Business growth. Delighting customers. Scaling without sacrificing. These are just a couple of the key themes we heard at our flagship event, Cognition24.
Gathering learning professionals and business leaders together, the one-day event focused on the power of education and training – on customers, partners and employees.
We’re pleased to hear such glowing feedback from customers and partners about how useful the sessions were from our partners and internal experts, and how they will refine their strategies for excellence in 2025.
As a busy professional, we know your time is tight. So we’ve highlighted some of the takeaways from this year’s jam-packed event, so you too can ensure 2025 is your most successful yet.
1. Training that Thrives: How Learning Drives Key Business Outcomes
Led by Robin Wadsworth, CEO of Thought Industries, Cogntion24 kicked off with Robin setting the scene for the importance of training and education strategies.
Simply put, training isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a business critical function, and if organizations want to grow sustainably, it cannot be overlooked.
Training will become a $500 billion industry by 2031, and it’s understandable when you see the metrics Robin shared. Organizations saw huge gains from customer education efforts including:
- 26% lower cost to acquire customers via educated and qualified leads
- 35% increase in customer lifetime value
- And a seismic 24% increase in revenue directly correlated to CE
Whether you’re making the case to your board for investment, or are in the decision-making hotseat, focus on the data and the quantifiable impact.
Watch Robin’s Cognition24 keynote here and find out how to make the case for investing in your organization’s learning programs.
2. Breaking Barriers: Educate the Market and Your Customers
We were thrilled to have John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Ecosystems at TSIA join us and discuss some of the key market trends he’s seeing in his role at the Technology Services Industry Association.
John notes that education is a critical step in the subscription economy. If customers don’t understand how to use products and adopt new features then their relationship with an organization will break down, leading to churn. Therefore, it’s essential to focus on adoption and expansion in order to keep revenue. In fact, there is a clear correlation between learning consumption and renewal.
What will be the music to many people’s ears is that learning and education shouldn’t be seen as a cost center. In fact, it’s the opposite. Education services can – and are for many – a profit center.
This critical insight is instrumental in breaking down silos across your organization. Partnering and making strategic relationships with stakeholders across the business – from the Chief Customer Officer to the technical support team. By demonstrating and contextualizing the role of education as a route to achieving business aims, conversations become more constructive and collaborative.
Check out the full Cognition24 session here to learn how you can improve your strategic relationships with stakeholders and in turn build successful profit driving centers of learning excellence.
3. Mastering the Future of Learning: AI-Driven Techniques and Technologies to Achieve Your Goals
In this fireside chat, Chris McClelland, Co-Founder and CPTO of Thought Industries, Jared Ranere, President and COO of Thrv and Alex Gounares, CEO of Tailored AI discussed the latest opportunities for learning with AI.
Whilst AI isn’t new, the panellists note that we’ve seen highly sophisticated applications explode on the market. And with this, there’s a huge amount of excitement and the opportunities for all areas of business are awe-inspiring. As too are the implications for learning.
At Thought Industries, we’ve utilized the benefits of AI a few different ways including generating content, suggesting relevant materials and creating quizzes. Key to the discussion however is that as great as the benefits are, data security is always a top priority for Thought Industries – and our customers.
What’s next on the horizon for AI? Well, keep your eyes peeled for the AI Agent. Building on products like Thought Industries’ tia, the next breakthrough is when AI can start proactively acting on your behalf based on real-time interactive conversations.
Listen to Chris, Jared and Alex share their thoughts in full here.
4. Competitive Edge: Capturing Market Share by Captivating Learners
Led by Jon Synnott, Senior Director of Customer Success at Thought Industries, this Cognition24 fireside chat featured Jill Kayton, Product Director of Avado and her colleague Matthys Both, Director of Technology.
Jill and Matthys discussed their close partnership to deliver outstanding support for the Chartered Institution of Personnel and Development. Specifically, Avado provides training for HR and L&D professionals. Understandably this audience of experts, they know their stuff! So it’s critical to provide an exceptional customer experience.
Crucial to their success is having a laser focus on the support needs of this specific audience and not trying to solve multiple training needs for a variety of audiences. Avado also ensures it brings in a large number of data points from customer feedback to course correct, like updating web design to make it easier to engage.
Watch the full session and hear from the team at Avado’s experience at driving engagement through Blended, Cohort-Based and Social Learning building an active community which has allowed them to keep its impressive market share of 41%!
5. Speed Meets Quality: AI Solutions for Scalable Certification Programs
Sadie Dickman, Director of Product at Thought Industries, and Josh Kamrath, CEO of Bongo, are joined by Jessica Pair, Director of Learning and Development at Enverus to reveal how they partnered to scale its accreditation progams.
Josh explained Bongo’s approach to certification in this Cognition24 session, noting that the real point of learning is the articulation of that knowledge in context – not just regurgitation. By utilizing AI, Bongo has been speeding up the time to analyze assessments to provide more accurate credentials – from small groups to organizations that will assess thousands.
Jessica shares her first-hand experience on how Enverus implemented Bongo through Thought Industries. Based on the desire to create a robust learning program, Jessica started in a specific business area to test and learn. A critical success factor was how Enverus could scale this program across the whole organization. As a large business, time intensive individual programs wouldn’t be effective, but their partnership with Thought Industries and Bongo was “the secret sauce” to its success.
Watch Sadie, Josh and Jessica here and learn how you can scale without compromising on quality.
Check out all of these Cognition24 sessions – and others – in full here. And, if you want to speak to us about how we can support your training and education program and make 2025 the most successful year yet for your business, get in touch with the team.
