Luis Garcia Podcast Transcript
Luis Garcia joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of The Digital Executive podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Luis Garcia. Luis Garcia is a seasoned international executive with over 25 years of experience in technology, digital media, and education. He specializes in driving new ventures and products to rapid growth by building effective teams that harness innovation, technology, and creativity to solve complex problems.
Luis Garcia is the President of PETE, an Orlando based tech startup that offers a suite of cost effective and customizable solutions that enable organizations to deliver personalized workforce learning at scale. The PETE team is dedicated to harnessing the power of AI to help organizations of all sizes optimize their training initiatives spanning from onboarding to regulatory compliance, product knowledge, technical skills, and more without hiring additional training resources.
Well, good afternoon, Luis. Welcome to the show!
Luis Garcia: Thank you. Thank you for having me, Brian.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Love doing this. Luis. Appreciate you jumping on and doing some great discussions this morning around your company and kind of what you’re doing in the business. Of course, but we’re going to jump right into your first question here.
Luis, as the president of Pete, how do you envision the future of personalized workforce learning and what role does AI play in achieving this vision? You share some examples of how Pete solutions have benefited organizations.
Luis Garcia: Yeah, thank you, Brian. And so yeah what we know today is, is that employees expect relevant training.
And in, in their development and this relevancy is not only specific to their job, but also specific to the company, the industry, and the personal growth. And until now, creating courses that are customized has been really expensive and cost prohibitive for organizations that are smaller.
And because he is creating a customized course. Can be as inexpensive as 15,000 dollars 100,000 dollars depending on the production quality. And that is just not accessible for the great majority of organizations. So, what we did at Pete is that we. Automated the process of content creation for training in when you are translating expertise into content materials for training, you follow our process called instructional design and that’s usually when you hire a company to create a course.
That’s what they’re going to do. So, we created official intelligence software that automates that process. And then, and therefore organizations can then create customized courses. And to the organization or to their positions that are fracturing the cost. But we took it a little further and we also have a learning management system for, so those courses can exist some in a platform where the employees can take them, and the employers can track their learning.
And, and then we are also build tools for assessment. What that means is a devaluation of the learning because for the learning to be effective is not only the materials have to be effective, but you also have to be able to evaluate the learning. And at the end of the learning experience, and we also use AI tools.
For that is you asked for an example. We have had a lot of success with sports videos and most professional sports venues in the Orlando area, where we are from Orlando, Florida, have hired licensed our platform because on event today on a game day.
A venue can be receiving an influx of hundreds of employees that are early temporary employees in that account from all kinds of places and walks of life. And it’s very difficult to give them training for the event day. And its cost prohibited to do it in traditional methods. So, they’re now using our software to train all these game day and employees not only in the specific job that they have to do, but also in other things like you know, customer service and safety and all this kind of things, and something that they could not long, they could not do before, and they’re not able to do now because of our software.
Brian Thomas: That’s amazing. And I appreciate you highlighting the fact that we are now in the day and age where we can really democratize technologies like AI and bring more of a cost-effective solution to everybody, not just the big corporations. So, I really, really appreciate it. Your share on that and the example as well and Luis, how does PETE differentiate itself from other workforce learning platforms in the market?
What are some unique features or approaches that set it apart?
Luis Garcia: Yeah, so learning management system, which is just a portion of the learning of the digital learning experience have been around for decades. And there’s certainly. Many of them in the corporate training world are very established, but we consider ourselves a new generation of learning experience for workforce learning, we are native AI, it was, you know, all the tools have been natively being built for it with AI technologies.
And whereas you know, these existing platforms are trying to incorporate AI, sprinkle it into what they, they already do. And so that’s 1 differentiation. We’re looking really specifically into the needs of the workforce learning for smaller companies. And specifically, to what they, what they need.
The only thing I will say in terms of the feature set is, the authoring of courses is very powerful perhaps the most powerful that we have seen the way we, we are creating courses automatically, but the areas that I get most excited is the area of assessment and, you know, the evaluation of learning because evaluating learning is very hard and if you think about traditional education And with a teacher and students the most effective way that they have found to evaluate learning is, is through testing.
And that’s, you know, it’s actually in terms of a learning assessment. It’s actually a very poor way of assessment and because it doesn’t cover all the areas and there are a bunch of situations that don’t really exist. Like, you know, no one solves problems without asking anybody in two hours or an hour or whatever.
You know random number of time people gave to a problem solve for evaluation when we went to digital learning that didn’t really improve that much and we continue to use testing and as multiple choice is, is the easiest way. To do evaluation because it’s so easy to automate and but really the best way that you could assess learning is by having a conversation with a learner and trying to dig in and ask us, understanding as you as you find out in in the, and that is not really scalable.
It’s not even scalable in the classroom. A single instructor cannot have, you know, deeper conversations with all the students and in digital. When the ratios are much larger a student to, to, to structure is even impossible, but with AI, we can actually have those different conversations. And so, we have created simulation, a simulation engine that can be trained in, in, in the learning outcomes, and then engage the learning conversationally and put them in situations, for instance.
In customer service, we can then train the AI in different situations and the AI can then talk to the learner as if it was a distressed customer. And and then evaluate can, how can, how the learner is going to address that, that situation and evaluate it. And that can be done at scale. And because they, I can have you know multiple conversations with hundreds of hundreds of hundreds of people at the same time.
So, we are putting a lot of emphasis into the evaluation so that not only a company can create the materials that they want them to learn, but they can also make sure that they actually learn it.
Brian Thomas: Great. Thank you. I appreciate that. And you’re right about the testing. You know, we’ve always said testing is the way to, you know, evaluate a student’s ability to learn.
And we know that that’s not really the best way. And the fact that you’re using your platform to engage students is certainly going to, you know, raise the bar. So, I appreciate that. And Luis, with over 25 years of experience, what are some of your key strategies for building effective teams that can drive innovation and solve complex problems? How do you foster creativity and collaboration within your teams?
Luis Garcia: Yeah, I love this question, Ryan, because for me, it’s all about the people that you’re bringing to your team. And I often say that in business, there’s very little that you are actually controlled. And things in the environment around you can change drastically and with you having no control over them.
And who you bring into your team is absolutely within your control. And so, hiring is something to be taken very seriously and to make sure that you bring in the right people. Now who the right people are is that question a different question entirely sometimes in, and for startups you don’t want people sometimes that are too much of a specialist because the environment changes a lot.
So, I tried to find a combination of people that are curious. Curiosity, I think, is a very important ingredient in a startup. And humble, because I think that you have to be humble to be curious. You have to admit that you don’t know everything. And to yourself, but also driven. And self-motivated, I don’t like to think of myself as a motivator.
I actually think that’s super hard to do and I try not to do it. And if you bring people that combination with that combination, all you have to do is provide a direction, provide coaching and get out of the way. And that let them do what they do in that they will, they will try things that will fail, that will retry, that will fail.
If they’re curious, they will find answers. These are humble that I’ll set the law says if they are driven, they won’t stop.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And you’re absolutely right on that. You know, when you hire those people, as Steve jobs says, you know, hire those smart people let them do what they do. That’s what you hired him for.
Yeah, given give I’ve noticed over the course of my career is given those folks autonomy and empowerment, and that’s how you build some great teams. So, I appreciate that. And Luis, last question of the day, what emerging technologies do you believe will have the most significant impact on education and workforce training in the next 5 to 10 years?
How is Pete preparing to integrate these technologies into his offerings?
Luis Garcia: So, I thought long and hard about this question Ryan, and, and honestly, there isn’t another technology that will impact education as much as artificial intelligence and or generational generative AI, the way we’re seeing it today.
You know, I’ve been in education for a very, very long time, and we have been talking about, you know, transforming education for decades. And certainly, there have been transformations. Certainly, the internet changed things and definitely digital education changed things, but nothing has the ability to create an inflection point in learning like this generation of AI, because it not only helps the learning experience, but it can also help everything around the learning experience as well.
And at PETE, that’s why we I was so excited to start it because I think for the first time, we’re able to have a technology that allows us to really go through the whole value chain of learning and transform it completely in, in, in, in ways that are very tangible for the learner. I think we’re going to be very soon in a, in, in a place where.
Every single learner will have the ability to go as deep as they want in whatever topic they want and fulfill their potential because the, the input of learning is going to be so adaptive. And so. Pete stands for personalized education, training and enrichment. And that is that personalized part that I think is going to be really important for the future.
So, I don’t think there’s any other, we can talk about AR and XR and, and other visualization tools and things like that, but. Truly transformational, I think generative AI will be the one that It’s here to really transform education.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. And I totally agree with you there. I think AI is going to be a game changer to really engage and empower learners.
But also offers that level of personalization like no other, traditional teacher or institution is able to provide. So, I appreciate the share and Luis, it was such a pleasure having you on today. And I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Luis Garcia: Thank you so much, Brian. Thank you for having me.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Luis Garcia Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
