#25 - Tom Pennings, CEO Onsophic - On how AI bridges the gap between HR and Business Performance by transforming training

My guest on the podcast is Tom Pennings, Founder and CEO of Onsophic. He’s what he calls a highly technical entrepreneur, technology enthusiast, and business networker. He’s worked for Borland, EVS, Google and Apple. Inspired by bringing data to the learning process, he and his co-founder Ian Hart assembled a team on two continents to connect digital transformation and assisted intelligence. This was the start of Onsophic.

Unlike many Learning Management systems on the market, Onsophic is about intelligently guiding every single employee in a company to optimize learning effectiveness and achieve their business objectives, rather than just delivering the training material and process. In doing so, it not only increases the performance of global enterprises but also accelerates their human potential.

This inspired me, hence I invited Tom to my podcast. During our interview, we’ll explore how the education process is broken and how that creates a gap between HR and the business objectives any organization has. We also address what questions business leaders should really ask, and what mindset they should embrace to succeed with Digital Transformation, customer centricity, risk and compliance, and learning 4.0. Here are some of Tom’s quotes:

We bridge the gap between HR and the business objectives by correlating training with on‑the‑job performance.

There are 536 different LMS solutions out there. What that really is, I would say ‑‑ and this not meant negative ‑‑ it is a content delivery… facilitating the delivery process

The challenges is, in our opinion, not with the delivery process. It is about guiding each and every individual.

Ultimately, Onsophic's goal is accelerating the human potential. The biggest win is the acceleration of their human potential, but also in time.

Many CEOs underestimate the value of the people in their company

It's really the people that drive a company.

It's really important to make sure that you make strategic decisions on making the cake, getting the most out of these people

I'm not talking about getting more performance out of them by implementing rules to make them work harder. No, it's about making, really, the work lighter on your human potential and get the most out of it.

By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

1. That the best results are achieved when process, people, and intelligence augmentation blend in the right way.
2. That we have to increment the skills and capabilities of the workforce while we are bringing in new tools and technologies into the workplace.
3. That gut-feel is often a very good guide to follow in order to pivot the trajectory of your business – and that spending time on assembling a team with the same beliefs and passion is essential to scale the horsepower behind your business.