FinPod

Meeyeon (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome back to another episode of What's New at CFI, the podcast series where we talk about all the newness and goodness at CFI. Today I've got two special guests here with me. We have Seb, who you might know from several courses. He is a subject matter expert, and now he's a VP of strategic projects, with a product focus, which you'll kind of learn about as we speak about...

what's new at CFI today. And we have, of course, Stephen, our CFI community manager who you might have spoken with and who he's probably helped you at some point. ⁓ And today we're going to talk about AI tutor. So I'm going to dive right in and kind of suggest a broad question. Why AI tutor? Why now? ⁓ How did this idea come about?

Sebastian Taylor (00:50)
Well, I suppose...

We always had a basic chat feature within the courses. So this project was really about making this feature better for learners. So I suppose the question is, why is this feature helpful? And ⁓ we know that a lot of our learners are using or were using the Ask an Expert feature, for example, to get support with questions during their learning. The advantage of having the AI tutor alongside those videos as you're watching the courses is that you get those answers instantly.

And so what we've done with this AI tutor is to train it on all of the content you see within the course, the course transcripts, and of course it has access to the rest of CFI's catalogue. And so the answers it's able to give you are consistent with the teaching that our subject matter experts would give you within the courses. So you get these instant answers during your learning experience.

Meeyeon (01:47)
And so we're talking a little bit more about the vision of AI tutor. What else do you think it will do for learners? As in, what types of gaps do you think that AI tutor can fill for a learner?

Sebastian Taylor (02:01)
Well, a key question we started with when we started this project was...

how can this, how can our AI tutor be better than something like ChatGPT? And why would you use this instead of using ChatGPT? Yeah. And so what it comes down to for us is context. And so because you are in CFI's platform and you're learning, and we obviously have the data to understand what you're working towards, which programs you're enrolled in, which courses and lessons you viewed to date.

Meeyeon (02:15)
Yeah, exactly.

Sebastian Taylor (02:35)
when you talk to the AI tutor, it has that understanding of what you're working through. It knows that your question comes in the context of this course and this lesson specifically. And for example, if you say, explain this concept to me, it understands that you're watching this video and where you are in the video so that its response is based on what you're watching at the time.

The other thing it's able to do is when you complete your account information, for example, you tell it what career you work in and what...

where you're based, when you ask the AI tutor for examples of how a particular concept is used in your industry, it's able to understand that, if you work in retail in the UK, for example, maybe it gives you an example of Tesco, a big supermarket chain in the UK and FP &A examples within that industry. So it's able to give you answers that are contextualized to your experience, your learning progress within the platform, and

And if we have another video that can help explain the concept that you're asking about, we can actually point you to that and help you further your knowledge by watching another video.

Meeyeon (03:57)
So it's

like a hyper specialized version, guess, of ChatGPT, yeah, in within CFI. So each user will largely have their own unique ⁓ AI tutor.

Sebastian Taylor (04:03)
Exactly, yeah, it's based on chatgp. Exactly, yeah.

Essentially, that will... I'd say that the primary thing that makes it or makes the conversation specific to you is the fact that it's answering based on the lesson that you are watching.

Meeyeon (04:26)
And this is a bit of a random question, but if the learner asks the AI tutor something like, do the CFI have any events that are coming up that can help me learn more about this topic? Will it be able to tell the learner about what we have coming up? If it's advertised, I guess on our website.

Sebastian Taylor (04:48)
Not currently, but those are the...

not currently, but those are the sorts of things that we're exploring that we'd like to add in the future is all the more transactional elements of your experience with CFI. How do we give it that functionality as well?

Meeyeon (05:07)
and Stephen you interface with our learners all the time, more than probably any of us combined. How have you been ⁓ seeing people using it? ⁓

Stephen Moerane (05:17)
Yeah, the most common uses we've seen are where users will ask, explain this concept or they'll be in a certain lesson and they might want to relate some concepts together. So they'll ask a more complex question like how does WAC relate to the valuation of a company, know, things like that. So yeah, we've been seeing that kind of usage. So explain this, how does this relate to that or what is, you know, sorts of questions.

Meeyeon (05:46)
in terms of impact on a learner's journey with CFI, Seb, how do you think ⁓ AI Tutor has slotted in to our broader product roadmap? Maybe you could just give us some insights on how you see the AI Tutor fitting in and yeah, just talking about how it fits into our broader product.

Sebastian Taylor (06:06)
Yeah. Well, I suppose.

The first thing to say is that in the last couple of years with chat GPT type technology, it really has changed the face of education. And so what we wanted to do was combine the best of both worlds. We obviously have our subject matter experts, which deliver these ⁓ thorough courses, comprehensively recorded in video format that you can watch in your own time. And to give you that classroom element, we now have the AI tutor alongside it, which is trained on all the same knowledge.

speaks to you in the same simple language that our subject matter experts speak to you. And so we believe that's a good way to deliver the best of both worlds. And so we're hoping that that helps our learners to better understand the concepts they're working on through the courses, to clarify different things, and to ultimately get better results in their end-of-course assessments and their final exams when they're working towards certifications.

Stephen Moerane (07:06)
Yeah, and to follow up on that, ⁓ we're always looking for feedback. So if anybody has anything to say or if you've experimented with AI tutor, feel free to leave us a note in community. We've got a number of feedback spaces. We would love to hear your experiences regarding AI tutor.

Meeyeon (07:25)
So whether you're stuck on a course exercise, you want to practice a concept or just test your understanding of something generally, our AI tutor is there to help you 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Although Stephen is always there, AI tutor is truly always there at your fingertips. So we really encourage you to share your experiences with AI tutor on community. Let us know how it's been helpful to you, any future improvements that you'd like to see.

And with that, we will see you next time.