Now, Next & the Future of Acorn's Capabilities Platform | February 2025

Summary

In Acorn's inaugural Sydney Connects conference, the company discusses its advancements in capability frameworks and their potential impact on HR ecosystems. The talk covers Acorn's initiatives to integrate capability across HR sectors through innovative AI-driven tools. With an eye on real-time assessments and organization-wide capability mapping, Acorn demonstrates how its platform leverages AI to streamline processes traditionally handled by consulting firms over extended periods. The transcript also hints at potential future shifts as Acorn navigates the complexities of AI implementation within governmental bodies, emphasizing the balance between innovation and adherence to regulations.

Highlights

• Acorn is expanding its capability-focused platform to cover various HR functions, integrating them seamlessly. 🎉
• AI's role in HR is pivotal, speeding up traditionally lengthy processes and enabling efficient organization-wide assessments. 🤖
• Capability mapping allows companies to align their workforce's skills with job roles, boosting performance across the board. 👥
• Customized in-house content based on real work examples is viewed as more effective than generic learning materials. 🏢
• Acorn is testing these advancements with big names like Walmart and Boeing, planning for a broader rollout soon. 🏢

Key Takeaways

• Acorn is ramping up its capability efforts, integrating solutions across HR functions with AI power. 🚀
• Capability frameworks are the new lingua franca for organizational performance and learning. 🌐
• AI advancements now enable what took consulting firms months to achieve in mere weeks. ⏱️
• Real-world practice and content creation within the organization are seen as more beneficial than generic external content. 📚
• The future promises real-time analysis and decision-making tools, enhancing strategic HR operations. 🎯

Overview

Acorn's cutting-edge Sydney Connects conference laid out an ambitious roadmap for transforming the HR landscape. At the heart of the conversation was Acorn's groundbreaking work on capability frameworks—a system designed to streamline HR functions by aligning workforce capabilities with job requirements. By leveraging artificial intelligence, Acorn aims to disrupt traditional consulting models, delivering faster, more integrated solutions across the HR sector.

With organizations struggling to keep pace with rapid technological changes, Acorn's vision for integrating AI-driven capability assessments is a game-changer. The platform can handle vast amounts of data with precision, aligning job descriptions, skill requirements, and individual capabilities in no time. This not only promises efficiency but brings a degree of customization previously unimaginable in the HR domain.

Yet, the path forward isn't without challenges. Particularly in the realm of government adoption, Acorn recognizes the hurdles of implementing AI while ensuring compliance with regulatory standards. Discussions on the nuanced balance between innovation and regulation were integral to this discourse, underscoring the delicate negotiations necessary to bring these innovations safely into diverse organizational frameworks.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Music and Introduction The chapter opens with music and an introduction to the Sydney Connects event. The speaker thanks the audience for attending and expresses excitement about the attendance. They share that similar events will be held quarterly in major cities across the country and globally. The speaker encourages attendees to stay informed about upcoming events and invites feedback from the attendees.
• 00:30 - 01:00: Feedback and Speaker Introduction The chapter focuses on gathering feedback from participants about the event and provides an introduction to a speaker named Josh. The emphasis is on understanding the audience's experience and discussing future topics of interest. There's a humorous note on Josh's youthful appearance despite his mature look, and the chapter hints at a discussion centered around capabilities.
• 01:00 - 01:30: Overview of Today's Presentations This chapter provides an overview of the presentations given during the day. Megan from ASICH highlighted their innovative use of current capabilities, positioning them as leaders in this area. Ellie demonstrated Acorn's functionalities and the company's self-application of its product. The chapter further elaborates on the future direction of Acorn's product, showcasing recent uses and upcoming features. The presentation did not involve any software engineers.
• 01:30 - 02:00: Emerging Importance of Capabilities The chapter discusses the emerging importance of capabilities within the HR and learning sectors. Over the past year or two, it has become evident that the issues addressed in learning are prevalent throughout the HR domain. This realization stems from observations that information generated within the learning and performance ecosystem is relevant and impactful across the entire HR landscape.
• 03:00 - 03:30: Challenges and AI Opportunities The chapter titled 'Challenges and AI Opportunities' discusses how problem-solving within an organization can influence and benefit various business areas. It highlights that many problems, initially unanticipated, create a common language across the HR tech stack and ecosystem. This common language is crucial for effective communication and decision-making, especially concerning capabilities and recruitment. Understanding the current capabilities of employees is essential for informed decision-making.
• 03:30 - 04:30: Streamlining Capability Framework Creation The chapter discusses the integration of various HR functions such as rewards and recognition, workforce planning, performance, and learning and development through a capability framework. The framework is designed to support a full cycle from onboarding, through the recruitment process, to retirement or transitioning to a new role. The focus is on interlinking these elements to streamline HR processes.
• 04:30 - 06:00: Mapping Job Descriptions to Capabilities In the chapter titled 'Mapping Job Descriptions to Capabilities,' the focus is on the challenges and progress in translating job descriptions into actionable capabilities within organizations. The team has struggled for a long time to streamline this process from a product perspective. They have explored existing methodologies in organizations and have recently noted significant strides due to the impact of AI. This advancement represents a major shift in how job functionalities are perceived and implemented.
• 06:00 - 08:00: Capability Assessment Process The chapter titled 'Capability Assessment Process' delves into the integration and influence of AI in capability development. It highlights an ongoing R&D project focused on AI capabilities that has been in progress for over four years. The advancements in open models and new languages have significantly accelerated the process, contrasting with traditional consulting approaches that can take a year or more.
• 08:00 - 09:00: Real-Time Chat and Reports The chapter "Real-Time Chat and Reports" discusses the implementation of frameworks that enable quick execution of tasks, which previously took much longer. These frameworks lay the foundation for various functionalities within the application, such as matching content to capabilities or individuals to job roles. Establishing this foundation is crucial for facilitating future advancements and operational executions.
• 09:00 - 11:00: Q&A Session The chapter focuses on explaining the practical applications of academic concepts discussed earlier. It introduces a new feature that allows users to map existing job descriptions to a capability framework, either existing or custom-created. Additionally, it mentions the ability to map these to existing cohorts within a system called ACORN. This session aims to clarify how theoretical ideas translate into functionalities in practical scenarios, answering potential questions about their real-world application.
• 11:00 - 12:00: Conclusion and Closing Remarks The conclusion and closing remarks chapter discusses the functionality of creating and recommending cohorts within the Acorn system. The speaker is excited to demonstrate this with an example prototype, highlighting upcoming changes to the capability dashboard due to the addition of new features. The visualization of these changes is described as 'really cool,' creating anticipation for the new updates in the system.

Now, Next & the Future of Acorn's Capabilities Platform | February 2025 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] Thank you everybody for coming along too. This is our first Sydney Connects. Um we've got a pretty awesome turnout and I just wanted to start by saying thank you everybody for coming along. We will be hosting uh these every quarter uh in every major city around the country. We currently are at an event probably once a week around the world as well. So we're kind of everywhere right now. Um so do keep your eyes open for the different things and we want a lot of feedback after this. So, if you do have any feedback, we've got a couple
• 00:30 - 01:00 ways that we're going to try and get that today as well, but we would just love any feedback about what you guys have done, what you've seen today, what you'd like to see more of, and uh yeah, just how you found found the event today as well. Uh Josh is stitching me up uh with his eloquent intro. Uh he's like 24, but he looks like he's about 36, and that is probably my fault. So, I will I think that I'm deserving of that. Uh cool. So, today, what am I going to talk about? Well, we've spoken a lot about capability today. Uh we had an amazing
• 01:00 - 01:30 presentation from Megan from ASICH. They're one of our sort of super users of capability and are sort of at the forefront of I think this way of thinking. Um Ellie showed you through what we do at Acorn uh and how we use our own product ourselves as well. And today I'm just going to talk a little bit about where that product's going and then I'm actually going to show you how it works. And I'm going to show you some actual use cases as well with uh how we've used Acorn recently and what those features will be when they're released. I don't have any software engineers here
• 01:30 - 02:00 today, so I can make a lot of unscrupulous promises to you all. Um and I've only got two product managers that are scaling at me from the back, so we should be pretty sweet. Uh so why capabilities? Essentially what we found over the past probably 12 12 24 months or so is that the problems that we've tried to solve within learning are omniresent across the entire HR stack. And what we find is that even though we sort of live in the learning and performance ecosystem a lot of the information that we're generating
• 02:00 - 02:30 creating a lot of the problems that we're solving actually inform other areas within the business. A lot of those problems uh we didn't sort of anticipate or set out to solve. But what we're finding is that the common language across the organization that allows all of these different areas within the HR uh tech stack and the HR ecosystem to talk to each other is capability. Because if you don't really know where your people are at, it's very difficult to make any decisions whether it be recruitment, whether it be, you
• 02:30 - 03:00 know, how are we going to do our rewards and recognition, our workforce planning, uh and all of that. And the crux of all of that is performance and learning and development. That capability layer allows us to basically put a full cycle in place. So what we're able to do is say, hey, maybe from the time that you're onboarded and the time that we look at who we actually recruit all the way through to retirement or moving into a new role at a different organization, these things are all interlin and we're trying to bring them all together. Uh and that's why we've focused really heavily on capability uh and and have
• 03:00 - 03:30 really started to push uh that in that direction. We've been trying to do this for a long time um a really really long time. Uh we've bashed our heads against walls on how to do this from a product perspective. We've spent a lot of time around you know how do we actually make this a process that's digestible. We've looked at how these are done in existing organizations. And one of the big things that we've managed to and the big strides that we've managed to see recently is how AI actually starts to impact these things.
• 03:30 - 04:00 I know AI is a big buzz word. We've actually had an R&D project going on the capability front with AI for about four and a half 5 years. And the recent leaps in open open models and and the new languages that we're able to to jump in and pull from have really accelerated this process. And what we've started to find is that something where it might take a consulting firm, an internal firm months and months and often to the point where they spend close to a year or or or more to actually develop and put these
• 04:00 - 04:30 frameworks in place, we can do now in a matter of days uh and a matter of weeks a lot of the time. And that allowing us to do that we think builds the foundation for all of the other things that the application can do uh that you've seen sort of ASICH do today. and Ellie talk about around, you know, maybe it's matching content to capability, maybe it's matching those individuals to the right job roles, whatever that is. Without that foundation, it's very difficult to to sort of execute on the next steps going forwards. So, we've
• 04:30 - 05:00 talked a lot about like stuff today, a lot of academic talk. You guys are probably like, "What the hell does it do? How does it actually work?" I'm going to show you. Uh so one of the new features that we have is we have the ability to take your existing job descriptions on mass and map those job descriptions to either an existing capability framework or create a capability framework. On top of that, what we're also able to do is map it to your existing cohorts within ACORN or
• 05:00 - 05:30 create cohorts and recommended cohorts from within the system. And it's really cool how we do this. So, I'm going to jump into an example of this, a prototype, so you can see exactly what this looks like within Acorn. For those of you that currently leverage capability, you're probably used to the capability dashboard. That's going to change a little bit because we have a lot of new features coming in in place. So, at the moment, this screen is slightly
• 05:30 - 06:00 different to what you you have existing in the system, but essentially, if we jump into map capabilities to cohorts, what you're going to be able to do is take multiple, we're not sure of the exact limitation just yet, but it should be probably around 10, give or take, multiple job descriptions, upload those directly into the system. We recommend that we target a business area when we do that. And then essentially what the system's going to be able to do, oh they also they don't need to be like PDFs. They can kind of be whatever. It'll read them. Uh works pretty well. What we're
• 06:00 - 06:30 then able to do is to start to generate a bunch of capabilities or map to existing capabilities and cohorts. So right now you can see what's happened in the application here is ignore the labels a little bit but we've got our first job description. We have some example cohorts. The system thinks that ah I think this is the most relevant cohort. However, we've also generated a cohort for you as well. And
• 06:30 - 07:00 now you can choose and confirm which cohort you think that job description will be mapped to. Those cohorts may or may not already have capability mapped to them within the application itself. So then we go through, we can edit, we can change, you've got full control over what the system generates and maps to. And then what starts to get really really cool is we map our cohorts to capabilities. We've already got our uh cohorts normally mapped to users. What we use for that is dynamic user fields within the application. So uh that's a
• 07:00 - 07:30 big word basically. What's their job description? Where are they? Really simple stuff. Then what we're actually able to do is we're able to send capability review requests to the team leaders or people responsible for the capability of those teams. So say if you've got maybe the IT team and we're starting to roll out a new capability framework for cyber security for that team in particular. If there's a subject matter expert that you want their input for you're actually
• 07:30 - 08:00 able to ask them to do a review of the system generated and mapped capabilities and they're able to have some input for you and then you get that final sign off as an administrator within the system. So you'll get a bunch of them here and then essentially you'll be able to drill into each individual cohort. You'll be able to see the capabilities themselves. You'll be able to create, edit, amend proficiency levels. So there was a question earlier today and sorry I can't remember who exactly it was from
• 08:00 - 08:30 around like terminology and what that sort of looks like. You've got full control over that. This example on the screen is horrific because we have 10 levels. We don't recommend 10 levels. Don't do this. This is what not to do. Please, please. Uh, our support team are probably yelling at me right now from somewhere in CRA. Uh, but you're able to come in here. You're able to basically see what the system has generated. You're able to see the capability range, which is exactly what Megan was talking about from ASICH earlier today around
• 08:30 - 09:00 this role has this range of proficiency that's applicable to them. And then you or the subject matter expert within your organization is actually able to take that and amend it to map to exactly how you want that to work within the organization. Now, if there's not any capability in there that you think is relevant or that matches up, it's really easy. We just generates a new capability with all of the different inputs that we have in the system and we can continuously create as many or as a few
• 09:00 - 09:30 as you need to map to those cohorts and those job descriptions. Then we just confirm it. We approve it and then we send it off to individuals. So what you can start to see is that we might have a bunch of different individuals that we want some approval for. And we really recommend this step because one of the biggest issues that we find when an organization moves to more of a capability um process is that it's a big culture change a lot of the time and it can be a
• 09:30 - 10:00 big shock. It can often be seen as hey you're reviewing me why are you reviewing me? Uh it can be seen as maybe the HR team has just sort of decided upon a bunch of these capabilities but they're not subject matter experts. So what we want to do is remove all of that and say, you know, the reason we're doing this is because we want to empower you to have the learning opportunities that you you need most for those roles and you get say in what the actual capability for your team is. And so then
• 10:00 - 10:30 once we have that leadership buyin, we find the results are much much more uh beneficial and the uptake is a lot easier to get across the board. In the case that we want to be tyrannical rulers, we can do that too though. So we can just map them and approve them ourselves. Uh we won't stop you. AI is allowing us to do these things at a at a pace and a speed that we weren't able to do in the past. What we've done recently is we've actually worked with NAB. NAB as those of you know big bank uh they've got 40,000 a little bit more employees.
• 10:30 - 11:00 They have about 6,000 job roles across the board. They estimated it would take their team around 5 and a half months in order to do this process. Uh, and we did it over I want to say about three or four weeks uh over Christmas and New Year's and then we rolled that out and this is uh uh Megan Oullivan. So she's the head of the future workforce uh at NAB and this is sort of how she found that result. Some of the other organizations that we're working with on this front are Walmart US, Boeing, um
• 11:00 - 11:30 Universal, Warner Brothers and a bunch of others. So we have we've basically taken some really large organizations to structure our pilot to find the gaps that we had and we're now really confident that we've sort of plugged those gaps. We're generating the right information for the right organizations and this is the next step of what you'll see start to come out in the product this quarter. So that leads us into our next step. So once we've mapped our
• 11:30 - 12:00 capabilities, the next thing that we actually need to do is we need to actually assess the organization. So we need to get a baseline assessment. What you heard as talking about earlier was a self assessment process and then a supervisor assessment process. And I 100% echo those words and think that's an incredibly important way to do that. The best method of understanding how an individual does their role is for us to ask them for evidence for them actually doing that task. And there's a lot of
• 12:00 - 12:30 different ways we can ask them for that. So we can ask them questions. We can do knowledge assessments. Or what we can also do is get some evidence of them doing the job. That's going to go into our new piece uh a new feature that we have called interactions. And what it's going to allow us to do is it's going to allow us to take existing interactions that people have in the organization that are used within the capability assessment process and snip those interactions to
• 12:30 - 13:00 users content. So what we're going to do is we're going to ask an individual let's say uh some of you probably do know Cormarmac. He's actually not a sales manager. He's one of our TAMs. Um, Coremarmac might have popped in a snippet from a product that we use in sales called Gong, which basically tracks and measures calls to say, "Hey, this is how I describe to a customer how reporting worked or this is how I described to a customer how momentum worked." And he's going to upload that as part of his capability assessment.
• 13:00 - 13:30 When he uploads that, his manager is going to then go through and review that and say, "Hey, that's a level three. That's exactly what we want to see you doing." And not only is that exactly what we want to see you doing, but that's a fantastic example that I want to share with the rest of the organization. The beauty of that is we now know exactly what is relevant within that piece of content and with what he's uploaded there and for who it's relevant to because we know the capability that
• 13:30 - 14:00 that's been mapped to during just a normal performance review. So, we've taken what he's done in the workplace, we've asked him to submit that as part of his performance review. his manager has then assessed that and said this is I think this is great. Um and then what his manager has the ability to do is share that to the rest of the organization and the team. So now what we do is we have a flywheel of content and the best content that you have is your people doing their job. It's by far and away the best piece of content. I'm
• 14:00 - 14:30 sure a lot of you have LinkedIn Learning, Go One, Skilloft, Udemy, and they're fantastic tools, but they can't be precise and specific to what your organization needs, and it's very difficult for them to actually find the targeted and tailored aspects of content for the right people at the right time. All we need to do is capture that content in real time. Then what we allow to happen is a bunch of social engagement. So, we're actually going to let other users ask questions of that. We're going to let them look at that,
• 14:30 - 15:00 review that, say if it was helpful to them or not helpful to them. And then Coremarmac in this instance might jump in and reply and say, "Actually, this is the reason I did that. Oh, that's a really great question. The reason I did it is because of X, Y, and Z." Now, all of a sudden, we have this really big content library that's full of content that's from your organization. It's in the language of your organization, and it can be shared directly to the right people in the organization. As we find innovative new approaches and we look to to change the processes and maybe the systems, the technology within the
• 15:00 - 15:30 organization, these are naturally going to be enhanced because supervisors are going to see the most relevant pieces of content. I'm using a uh a video example here, but there'll be a few a few different examples that we have. So, we'll have things like maybe it's tickets from a support desk. It could be call recordings, could be video recordings. In the case of our software engineers, we actually uh are looking to use things like our Jira and code review processes. So we can upload the change log that the developers had and we can
• 15:30 - 16:00 basically take all of those things and then we just always have awesome content for the right people at the right time. So if you don't do capability assessments currently, this is one of the ways the capability assessment engine will look. Um the way that it function is exactly how you heard in the ASICH example. We tailor the assessment based on the capability, based on the proficiency, and based on the individual. So, if I come into the system here, I select my capability. I can jump in and I can say,
• 16:00 - 16:30 "Hey, this is where I think I'm at." Maybe I'm going to leave some comments for someone to read. I'm going to put in some of the things that I've demonstrated. And then I'm going to be asked to potentially upload an interaction or through an existing system integration like Zoom, Teams, Zenesk, Jurro, whatever it is. We'll actually just pull that interaction directly through from the individual as well. So we'll actually have a list of interactions that they can pop in there. They jump in, they select their interaction, they pop it in there, and then the supervisor will go through a
• 16:30 - 17:00 similar process in order to say, "Hey, this is really great. I'm actually seeing what you're doing. there's evidence that you're demonstrating this capability and I want to share that evidence with other people in the organization. The last part that that leads us down to is that once we've done all of these things, we we want to find out what they mean and what the different in information and the data and the analytics that we have in the system is able to generate. And so what we've started to implement is essentially a real-time chat that has the ability to understand and
• 17:00 - 17:30 distinguish your reports, their use cases, allow you to upload relevant data, questions, and things from other areas in the organization, and then get information on what those reports look like. What it does essentially is it allows us to have this chat window here. And what the chat window is going to do, I know sorry from the back it's probably really difficult to read, but we have a bunch of different options. So the first thing it's going to do is it's going to take our report. The example that I have is a gap analysis report for capability.
• 17:30 - 18:00 It's going to take our gap analysis and it's going to say, you know, 44% of users are not assessed within this capability. Here are some of the things that you should do in order to help your users get assessed in this capability. We can then work directly with the system and we can ask it things like, hey, can you identify any risks with this? Can you create an action plan of tangible things for me to do? But what you can also do that's really cool is bring in data from outside of Acorn by uploading other documents directly into
• 18:00 - 18:30 the system that it will be able to read, interpret, and then create action plans on based off what you've you've prompted the system to actually do itself. That's an example of a gap analysis report, but this won't just be something that we're going to focus on the capability front. This is something that's going to go to all reports within the system. And by far and away, our most used report of all time is our compliance report. How fun. This is our compliance report if you haven't seen one. Um, I'm probably quite happy for you if you haven't seen
• 18:30 - 19:00 one to be honest. But here's what it looks like. We basically have a matrix with all of the different individuals, who's compliant, who's non-compliant. And again, what we can do is we can start to interface with the AI and say, you know, I want you to identify my compliance risks. I want you to talk to me about which teams are running low and which teams are doing the things that we need them to be able to do. All of that is then exportable out of the system into a word document where we can actually take that action plan and use it to inform other business decisions,
• 19:00 - 19:30 create business cases, and and things outside of the system. all of the different information you have within Acorn will be able to be pulled from that. So, we're going to be able to say this group, this team, this division, this branch. And then the next stage of this is you'll actually be able to prompt the system and say, can you send a reminder email to the managers that they need to get their staff to do that and the system will generate that reminder email and send it out. So, you'll actually be able to interface with the system using uh language rather than clicking through and creating uh different workflows and and processes. That's what we've got coming up and
• 19:30 - 20:00 that's sort of a little bit of the the why and behind the the different things that we have coming up. Does anybody have any questions? So, in the case of capabilities, if you have capability enabled within the system, uh that will just be an update that just happens. We make updates every Fortnite. If you want to see the next Fortnite patch, you can just go to help.aconworks.com uh and you'll just get those. In terms of reports, uh if you have like uh the capability set up, you have a gap analysis report. If you don't, that's
• 20:00 - 20:30 something you're going to need to reach out for. But in terms of the AI component, um you're going to have to reach out and probably have a discussion with us around that. In particular, if you're in government, uh we're really really scared of AI and government. So, we're being quite cautious with that. We've developed an approach that our model is internal within our own system. It doesn't go outside of the system to call things. So your data stays within Acorn. It doesn't leave Australia. It doesn't leave your server, any of that. But government's really scared of AI at
• 20:30 - 21:00 the moment and rightly so. It can do a lot of a lot of crazy things. So in the government space, it's probably going to be something that we enable for you after the right policies have have sort of gone through. Uh outside of that, uh it's it's probably going to be something that comes online live within our private sector clients a little bit quicker. Yeah. So so we are 100%. So, one of the things that we find within government is everybody wants to be second. Uh, no one wants to be first. What we've actually managed to do though is we've managed to work really closely with the APS-C.
• 21:00 - 21:30 We've got them, I think, close or very very uh recently to endorse our AI policy and our framework of how we're using AI. Once that's sort of official and signed off, that'll be something that we can then go and share with other organizations, uh, within the federal government because we've sort of got, you know, a little bit of a launch pad there. Um, so at the moment, what we're seeing is there's a lot of conversations, but no one's really taken the plunge just yet. Uh, if any agency would like to be first, please reach out. Uh, we can accommodate that. Um,
• 21:30 - 22:00 but right now, we're just waiting for it'll probably be with the APS-C or potentially the DTA. um our AI policy aligns exactly with the DTA's framework and sort of what they're looking for and it also aligns with what the APSC is looking for. And so we're just looking for those first use cases, which is why we've started to work with organizations more like NAB and Walmart and whatnot in order to start to to look at how this will function across our ecosystem first. So all that stuff that you just saw there is like pretty much about to
• 22:00 - 22:30 go live. So we've essentially just used it in a pilot environment. um initially, but all of those things are actually coded. I have a development environment that I can jump into. It just hasn't been pushed to production. So, it'll be live I think on the 10th or 11th of March essentially for people who are looking to use that. Yeah, for sure. So, um cohorts are typically created from an amalgamation of the different fields. The most common
• 22:30 - 23:00 ones that we use for cohorts within an internal environment, so internal training would be something like location, job description, potentially like your level or classification within your organization and a bit of a combination of those three things. So like you're a level two software engineer in CRA and that might be a cohort with specific capabilities. um in an external environment where we've got members of the public just accessing content, we'll generally have an array of questions that we ask them
• 23:00 - 23:30 that that data is derived from. So that could be you know what's again it could be your job role, location, you know, type of organization, size of organization, and that may place them in a cohort. That information from an internal standpoint normally comes from the uh HIS or payroll system. That's normally where we'd pull that from. um in an external environment. It normally comes from a CRM like a Salesforce or a HubSpot or uh a bunch of user questions that are targeted at the individual. Sometimes it's a combination of both and
• 23:30 - 24:00 there might be logic in there that says, you know, if you answer A on this question and B on this question, you're in cohort X over here. So, it's a little bit of a combination. The fields in Acorn are dynamic. So, we can have as many or as little as we need. And the cohorts are also dynamic. And they have andor rules. So you could say, you know, if you meet this criteria, uh, and you you have one, two, and three boxes ticked, you're in the cohort. Or you could have one of these three boxes ticked and you'll be in a cohort. It's very flexible, and that's generally where it comes from.
• 24:00 - 24:30 Yeah, you can be in a lot of cohorts. Um, in the case of like Department of Agriculture, Forest, and Fisheries, they've got probably about 400. Uh, and so people overlap quite often. So, it might be uh you're in an accounting cohort because we want to make sure that we're measuring your CPD points, but your job role is over here in the system and we want your capability to be mapped to that um over here. Often, it's location based as well. So, uh lawyers, they have different frameworks throughout all of the states and
• 24:30 - 25:00 territories. And if they practice in Victoria, they might have a different CPD framework that they need to maintain, but their core capabilities as a lawyer are the same at the organization. And so we might put them into two different cohorts. Um, another example might be you're in the new starter cohort for your first 90 days at an organization and you're also in the customer service team cohort as well. And then after 90 days, we're going to move you out of the new starter cohort. So you can be in a bunch of cohorts. There's no real restriction to that. Uh, it just depends on, you know, what you
• 25:00 - 25:30 need them for and how they're being used. I think there's enough terrible, terrible content that exists. Uh there's a lot of really crap content and most content that users enroll themselves in or go and look at is often really bad in particular when it's really generic. And so what we don't want to do is we don't want to contribute to the problem of generic overwhelming content. And what we want to do is we want to solve that
• 25:30 - 26:00 problem by by basically showing people how they can progress in their career. And the best way to progress in your career uh from our perspective is you want to see what the person who did it before you did, right? Like I I can watch a YouTube video, but it's not going to be as relevant um to me and it might be really really hard to find the things that are actually relevant. So AI, where AI will help in the content creation process is if you have a specific use case at your organization and you're developing content, that's
• 26:00 - 26:30 great because you can actually go through and you can say, well, it's a little bit off here. I'm going to tailor it to my organization and I can make content a lot faster. What we don't want to see is just like mass content libraries because I can tell you for a fact like in our system the generic content completion rates are around 1/100th of the volume of completions as content that an organization has created themselves. And so we shouldn't be telling you guys what content you need. You guys should be telling us what content you want to see in the platform.
• 26:30 - 27:00 If we tell you it's going to be generic and it's not going to work and it already doesn't work and it's completely broken. So, we're not going to spend time in that world of creating more generic content. Um, there'll be a lot of people that do, too. I think if you wanted to go and find an AI tool that could generate a bunch of content for you, you could probably find a hundred in the next 5 minutes. So, it's it's not a problem that we want to contribute to. Thank you.