Established in April 2019, Arist is on a mission to revolutionize how people learn by moving away from the traditional educational model in favor of blending into existing work behaviors. Arist counts HP, Novaris and Exxon Mobil among its clients.

In July 2023, the startup announced Series A funding of $12 million, taking total investment to $16.7 million from investors including PeakSpan Capital, Y Combinator, Craft Ventures, Acadian Ventures and others.

John Brazier: What is Arist’s USP? What makes your proposition special?

Ryan Laverty: There are a lot of learning tools on the market with learning management systems (LMS) and micro learning apps. What Arist does is break learning down into bite-sized components delivered to people in a thoughtful way, spaced out over time.

The thing that no-one else is doing that we find creates outsized impacts is to deliver learnings where people already are. What the means is that we put learning on the tools people spend their time on – Teams, SMS, WhatsApp, Slack, email, etc.

The reason that’s so important is even if you take the exact same learning model and content, and put that into something like an app or LMS, people will only check that every three to six weeks. They check something like Teams or SMS every five to seven minutes.

That’s a 16,000x difference in how much attention workers give to those systems compared to any sort of dedicated system.

For us, that’s the biggest thing. You’ve got to put all of the content in a place where someone’s already established a behavior of spending their time.

JB: How is Arist trying to change the world?

RL: We see this as fundamentally redesigning the way people learn.

Most learning is built around the University model and hasn’t really changed; it’s very event based with tons of content in a lecture style – or maybe eLearning that’s now video-based, but it’s the same sort of thing.

When learning is a onetime event, people forget about 90% of what they learn within a 24-hour period. Where this type of model works well are simple concepts, plus ‘practice equals mastery’. Most things we try to learn in a post academic environment follow that.

We believe we can actually redesign most of modern eLearning to fit that human behavior of long intervals of practice with these interventions.

Today, it’s HR, it’s corporate learning but we’ve also done a lot of public campaigns all over the world, in places like Tanzania, and Sierra Leone and India. I’ve found that for all age groups, it fundamentally becomes a far, far better way to learn.

JB: What is your key message to HR leaders?

RL: The first is that you have to meet people where they are to get really beneficial outcomes, there is no way around that.

The more prescient trend this year, because obviously AI is everything right now, is that HR really has the opportunity to lead the organization and take a level of ownership.

We’ve seen organizations use the sales leader to teach the sales folks about AI and my ops leader teach the ops folks about AI. It’s hard to establish who’s going to lead the charge on that, but we’ve seen a few organizations be successful with HR.

HR owns onboarding and can take the charge on disseminating information about AI; we’re trying to tell HR leaders ‘go teach people about AI, because you’ve been looking for a seat at the table’.

This is the opportunity to do that. Go teach the entire company about AI and the fundamentals of it, how you’re going to use it and do so responsibly.

JB: What are the next strategic goals for Arist?

RL: On the AI thread, we’re investing heavily. Right now, we have AI course creation and that’s been our most popular feature by far for the past year or so. We’re also investing in analytics to use the data we collect responsibly to determine the key moments in the employee lifecycle.

Let’s say I’m a manager and I have a career conversation coming up, or I’m a salesperson, I have a big sale coming up – what are the critical things that I need to know? Our focus is how we can serve up the right learning to the right person at the right time.

I think we’d had the right learning with AI creation and we’ve had right place with these tools people use every day. But the right time is really tricky to get right, and AI is really going to be a huge component, both for right learning and right time.

We’re also looking more broadly outside of AI at how learning can speed up commercialization. There’s a fight for HR and learning leaders of making learning relevant to the business, and use it as a strategic and competitive advantage for the business.

If we can use learning and enablement to speed up the time it takes to launch new products that creates a level of reliance and belief in learning by the C-Suite that I don’t think we’ve ever had before.

JB: What one trend will be top of mind for HR leaders in the next 12 months?

RL: Speed to impact is more what it’s about even than AI, which is an enabler. If you went back 15 years, no learning or HR leader would have said speed was a top five competency, they would have said efficacy or long-tailed impact of outcomes.

What we’re seeing now though is that the world, ever since COVID-19, is changing so rapidly that the needs and talent of an organization are also changing rapidly. A lot of HR leaders and their organizations building training internally, rather than having sales or marketing create almost a shadow training organization where it took too long to get their learning.

The relevance of HR, and learning more broadly, really comes down to how fast you can create something effective. AI is going to be the biggest enabler of that.

In a world where the CEO comes and says: ‘Hey, we have this massive talent shortage and we need to teach everyone about AI’, HR can come back quickly with a solution that is ready to deploy across the organization.

UNLEASH Startup | Spotlight is a monthly Editorial interview series where we speak to and profile the best and brightest technology startups the HR world has to offer. Want to feature in the series? Get in touch with john@unleash.ai to find out more.

Want to learn more about exciting AI developments got HR or the latest strategies for Learning & Development? Then don’t miss out on the fastest growing HR event in the world, UNLEASH America 2024.

Get your tickets here!