Your organisation has probably spent years building a learning library. Courses, videos, SCORM files, PDFs — hundreds of them, living in the LMS or scattered across SharePoint. You can enrol in them. You can sit through them. What you can’t do is ask them a question and get an answer in seconds, at the moment you actually need one. The knowledge is there. It just isn’t retrievable. That’s the problem Mike Alcock, founder of Talvi, has set out to solve.

In this episode, Mike takes John through how Talvi works. They also cover Mike’s own unlikely route into learntech: a Civil Engineering degree at Sheffield, a detour through an insulation factory in Newcastle, and three successive software businesses each arriving ahead of the market. And they have a searching conversation about what tools like Talvi mean for the LMS and for the instructional designer — neither of whom emerges entirely unscathed.

Is the technology now genuinely good enough to make learning in the flow of work a practical reality, rather than a conference agenda perennial?.

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 – Start

02:14 – Intro

04:15 – What is Talvi for?

16:20 – What’s the journey for a learning leader adopting Talvi?

20:47 – Mike’s story: from civil engineering to learntech

30:19 – What will tools like Talvi do to the LMS?

39:50 – Explanation of terms: RAG, vector databases…

49:01 – End

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