Customer behavior is changing rapidly, and in the era of agentic workflows, customers expect real-time, accurate answers in their moments of need.
Thought Industries’ CEO Irana Wasti recently sat down with Vicky Kennedy, CEO of Echtus to discuss how customer education is evolving in the AI era, making it critical for businesses to break down organizational silos to meet their strategic goals.
Organizational Silos Have Become the Number One Blocker to Strategic Alignment
Education doesn’t usually start out as a function in and of itself. Instead, it is often an initiative that’s formed within teams and within departments, for example a marketing team that creates an education initiative to give users more information about how to see success, a product team that launches product training for a tricky new feature, or a customer success team that develops customer training to solve for a specific challenge which is coming up time and time again.
As a result, silos can feel very natural, because all of these individual education and training and enablement initiatives are formed within disparate departments. But while the discipline and its outcomes sit across different teams (all of which have separate tools, methods of communication, and knowledge banks), they exist within one business that is ultimately trying to serve one customer.
The Impact of Siloed Knowledge in the AI Era
Silos are nothing new, and have always prohibited the effectiveness of what education and enablement could really achieve at scale, so what makes this such a pressing challenge? Today’s movement to adopt agentic workflows and agentic delivery has created a need to unify tech stacks (and the people that use them). Siloed teams and work streams make unified workflows impossible. If each team focuses on their own perspective and audience, customers receive incoherent, inconsistent, and even conflicting messages.
As businesses move towards building agentic workflows and use AI to drive high-level goals, they need to bring together multiple initiatives across the business in service of a combined goal. Product adoption is a perfect example of this. Education teams need to be asking themselves, where does enablement and education fit in when it comes to driving product adoption, not just in its own silos, but more widely across the business?
Rapidly changing customer behavior means organizations have to adapt in turn. Irana mentioned that some Thought Industries’ customers are seeing a significant drop in traffic volume to their academies, as their own customers turn to their favorite LLM for answers instead of the business who sold them the product they use.
The simple truth is that when customers go searching for answers, they are now far less likely to go to the academy. That means organizations are no longer in control of whether customers are getting the answers they need, or perhaps even worse — whether those answers are accurate. As a result, while silos were never something to celebrate, today, breaking them down has become a business imperative.
How a Single Source of Truth Breaks Down Those Silos
With silos in place, education teams don’t have a single answer for what it means to “go learn how to use our product.” They can ask the question across ten teams, including Sales, Support, Product, Marketing, or any other, and get ten different answers on how to best train on the feature in question, or how to use education to boost product adoption as a whole.
For Vicky, that’s why a single source of truth and the right education architecture powers all the channels from internal enablement to external LLMs, and from in-product training, to any other knowledge anywhere on the web. As soon as you have a single source of truth, that centralized and coherent information naturally breaks down silos, and helps to unify teams in better service of organizational goals.
This benefit goes far beyond product adoption, making inroads across the customer journey, starting with attracting educated qualified leads — prospects who understand how your product is going to help them see success before they ever reach your home page. At Thought Industries, we’ve seen customers gain a 20% increase in traffic to their websites by working off a singular source of truth and knowledge, and designing how information is shared intelligently across channels and for specific audiences.
Education architecture solves for the business, and it also delights the end customer who is now far from the Academy, looking in different channels, for different formats, and with different goals. Irana shared a soundbite from a business whose customers either want a two-second answer or a PhD on a given topic!
Instead of having to build both the two-second answer and the PhD-level learning path in an ad-hoc manner, businesses can use a centralized architecture to provide users with exactly what they need, wherever and whatever that might be.
This podcast was packed to the rafters with actionable insights on breaking down organizational silos. Watch the full recording to learn about:
- How the proliferation of tools is making organizational silos worse, not better.
- Reference v.s. competency-based education, and how to create solutions for both.
- A step by step walkthrough of how education architecture is built at Echtus.
