connections and be innovative and creative,” he says. “So it was just a natural fit for us to become a member in Learnovate and to learn from other members and connect to the network.”

Casey’s top ten tacit playlist

So how does Slick+ work in practice? The company, which Conneally and partner Linda Hegarty set up in 2022, provides a platform for organisations for people, such as Casey, to develop short videos about “how we do things here” – no longer than four minutes – and to share screens if it helps to show viewers how things are done. Casey can link resources, and colleagues can like, share, add to playlists and more.

The platform makes it easy, providing filters, backgrounds, teleprompter scripts and time limits where needed, so that creators can make and curate their ‘playlists’ of videos, Conneally explains.

“Casey can use Slick+ to create different videos about various procedures and tasks and how to do them,” he says. “People will not just get to know what Casey knows, they will get to know Casey too!”

“Then if I want to know how to do a particular task, and I don’t want to go and ask Casey personally because maybe we work in different or remote offices, or I am being on-boarded and I need to go back over something, I can just select the relevant video from Casey’s playlist and learn what I need to learn in just a few minutes from someone that I connect with and trust.”

The AI component is not obvious as the user focuses on the human and the content, but it is there in the background, he adds, making it easier for users to create and retrieve videos, while also gathering data about their use and applications.

From idea to tested prototype

In terms of making videos about tacit knowledge, it’s no surprise that Slick+ has it down to a fine art. Conneally was Head of Communications & Partnership Promotion at the UN’s agency for ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies), before spending seven years working as a director with a global workplace technology company. Hegarty is a seasoned entrepreneur and an expert in workplace learning and technology adoption in large-scale professional learning initiatives.

“When we started out, we could see this huge acceleration into online learning and remote working since the pandemic, and the problem we were digging deeper and deeper into was essentially how to capture tacit knowledge in organisations – this informal knowledge, this context-specific knowledge – in this new world of work,” recalls Conneally.

He and Hegarty researched the issues around tacit knowledge and how to apply social learning theory to share it.

“We worked with more than 50 companies, exploring this problem of capturing the informal, context-specific knowledge that is so important for progress and productivity,” he says.

“We could see that short-form video was an effective way of capturing and sharing knowledge in this noisy world – you can’t send people to a shared drive nowadays to a bunch of PDFs and PowerPoints and telling them ‘right, off you go’. There’s nothing as demotivating or disconnecting. So we built our Slick+ platform very much around short-form video and using social learning design to help people engage and share and connect with the content itself.”

Next, with the support of Enterprise Ireland, Slick+ liaised with DCU Business School to validate a working prototype of the platform with users, and today, Slick+ employs almost a dozen people in Ireland and Brazil and works with clients in Ireland, the UK and Switzerland.

“People and organisations are very comfortable with the platform,” says Conneally. “The system itself is very intuitive. We have done a huge amount of testing, and we’ve followed the ‘don’t make me think’ principle and made it as simple as possible.”

‘The most human company will win’

As the world of work relies more on remote and hybrid models, and particularly as AI infuses technology, Conneally sees context and personalisation as the keys to sharing tacit knowledge in a meaningful way.

“In recent years we have seen a big increase in remote working and online learning, particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic and also because of the expansion of digital technologies and AI,” he says.

“But at the end of it, we are still human, and the most human company will win.”

To that end, Slick+ has kept the human front and centre in its learning and design approach, ensuring that people can get the information they need easily and when they need it.

“We’ve built a whole system around helping people firstly to adopt a new technology into the workplace because that’s always a challenge, no matter what the technology is,” says Conneally.

“Then we make it easy to adapt the platform into their working practices so everybody is aligned and can hit the accelerate button and use it as part of their normal working toolkit. Slick+ integrates everywhere – into Teams, into SharePoint, into all of the widely-used learning management systems – because we want Slick+ to be where the user is, that’s another important design principle. We don’t want to be another noisy app, we want to be relevant, helpful and there when people need it.”