Brandon Hall Group™:

Jeff Walter (00:04)

Hi, I’m Jeff Walter and welcome back to the training impact podcast. My guest today is Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group . Michael is the chief strategy officer at the Brandon Hall group. Brandon Hall is the only professional development company that offers data research insights and certification to learning and talent executives and organizations. Michael, welcome to the program.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (00:23)

Thanks for having me, Chef.

 

Jeff Walter (00:25)

It is a little turn of events. I’ve been on your show a couple of times, so it’s great to have you on my show. I appreciate it. Appreciate your time. figure we could just jump right into it. You guys just had your annual Human Capital Management Excellence Conference, which unfortunately I was unable to get to. I always found that conference really interesting to get your fingers on the pulse of what’s happening, so I thought it would be just

 

if you can kind of debrief me and everybody on the conference and what’s new and exciting.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (00:51)

Sure.

 

Well, first we missed you, so we hope we see you next year. But it was quite a conference, I have to say. I’m sure everyone in the audience is saying I’m sure it was began, middle, and ended with AI, which is pretty close to correct. But it was interesting perspectives. the conference is always a gathering of our award winners for the particular 2025 cycle.

 

which many of the audience might know, you know, we do this gala every year to celebrate those successes.

 

But in there is embedded ⁓ many sessions on what’s happening across HR, particularly learning and talent, the things that were super interesting was the AI impact of everything. But the original topics were, for example, things like what the next generation leaders need to know and know how to do. Skills transformation, creating a skills economy and moving away from job and role-based skilling was another piece.

 

What do we need to do in order to build talent mobility, talent intelligence, agility within our organizational setting? Also, what does it need to be from an inclusion standpoint? Like how do we more inclusive and build better cultures for the learning and talent development initiatives that we need to do? We talked a lot of technology.

 

as well, not just AI exclusively, but where’s technology going in general and how AI is going to be a part of that discussion. I really like the interactions because when we run these panels, my team are moderators, but they’re panels from award-winning member organizations.

 

So people are really hearing the case studies rolled out for folks. So it’s always super engaging. I’m always a student of all of the sessions as well because we learn so much. see the case studies come alive, you the award-winning submissions. I think what’s also interesting too, super relevant to us getting together this morning, Jeff, is the idea that you can’t just automatically assume.

 

that non-employee training is the same as employee training. You can’t think of it that way from a people standpoint, a process standpoint, a tech standpoint, a readiness standpoint. So it’s almost like you could have had two conferences. like, that’s really great for my employees, but how do we handle our clients, our value-add resellers, all of those people that help us to get our product out there, channel partners, distribution outlets?

 

How do we do that and do that well? And the thing that was really interesting about the conversations, both with the sponsors that were there and the tech award winners and such, is people are still struggling with the same thing, which is quintessentially when you hear an HR professional talk to an extended enterprise professional, the extended enterprise professional says, man, I wish I could just say to people the same thing you get to say to your employees, which is you.

 

Jeff Walter (03:47)

Hahaha!

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (03:48)

You have

 

to learn this in order to work here, right? So there’s the hook, you know, there’s the, there’s the, gotcha. But the folks that don’t have that where learning literally has to be marketed and sold and draw people in and make it attractive and be useful. And so what was really interesting was seeing people really starting to get a grasp on.

 

you know people that don’t work for you don’t have to learn and then the turnoff is your CSAT scores go into the toilet your MPS scores follow and then people don’t want to use your product and they’re certainly not going to take on more of your products and they’re not going to become have a higher attachment value kind of grow it spirals out

 

Jeff Walter (04:16)

Right.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (04:28)

pretty fast. So to kind of sum it all up on that side, the number one thing people are looking for are better tech stacks. That was the number one thing. You know, they’re not changing their manuals, they’re not changing their sales collateral, not changing their marketing collateral. But tech has to be the opening, particularly for CE, tech has to be the opening now to say, people don’t want SCORM courses, you know, they don’t want to take three hour things, all that like, and they’re hoping that tech

 

Jeff Walter (04:40)

Mm-hmm.

 

Yeah.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (04:58)

will kind of reshape the thinking and create more innovative outlets that you’re seeing on the employee side.

 

Jeff Walter (05:04)

You know, it’s interesting you say that about SCORM courses because it’s, I just got this gut that we’ve passed peak SCORM as it were. I, well, but, but I mean, but we’re not, but we’re, but nothing’s replaced it yet. But, ⁓ we’ve been playing around with, and we’ve got some stuff going on right now, especially in a franchise space where, you know, to your point, like you have the operating manuals, you have these things.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (05:13)

I’d like to think that that was true.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (05:31)

And

 

we’re shifting our AI focus to have AI generate the learner experience off of those materials. So I, and, ⁓ and we’re getting some really interesting results in terms of study guides, courses, then all that kind of stuff. But w so what was the most surprising thing to you during the conference? You know, the cool thing about your conference versus others, is, is what you had just said is.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (05:37)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

 

Right, right.

 

Jeff Walter (05:54)

It’s primarily, and the panels are primarily the award winners and it’s all case study. So it kind of goes back to that Socratic method of learning. It’s like, opposed to, you know, a lecture and, and, and, but, just, or just a panel of experts and they’re just talking off the top of their head. Yeah. Folks that are like, Hey, we presented this case study and, um, well, when you’re going around, what was the most surprising thing you’ve

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (05:59)

That’s right.

 

Exactly.

 

Right.

 

Jeff Walter (06:23)

you can’t most insight, you know, kind of like, Hey, I didn’t expect that. That’s like, that’s a new thing to me.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (06:28)

I’d have to say it’s a duality of AI. I was surprised at times how progressive some people were, and then I was surprised at times on how far behind people are. I know it sounds weird, but I was surprised both times. We’ve done all the research. We show that 46 % of organizations are in phase one, phase two of readiness for AI. You always have the stats. In fact, we launched

 

Jeff Walter (06:31)

huh.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (06:55)

polls and gave direct audience feedback where people fell in terms of AI readiness. But when you hear the actual stories themselves, and you hear them from individual organizations, that’s where the surprises come from. You hear that particular organization talk about it you say, I’m surprised you’re not farther along.

 

And then you hear another organization talking about it, like, I’m really surprised you’re that far along. So it was a surprise both ways. It didn’t really change the needle on where everybody fell, but the individual stories and how they’re tackling it, I will tell you what was a little bit interesting and probably gave me a little bit of an electrical jolt was I don’t sense

 

a lot of times that organizations have really decided how they feel about it. So there was a general sense of, get in. Sometimes they say AI stands for all in rather than artificial intelligence. But you didn’t get that sense of

 

everyone’s got the governance nailed down and the organizational readiness nailed down. They’re like, hey, listen, we got to get started. We got to do this. We got to jump in. And then what was also surprising too, although not at the same time, but to hear it again, is you’ll have one group this far along in AI. And then within the same group, like an HR team or other team, they’re this farther along. So literally within organizations, you would get different answers.

 

So if you had everyone just line up and say, where are you, where are you? On the extended enterprise side, was disappointed in the fact that I didn’t hear as much about AI. And I would think it would be so super impactful on that side. Because when we look at CE, and we also look at extended as the umbrella over that, we see three areas that we’d like to see AI penetration. One is content creation and reformation.

 

You know, we don’t just want to load PDF manuals that let’s be a little bit more imaginative in what we want clients and others to learn. So we look for that, right? Then we look on the other end and say, you getting better analytics, better insights about sentiment from the people that you are training? Like, do you see positive signs like a lag indicator of usage of product or usage of other products or satisfaction with the product? That’s a lag indicator nobody can wait for.

 

Jeff Walter (08:54)

Mm-hmm.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (09:14)

not in the world of extended enterprise, like you need immediate feedback. It’s almost like, know, tell me, tell me. So that was the other end of it. And then the third piece that you just touched on, which I think has the most amount of white space, is that we’re using AI to improve the learner experience. So we got better analytics, okay, we can create content quicker and make it more interesting. But if I don’t want to interact,

 

with the platform itself. Like I find it a root canal to like interact with. I never get, you don’t get analytics out of me because I’m not there. And certainly the content that you spend all this time creating, I don’t see because I’m like, this product is like, I’d rather not use it or gnaw off my right arm before I have to try it again. And I just saw like very, not as much attention.

 

as I was hoping on improving the user experience, especially when we get back to what we mentioned earlier is that I don’t have to learn. I just don’t have to. So draw me in in my first interface, if it’s awful, that’s not a good place to start.

 

Jeff Walter (10:10)

Right. I don’t have to do this.

 

Yeah. Well, you know, and it’s funny that you mentioned SCORM because we were applying with that. then what we went to, I got on the extended side and especially in the middle market, you know, the big guys, they have the budget to be able to produce SCORM courses. And I know all the authoring content, authoring tools, they’re packing AI into that. And so you can do a better, faster, cheaper.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (10:40)

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (10:43)

But a lot of these middle market guys, don’t even know where to start. they don’t, and nobody in the organization knows anything about SCORM. Right. And so one of the things, uh, we just did this, uh, experimental thing. It’s in our labs. It was really kind of cool is we took the operating manual of a franchise. And we wrote a pretty sophisticated prompt to turn that into a crosswalk it over to a training plan for.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (10:50)

Mm-hmm.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Mm-hmm. Right.

 

Jeff Walter (11:11)

franchisees, managers, and employees, franchise employees. And then, uh, and it said, okay, you know, you do this as an online module. This isn’t in classroom, but, then we took the chapters that were, you know, so here’s the brand values and all that kind of stuff chapter, you know, chapter one or two or whatever. I always said, uh, we built another prompt that said, create a, a, a web page that will teach.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (11:29)

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (11:40)

a student this content and include multiple modules, flashcards, and a practice quiz. And it did it. Now, not ready for prime time, but yeah, not something I would do tomorrow without intervention, without human intervention. But we were playing around with that and we were like, my gosh, I could just like,

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (11:42)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

 

Wow, okay, there you go.

 

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (12:06)

I could automate the whole thing. Yeah. And, and, and, and then, and then, you know, create the assessment. ⁓ but to, like, to your point, think in that middle market, one of the biggest challenges is content. They have all the operating manuals, like you said, they have all the marketing material, the operating manuals, and it’s getting that content that’s just, ⁓ anyway, did you see anything like that?

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (12:09)

Well you could, you could.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Mhm.

 

Right.

 

Well, yeah, yeah,

 

and I’ll use a word that doesn’t get used enough with AI. The transition between, and score, remember too, is like an air quote. It’s a mentality of structured learning, not just a reference model itself. But here’s a great lunch conversation. Okay, I’ve got all of this stuff piled up. I don’t need more training.

 

You know, like I’ve got all the training I need, I just need a way of delivering it. I’m like, wrong, right? Like you don’t have content yet. You have information. But there’s a big difference between information…

 

and content. that’s like saying, I have a stack of books in my library and I’m just going to hand it to people and then they’re going to know how to do things. So what we’re not doing a good job of is using the neurocognitive aspects of AI is to translate information into knowledge. And that’s the active process, like getting people to absorb it and then apply it. So what I want to throw out to your audience is

 

the way that you need to, the thing that you have to like take the slide bar and bury it on 10 for CE training or channel training is sentiment. Like when you’re using AI, the key thing that’s missing is sentiment. And so I’d like to see organizations use AI to say, let’s get the temperature.

 

Jeff Walter (13:36)

Thank

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (13:49)

figured out, let’s get the persona figured out, let’s get the sentiment. So, you know, who’s the audience? Like we very seldom see AI for Extended Enterprise start with sentiment. Like, okay, here’s the scenario. I’ve got a bunch of clients that have a 30-second attention span. They have professional ADD. They have a lot more reasons to not want to learn than there is to learn. They want to get to the point and just use the product. They don’t have time. They’d rather live in the world of The Matrix where you stick a steel rod in the back of their head, their eyes

 

and they can fly the helicopter. Give AI perspective, because it’s not human. And we don’t do that enough to set that up before we translate the learning. AI is really good at that. It’ll be like, OK, I got you. You just gave me the hot LZ approach to this. know where I’m landing. And you get a much different output. Now you begin to contextualize to your audience. And so we have to speak to AI as if it’s a human.

 

that you’re collaborating with, you’re partnering with and saying, listen, let me just show you the ropes or take you through the first day of school before I start throwing math books at you and English books. Let’s walk around the school, figure out everything, here’s your locker. Give perspective to AI. And I think that’s really important in client education and channel education training because if you don’t put that in, if you don’t say we’re going into this world,

 

Jeff Walter (15:13)

Right, right.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (15:14)

before I deliver the learning, then what you end up with is exactly what you just said. It’s very electoral, very academic, know, very like sterile, and it doesn’t do anything. But AI will be right. It will tell you like I did exactly what you want me to do, but it really didn’t do exactly what you wanted it to do. We have to add the HI part.

 

Jeff Walter (15:35)

Yeah. Well, you know, that’s interesting that, you know, that you mentioned that the sentiment or the context. I, you know, I’m just thinking of our own uses of it. And, and, you know, I, I never, I didn’t think about it the way you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re specifying it more, as a, as a, as a process. But to your point, if you, you just say, you know, if you just kind of say, Hey, do this for me, you know, give me, give me a lesson plan on X.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (15:59)

Mhm.

 

Jeff Walter (16:02)

It does it and it does a really good job. It’s like Joe Friday. Yeah. From those of us that remember drag that, you know, just like just the facts, ma’am. And it’s like very encyclopedic. It’s very kind of just the encyclopedia and nobody picks up the encyclopedia and reads it from cover to cover. Right. You know, I mean, but if,

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (16:04)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

 

Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah.

 

Yeah, yeah. the feeling

 

to it is like watching paint dry.

 

Jeff Walter (16:25)

Right. But, but, I’m just thinking there have been times when I’ve used, when I’ve used it and my prompts, I’ve set the context. I said, you’re this, I’m trying to do this to these types of folks. want to use this type of metaphor, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And basically spite half the prompt, just painting the picture and then say, now do this. And then it’s much more engaging, much more interesting.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (16:38)

Mm-hmm.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Yeah,

 

so let me throw out another, I like to use like one-liners as you know, because I think they’re good, you know, mental prompts for us, is we have to convert the CE and the channel training to storytelling. You know, that’s a good mentality, like you just wrote a great book and you told a story. What I loved about your book was,

 

Jeff Walter (17:05)

Yes.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (17:12)

you told it with a humanistic thread, which was your preparation for the triathlon. And then you anchored against it. That was the backbone. That’s what made it human. That’s what made it understandable. All your analogies, all your metaphors, everything was connected. That’s what brought home the human aspect of it. You used storytelling.

 

to drive a larger topic for the audience. You get drawn in. You’re like, okay, this is really cool. I’m waiting to see what the next analogy or metaphor is. But we are not, we don’t create analogies and metaphors with that form of training. For me, if someone’s saying to me, okay, right now you have to create CE training and here are all these books and stacks. The first thing I would do is I would say, stop.

 

Jeff Walter (17:58)

Alright.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (18:01)

Okay, I’ve got that. Give me five or six case studies from your clients. Or let me go interview them for 30 minutes and record them on read.ai. And then let me add the transcripts in because suddenly that’s the storytelling background. So when AI takes the case studies and the testimonials and the recordings from read.ai have a really good interaction of

 

That’s bringing it to life. And then you marry the content that people should know or you want them to know with the storytelling aspect and you put those two together as attachments in your LLM and then you say, let’s tell a story, let’s market it, let’s be compelling, let’s draw the audience in. No different than the prompts you would give if you were writing a book. Like you never would put in a prompt like, please write the most boring, straightforward, drab book.

 

where what’s going to be great about it is I don’t have to take any kind of medication to go to sleep at night. I’m just going to read two paragraphs of this book and I’ll wake up the next morning, so it’ll take me a year and a half to read this book. We would never do that. We always start with the sentiment of the book, not the topic. We want it to be, this is the audience, we want it to be this, we want it to be that, illustrative, blah, blah, blah. We describe what good food tastes like before we sit down and eat the meal.

 

Jeff Walter (19:03)

too.

 

Yeah.

 

Yeah. Well, I wonder, you know, it’s interesting just riffing on that for a second, you know, in marketing, we talk a lot about the ideal customer profile, right? And I wonder as we start using these tools for creating learning content, if, this goes to your sentiment in the context is if we should spend more time fleshing out the ideal learner, profile, like,

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (19:31)

Mm-hmm.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (19:47)

To your point, it’s like, I’m just sitting there going like, okay, you’re writing a, a training program for a mid-level franchise, right? Franchisor. And it’s like, okay. You know, the employee, typical, you know, the typical employee is, you know, 22 years old, high school degree, blah, blah, blah, blah, or, know, 37 years old college degree, family, two kids, blah, blah, And you paint this whole picture of the ideal, um, learner profile.

 

And then I think that might help bring in that sentiment and that context. Cause now, now, now you have that picture of, this is a high school kid. This is somebody early in their career, probably single. This is somebody in their thirties, probably with a family like, like, and, that helps. know, and they’re on this trajectory, this career path trajectory. This is what, and that, I think that might make for more. Like I’m just saying, you’re going, I never thought of thinking of writing a.

 

Ideal learner profile.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (20:47)

So what I would add to that is everything you just described is like a true profile. It’s a bunch of demographics. What AI still can pull from that is it doesn’t understand behavior. So you have to take it a step further and say,

 

Jeff Walter (20:54)

Yeah.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (21:02)

you know, my clients average 27 years old, they are highly educated, but you know, you give them, but then you have to add to that prompt the additional. So therefore they behave like this because AI is going to read that profile. It’s not going to have any context for, okay, that’s really nice, you know, but what do want me to do with that? And so, cause it doesn’t, it’s not like talking to a human where a human be like,

 

I get you, see, want me to kind of take that into consideration. So our brain has empathy in it and behavior and I can, you know, like if they’re 24 years old, they’re going to have an attention span of 10 seconds and think they can run the place or know everything. Like we’re going to fill in because our brains contextualize. We have human intelligence. We have that emotional intelligence. AI doesn’t have that. So what you have to do is take it one step further and say, okay, now that you know who I’m dealing with,

 

Therefore, they walk, talk, act like this. You have to feed the behaviors in. You have to literally feed in the behavior. Then AI takes the two and basically can then contextualize, say, okay, really, thanks, you I can picture that person in my mind, my AI mind, and I see, you know, like what you think their behaviors.

 

Jeff Walter (22:00)

That’s what you, okay.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (22:14)

would be or what they’re most interested in. You know, can keep going on it, like what their blockers will be, like where their perceptions will be, where they’ve already made up their mind and want to unmake up their mind. You just got to keep threading that to AI because what you’re basically doing by doing that is you’re saying, hey, I’m going to make you human by giving you human prompts. So then it takes all of that and now everything you gave it, you would translate that into

 

how you perceive and contextualize and then you’d write your book or create your course. What AI will do is look at that as a series of data points, because all it thinks about is data. be like, a behavior or the way you describe, that’s a data point. So by the time it gets done reading it, it’ll be like, I have 47 different data points that I have to take into consideration, and now I’m gonna compute that. And the other thing too is the more you can give

 

around people’s circumstances as well. And this is really important because we all know that no two clients, even if they bought the exact same product, have the exact same title, everything we just described, walk, talk, act the same way, there’s another layer which is, you know, I’m in this organizational setting or I’m in this position to learn.

 

So we have to take one more layer and say, and by the way, now that you know who they are demographically, here are their behaviors, I’m going to add one more layer for you. And that layer is going to be their circumstances, like describe their scenario, like give the situational analysis, the AI. And that to me is the Rosetta Stone for

 

Jeff Walter (23:33)

Yeah.

 

Hmm.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (23:48)

contextualization because the big challenge we see when we review CE programs and channel programs is everyone’s like it doesn’t matter what company, like I kind of get that they got my demographics down and you know my interest levels whatever, but it’s a one size fits all training. The promise of AI is you could take everything we just talked about and you could create tenor

 

12 different versions that are 10 % different because of the circumstances and conditions of that person being put into a situation that’s not the same situation as someone else. I want to be careful because we have a tendency to use terms like profiles and styles and I think it’s, think about it like playing a game. know, like a great example that I use, it’s really black and white, is

 

Think about a coach getting a basketball team ready, going to play the exact same opponent. Everything’s the same, like identical. One difference, it’s an away game versus a home game. That completely, you’d say that to any coach at the college or professional, they’ll be like, ⁓ you know, if we’re playing a home game, there’s a month, you know, I have a whole different set of variables that I would add in versus playing in the away game. So why would two clients that work in different companies

 

Jeff Walter (24:57)

Right.

 

Right.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (25:10)

not have at least a difference of that. When I say that to people, home and away they go, my god, I get it now. And AI gives you the promise of being able to do that in minutes rather than sitting there trying to figure hours and days and how many different versions of learning do you want to create.

 

Jeff Walter (25:14)

Yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Yeah. You know, my brain just went some, you were saying that and my brain went like five steps down the road. I’m sitting there going, okay. Well, I’m just sitting there going, okay. If you’re going to have the learner, the online lesson produced via AI, right?

 

I was kind of thinking like, like we do today and everything we’re talking about is really good. Okay. Here’s this profile. Here’s this context. It’s a home game. It’s not an away game. And then my brain just went, you know, it’d be really, but you’re still in my brain. was producing like the course or the learning plan that everybody would take. I just sat there and went, and I remember that when I was at the HCM conference, excellence conference a year or two ago,

 

You could take all this information, you know, about the learner, including if they, if they so choose their social media and feed that into creating a lesson plan, an online learning that is unique to them. Like you can simply go, here’s the knowledge. want you to teach them this. Here’s all this in, you know, you, you, you got access to all their,

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (26:25)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (26:36)

training records, all their employee reviews in the case of employees, but not so much for, and all their social media. So you can really kind of paint the picture of what motivates them and their, you know, their personas. And then say, based on that, generate a tailored lesson plan for this particular individual. That that’s cool.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (26:40)

Mm-hmm.

 

I agree. And that’s social proofing,

 

you because you brought up something really interesting and we kind of blew by it a couple times that you and I are in that specific age bracket where if someone says where you’re from, you name a city, a state, a zip code. You know, we grew up in a socio-demographic, we identify through location, dropping a pin, as they say. New generation is psycho-demographic.

 

Jeff Walter (27:04)

Yeah, yeah.

 

Right.

 

I don’t know.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (27:25)

They, when you ask them to identify, they identify themselves with social proofing. I’m influenced by these people. I follow these people. I go into these sites. I get my information from these channels. They’re psychodemographic. They identify with a different type of demographic. They would never say, I live in Charlestown, Massachusetts, 02129, like I would.

 

It’s brilliant what you just said because if you go out and you research social media, you’re in essence connecting to the new audience, which is their social proofing is going to be the key. A great example of this in an unrelated subject but related to the conversation is it’s very sobering when I’m doing instructional design and training workshops for companies. I’ll say to them, just remember one thing.

 

I grew up in an environment where it said, read silently as I read aloud. That’s how I grew up. That’s what my teachers said. They weren’t interested in your input. They’re like, I already know, and I’m going to tell you what you need to know. It’s kind like, if I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you. That was the way it was. It was compliant, heads down.

 

Now the sobering fact is you get up there and you’ve got 20 years experience doing this and you’ve got a bunch of next gens in the room. You know what they’re going to do. They’re going to look at you as one point of information. They’re going to be like, I’ll consider it. Thanks for sharing. I’m going to go check with my posse. I’m going to go into other sources. I’m going to go to AI. There is no definitive.

 

the information asymmetry is over with that. So we have to consider too that if we’re not trying to capture as many different points that that person views, to your point, a 360 degree view of the client or of the channel part, whoever we’re talking to, then you’re literally going to have a huge blind spot in your training and education initiatives. You may have the content exactly right. It may be exactly what they need to know.

 

Jeff Walter (29:02)

Right,

 

Yeah.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (29:27)

but you’re going to land the plane like a helicopter.

 

Jeff Walter (29:30)

Right.

 

Yeah, that’s, mean, I, yeah, I think we’re, I think it’s probably further down the pipe, but not that much further. Cause I was thinking about in terms of building the course or the assessment or, know, and then this is, but you know, and then when you start talking about all the, all the cycle demographic, uh, stuff, I was like, huh.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (29:44)

Mm-hmm.

 

We have to

 

get in rhythm. I don’t know if the audience remembers this, but there were some GE commercials, like a year or so ago. And they had these young people coming to work at GE. And then they had to go explain their company and their job to different stakeholders in their lives. They had to sit down with their parents and explain. But the one that was most telling,

 

Jeff Walter (30:12)

All right.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (30:14)

that I think whoever did it had brilliant marketing was they had to go, they went to get together with their friends and they explained that they were working it and they had to explain to their friends their choice and their friends at first were kind of like, really? know, what that was getting across, whoever did it must have been a brilliant marketer and understood the socialization and proofing was there’s a very strong personal affinity.

 

connected to a brand. what they were being challenged by was not, hey, it was a great job. The first question was not, how much are you getting paid, what are the benefits like, what’s your PTO? That’s the way you and I would think, right? Those monetizations that make it valuable. It was, could they be in a room with other people that are important to them and their opinions matter? Did I make the right choice? Is that company a reflection of me and what I’m all about?

 

And it’s no different in customer education. People have very strong personal branding affinity to the products they use because of this world we live in. Like no one wants to use a product that they find out afterwards they’re killing animals. Yeah, it’s very strong affinity. So when we’re delivering learning on a product, if we don’t take that into consideration,

 

Jeff Walter (31:24)

or doing anything that’s ⁓ against their belief system.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (31:36)

in the learning itself. If we’re not trying to have them understand that they made a really good choice, you know, and remind them in the learning of, you know, we really know that the products that you… And it doesn’t matter, Jeff. Like, people will be like, well, how much affinity do you have to a bulldozer? That’s not true. You do. You do. Where it was made, was it made in this country, in another country?

 

Jeff Walter (31:55)

Right. Yeah.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (32:02)

You know, how do I feel? Like, we have very strong opinions.

 

you know, have I had previous experience, have other people told me about this brand? Because what we’ve got to realize is in client education or channel, like they’re going to have to go explain to the people that are important in their lives, both professionally and personally, the choice that they made. It’s not just it was the best RFP or the lowest bidder or, you know, the most amount of features. It’s going to be an extension of me and if people see conflict with that.

 

or they see contradictions with that. In the new client world, that’s going to have a negative impact. So you can’t be sterile about just translating how a product operates or a service need. You’ve got to say, I know you. A great example of that was lifestyle advertising. Jaguar, they’re a big brand. They stopped selling cars, and they started saying, we have to insert into somebody’s lifestyle. And it was really interesting.

 

think like when Jaguar did, they found out the majority of the people that they’re selling were like motorcycle riders too. They loved Harley’s. When they started understanding the person that they’re selling to, it completely changed their product development roadmap. It completely changed their marketing positioning. It changed who they thought their ICP was and what their unique value proposition, because they began to understand them. Selling to a person, I’m not saying,

 

you know the person is a key and I’m selling them a lock vice versa. It’s just a fit thing, you know? And so that’s what we have to do is we have to begin to take into consideration that it’s a very complex

 

educational side. And what was the last time you had something happening in your personal life? you’re like, you know, thank God they sent me a course on that Bose speaker. I can’t wait to take that three hour course or that two hour course. So log on to this platform and take a course. They’re sending you apps, you know, it’s Bluetoothing out, it’s connecting for you. Like, I just want to start listening to music. I don’t need to go to the moon next Tuesday. We also have to think about the expediency

 

of things as well. And is the education a reflection of the product? A lot of times when I look at these programs, I say, you’re actually talking clients out of using your product. And they’re like, what do mean? like, the education…

 

is so over the top and harder and more complex than the product itself. Like you’re using the Encyclopedia Britannica to explain to someone how to light a match. You’re contradicting everything that you put into the product. It’s easy to use, pull it out of the box, do this. And the way you’re educating people about it, you’re actually adding complexity and difficulty. So the client education is actually, and the channel education, getting your channel partners to understand, you’re actually talking them out of all that money and time.

 

you spend on product use of use, get started, go, quick implementation, you’re talking them out of it because the education doesn’t reflect the actual product or service. And when I say that, the company’s like, holy cow, I never thought about it that way. But I think where the burden is going to be and the responsibility is going to be is companies like Latitude,

 

Where if we don’t take that position as an expert of saying these types of things, like offering services and explanation like your company does, I’ve known you for a lot of years, know, if you don’t provide that context, you could in theory help them, but how much are you really helping them?

 

Jeff Walter (35:25)

Yeah.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (35:36)

In theory you could make the content simpler, but are you making it more engaging? That’s the missing piece. It’s not take big chunks of stuff, systematically deconstruct it. It’s just as messy and it’s just as complicated in small bites. Example of food, Imagine if you had kids where they have something that you really want them to eat and they hate it and your mentality is all they have to do is make it in smaller pieces.

 

Jeff Walter (35:44)

Yeah.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (36:05)

They’re

 

going to hate every single piece because they still don’t like what they’re eating. So doesn’t matter if you make it smaller in bite size. That’s not the translation. They still don’t like broccoli. You know what I mean? So you got to do something different. You got to dress it up or pure it or get once a time a farm or whatever. You’ve got to re-approach things. I think that if we don’t do that…

 

then we’re not going to have clients and channel partners who are be like, holy cow, this is crazy. They’re not going to see education as a differentiator and a power. How many companies do you work with, and this is again for this audience, that they lead with their learning. To say, you know what? Instead of taking you through a product demo or service demo,

 

Jeff Walter (36:39)

Right.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (36:51)

Let me take you through how easy it is to use it through our learning. Let me pull from the learning a video segmentation that really just shows how easy this is. It’s pulled right from a CE course. Or let me take you through a game or a simulation. It’s pulled right from… Use that content in the active selling strategy to prove how straightforward. How many times do you look up a product and there’s already a YouTube video?

 

that walks you through the whole thing. You’re not looking for the manual. You’re not like, my refrigerator light is on. Let me please find the GE manual that’s 400 pages long. You type in, I got a GE refrigerator, the light’s on, and what happens? You get like 37 different videos of people solving it. So it can actually be a lead in your selling process. I think the educational programs and the selling cycles are two separated.

 

If I could wave a magic wand, I’d take a product like Latitude and say, your entire sales cycle is going to be on Latitude. It begins on that platform, the middle of the sales process is on that platform, and it ends on that platform. That should be the workspace for gaining new clients and building stronger relationships with the client. When we separate the processes, we fail. One plus one equals a half.

 

Jeff Walter (38:10)

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it’s really interesting that you say that because I’m, I’m speaking at the international franchise association next week. I’m doing a workshop on scaling and, and in my research and talking to a bunch of folks, and this is related to learning and development, but, but separate was there are these kind of seven different disciplines. My research came up with this to scale and the middle three, and you can kind of, it’s like a tier

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (38:12)

you

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (38:36)

layer cake, three on the bottom three, and then one at the pyramid and the, the middle, bottom layer is the foundation, right? It’s like, okay. And generally, you know, are the unit economics, what are they like? And you have all your operations buttoned up. And that’s like the basic, like you got to get that core down, but then that middle layer is replication. And it’s interesting when I, what the research showed on that is there would be things you think about when you talk about replication, like, you know, your process for getting new franchise.

 

How do you find a new franchise? Right. But it also works with the channels too, like finding a new reseller, finding a new service provider. and then you have to have some support for them and some performance management so you know when to intervene. But the big thing in the chunk in the middle, that is the replication infrastructure engine that allows you to go from is exactly what you just said is the training program. Because,

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (39:09)

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (39:30)

And it’s, it, it’s interesting. It, I, I, you know, and, you know, maybe I’m a little biased because I’ve been in the industry for awhile, but it’s like, when you, when I saw it in that context, doing the research, it’s like, that’s the engine that lets you replicate the model over and over and over again, especially on the, the extended side, you know, where you’re, I want to sign up more people to resell my stuff. want to sign up more people to service my stuff.

 

I want to sign up more people to use my stuff, know, those clients. And I want to replicate that over and over and over and over and over again. And, um, and that becomes the tool. was just really interesting. I, you know, it’s, it’s almost like what you said. It’s we usually think of it as the tail wagging the dog, but it’s actually you shift. If you do it right, it’s the lead.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (40:06)

Yeah, and

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Yeah, I mean, let’s talk about that conversation. I looked at franchises and another life. When I interviewed other franchisees, see whether or not I wanted to invest, the thing I asked them was, what was the experience of coming on board and what did that lead to? Like, what support did you receive? What training did you receive?

 

Like I already know what the franchise does. Like I already know that it could make me a lot of money. Like I already know what the product is or services. I wanted to talk to franchisees to say, what was the experience? And the replication part is I wanted to talk to a bunch of them because I was looking for is replication really there or did they have varying experience? But it’s all about the experience. So where did they get that experience? They weren’t, they just were being onboarded. They couldn’t be

 

Jeff Walter (40:43)

Mm-hmm.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (41:06)

fast forward into the future and already know what it’s going to be like. They had to base the experience on the onboarding and the training. And the folks, based on the trajectory standpoint, you know what owner operators and franchises, that’s it. That sets the entire trajectory for the success of that location if there’s not a good onboarding experience.

 

you know, and they don’t get what they need. It’s unrecoverable. I mean, very seldom. Like, it’s about it. They oftentimes sell it or don’t do well, right? So the replication had, and I’m glad you brought it up that way, is the replication is not

 

perfect personalization of training under every circumstance. The replication is can you replicate the experience of onboarding and getting up to speed and having everyone have the same experience. You know, in my franchise that I’m buying or my owner-operator cat dealership that I’m opening up, you may think it’s the same, but I’m opening it up in Sandusky, Ohio.

 

And it’s not the same as opening it up in Joplin, Missouri. I don’t care what you say, even if we’re selling the same thing. What people want to know is, can you contextualize the experience? Can you make the training, the onboarding, the information work for me? And the more different scenarios I’ve seen you do that, the more confidence I’ll have, and that you can do it for me. So I want to make sure that

 

You know, people just think replicating is, you know, like as long as I offer the same training and the same onboarding, everybody’s gonna get it. And that’s back to that, as you and I know, like that one size fits all learning, like why doesn’t it all work? Well, how about the fact that you didn’t take into consideration your audience and circumstances, so we’re back to where we started.

 

But I do think you can personalize customer education and channel partner training at scale. I honestly and truly believe you do it. Because I don’t believe it was as easy to do and nearly impossible to do without AI. But now with AI and everything we talked about the last hour, tell me why you can’t do a hyper-personalized situation.

 

Jeff Walter (43:07)

Yeah.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (43:12)

down to your point, the ICP, the persona, the temperature, you can do that in a matter of minutes now with AI. It’s a breakthrough technology for doing that.

 

Jeff Walter (43:21)

Yeah, I think it’s, it’s, it’s, I think we’re as the industry, we’re all kind of groping our way through it, but it seems to me like the best.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (43:27)

Mm-hmm ⁓

 

Jeff Walter (43:30)

the future would be that, that, that, that, that, that personalized learning experience as opposed to, you know, like two years ago, when, when I was at your conference, you know, it was all about the personalized, learning path, right? Like, know, everything about me, we’re using the AI to sit there. You should take course a then course X and then course Y.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (43:38)

Yeah.

 

Mm-hmm. Right.

 

Jeff Walter (43:52)

And, and now it’s like, now what we’re talking about, it’s really interesting. So it’s evolved in two years. like, how course a is delivered is different for me when I’m the student versus you when you’re the student, because I’m different than you. And so different things are emphasized. Different things are focused on. You can do that if you have that, you know, it’s like having that, um, wise, uh, instructor and goes, Oh, well, Michael, I know your context, your background. So when I teach you algebra 101, I do it this way.

 

And Jeff, I know you and your background and when I teach you algebra 101, I teach it that way. And it’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about that hyper individualization until we were talking.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (44:31)

Yeah, and to

 

And part

 

of individualization and personalization is not, I’ve personalized it and I’m done. The thing that AI brings is agility because nothing is a straight road. So you do a hyper-personalized onboarding and training experience for that cat dealership in Sandusky. What AI does is allow Sandusky to come back and say, not there, close.

 

but no cigars, we used to say in the old days, right? So it allows you then, you don’t have to go back to square one like the old days. You can basically like literally do agile onboarding and training, saying, here it is. You’re in a position now where the client can come back and say, I need a little bit more, a little bit different. And you’re like, you got it. Whereas in the old days, we’d have to like go back to the drawing board, you know, like this big heavy lifting, reformation.

 

AI also makes the onboarding experience more agile so that even in a perfect world that you think you delivered it, it’s not perfect for them, but you don’t have time to wait. They’re in an active process of coming onboard.

 

Revenue is at stake. Someone’s personal investment is at stake, like time is money. You don’t have time to say, well, AI is like, no problem, I get it. Let me tweak this 15 % or they come back to you and say, this is great, but I need it in three more languages because I can’t use English as a primary language in doing this. You’re like, no problem. So I also want to get in there that the agile aspect of AI, the ability to turn it around on a dime,

 

Jeff Walter (45:39)

Right.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (46:01)

because time is money. That’s an extraordinary piece to this puzzle is to be able to just say, here’s what I think you need, and if it’s not, let me know in 10 minutes, I’ll get you exactly what you need.

 

Jeff Walter (46:14)

Well, yeah, that’s, it’s really interesting. You took my thinking to the next level, which is why I love going to your conference.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (46:22)

Yeah, listen, again, I’m a student, right? You know, like I’m a sponge observing all

 

of these interactions and needs.

 

Jeff Walter (46:29)

Yeah. You know, well, Michael, was, that was really interesting, really interesting. Cause you took my thing. as, as always happens when I talk to you, but especially now that you, you just got flooded with a whole bunch of information from this conference and I’m getting the distilled version. It’s really, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re pushing me. so I really appreciate that. And, ⁓ I just looking at our time, we’re coming up on time. ⁓

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (46:46)

Yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (46:55)

And ⁓ anything else you want to say about the conference? It’s a great conference, by the way. I’d love attending it again. Sorry I was there.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (47:03)

Well, thank you and thank ⁓ you for plugging in and bringing it up. I think, we’re post pandemic and people don’t talk much about that anymore, but I truly believe that it’s still 2026 and we’re trying to get ourselves reoriented to in person. Again, and feeling that live connection again, was like, everything burst into a million pieces when that happened.

 

Jeff Walter (47:20)

Mm-hmm.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (47:28)

And I don’t think we’re all there yet, but what I was really comfortable with this year is let’s just say four years after, that in-person is alive and well and all of that I shared with you was being in the middle of that wisdom of crowds, ping pong, popcorn effect, where you’re like, that you can’t do like sitting on a teams meeting. So I would say to everyone in general, know, get back out there.

 

Jeff Walter (47:50)

Right, right.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (47:56)

Like wherever you can re-attend conferences and summits and do things, it’s not only going to warm your heart, but it’s going to stimulate a part of your brain that’s been dormant because we’ve been dealing with headshots and oops, I didn’t mean to interrupt you. And it just brings a resurgence. You can just…

 

It allows you to collect information and have interaction where you may just be overhearing someone while you’re talking and you’re like, wait a second, I can’t forget that or I can bounce from room to room. You can’t create that in a virtual environment. So I would say whether it’s our conference or the conference that you’re keynoting, know, get back out there, like dig out the budget, carve it out, you know, make the painful decisions.

 

But start doing things in person again and you’re going to find that your level of understanding and your level of being to really get what’s going on will be there. But also you’ll be able to socialize and collaborate and create new networks and not just relying on LinkedIn and like, I sent out a connection that I haven’t heard from them yet, like the inpatient connector.

 

get back out there and do it the organic way again. It’s time and we really need to be doing that.

 

Jeff Walter (49:11)

Yeah. I, I, I, I, I second that. And I would also say the more AI gets into our lives, more important that is as well that, that human connection. And I, I make it, to me, it’s akin to, um, you know, um, what we did in L and D where we started using, uh, you know, self study courses to get people up to a certain threshold. And then you did the instructor led and then that became a much richer experience.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (49:18)

yeah.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Jeff Walter (49:40)

You know, some folks have said, oh, you know, this will replace the human interaction, but I think, no, I think it brings us all up to a level. And then when you have those human interactions, like at your conference, it sparks are flying because people are, are, are that much, they’re not just acquiring the knowledge. They’re, they’re pushing it up against things and, and providing new insights. It’s, know, so I, I second what you’re saying on, on, on, on actual live connections.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (49:59)

Yeah, they’re living it. Yeah, I mean…

 

Yeah, people bring up to me, like I read, that sitting is the new smoking. We can’t sit. We have to move around and everything else. I really believe that technology creates a sedentary behavior with us. Like the ease of technology. We have to be careful. Like we’ve already gotten sedentary with doing this stuff. But AI could make us immobile. Just think about the difference of if I had to dig the ditch, I would stay in really good shape.

 

Jeff Walter (50:30)

Right.

 

Yeah.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (50:35)

If I’m running

 

some AI generated robotic thing, I could end up eating a bag of Doritos and drinking Coke and really become an unhealthy enabler. And so we’ve got to be careful that our mental…

 

physical, emotional, spiritual part gets energized in interacting with other people. I couldn’t agree with you more that AI has the opportunity to further silo us and further segment us or put us into a smaller concentration of individuals because the one too many is being taken, you know, taken advantage of through AI. So I couldn’t agree with you more. need to be, we’re stimulated. And if we’re going to be the HI that drives AI, we know

 

that being around people improves our HI. Like that’s the wisdom of Krauts, right? So if we want to be better AI, we have to be better HI, and that means talking to other HI.

 

Jeff Walter (51:26)

Exactly. 100%.

 

Yeah. I think that’s a great place to end it. I really appreciate you. Before we go, I just want to also just thank you publicly for your forward to the book. The book was published last week. And so I’ll be getting you a copy. But I really, what? of course, of course, of course that’ll be worth something someday. You know, and, but no, thank you for all your help on that. And I appreciate that.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (51:43)

Yay!

 

Autographed? Autographed. It’s gonna be autographed. It’s gonna be autographed. Yeah, you bet.

 

Jeff Walter (51:57)

insights and thinking.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (51:58)

Yeah, and for your audience, for people that are tuning in that are clients of yours, wonderful choice. Wholeheartedly recommend you continue your relationship with Latitude and the folks that aren’t. You should be experiencing FOMO. So get on board, talk to Jeff, and get engaged because I’ve been in this space 40 years and I’ve never met a more progressive executive team and organization like Latitude. And thanks again for having me on.

 

Jeff Walter (52:12)

Thank you.

 

Thank you,

 

Thank you. Thank you, Michael. And thanks to everybody out there listening. ⁓ We appreciate you and we’ll catch you next time. Have a good day.

 

Michael Rochelle of Brandon Hall Group  (52:35)

You too.

 

Alright.