AIP Podcast EP 73 – Transforming Corporate Learning Through LearnOps Innovation by Cognota

This episode’s guest, Ryan Austin, Founder and CEO of Cognota, joins host Anne to explore how organizations can finally measure and maximize the impact of corporate learning. Ryan shares his unconventional journey from “bad student” to tech founder, revealing how his hands-on approach to entrepreneurship led to the creation of Cognota—the world’s first LearnOps platform built to optimize enterprise learning operations.

He explains why most large companies fail to track the ROI of their learning programs and how Cognota empowers teams to connect their learning strategy directly to business outcomes. Ryan also discusses the evolution of LearnOps into a broader vision that unites learning, talent, and HR operations under one system—helping organizations overcome silos, improve capacity, and unleash their people’s full potential.

Check out Cognota's recent research, made in collaboration with Deloitte, Cornerstone OnDemand, and Endeavor Intelligence, which reveals how AI Operators are transforming enterprise learning from reactive support to a strategic powerhouse. Click here to access the free white paper.

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Website: https://cognota.com/
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The AIP Podcast is hosted by Anne Cheng, on behalf of the AI Partnerships, a Railtown company

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Today's enterprise market is a bond with revolt, development, default, AI of, L, and a whole array of functionality-driven operational optimization teams. Many organizations lean on learning and development. Yes, the large organizations try the arrow of the learning outcomes. Perhaps simply because it sounds impossible, but is it? Well, hello there everybody, and welcome back to the AIP podcast. And once again, I'm your host and today on behalf of the AI Partnerships Corps. My guest today, Ryan Austin, is the founder of Koknota, a company that optimizes the operations of learning programs and resource management, helping to drive true outcomes from the enterprise learning and development function. Hilled as Canada's best places to work. Koknota helped its customer to unleash the potential of the greatest assets, its people. Hey Ryan, welcome. It's really good to have you here on our show. So we dive right in.

SPEAKER_01 1:18

Yeah, sounds great, and thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 1:20

Well, tell us a little bit about your journey and how it led you to become the founder of Koknota.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

Yeah, it's uh it's a good question. Well, so for first off, I was a bad student, so I had no choice but to become an entrepreneur. Um, and it's interesting because you know, I I was always on the brinks of failing high school or university. I think my teachers liked me, which is why I passed. Um that's the only rational reason. But now I I lead an education business, um, you know, a learning business, which is important because for me during um you know, during the traditional schooling system, like just sitting in a class and listening, that that wasn't the right learning style for me to actually learn from. So entrepreneurship worked for me because it allowed me to almost get my hands dirty on things, fail, try again, succeed, try, do the next thing, fail, and so on. And that that's what I think made me to become a good entrepreneur is is just being hands-on, and and that just suited me. Um, long story short, uh, I've done a few companies. One company led me for a bit to work at a company called World Trade Group, and um I came in to build go to market practice uh for them. Noticed that their competitors offered corporate learning solutions and they didn't. So I pitched the board like, hey, why don't I become an entrepreneur and build this new revenue stream for you? They were eventually acquired by Green Hill Capital Partners, and I went off again to being an entrepreneur or set off to become an entrepreneur. Didn't yet know what I wanted to do, so I just consulted in enterprise learning and development, and that's when I started to build a thesis that why is it so hard for these business leaders to talk about the business of learning and development? They were good at doing the learning and development, but not talking around the business metrics of learning and development. Things like you said, priorities, resources, impact, ROI. And the thesis was that they just didn't have a purpose-built operating system like the other business functions. Like you said, RevOps exists, DevOps exists, they all come with their own business operating systems. LearnOps did not exist, and thus an operating system didn't exist, and that's when we set out to build the world's first learn ops platform.

SPEAKER_00 3:54

That's amazing. But thank you. You know, what's Cotonoda really about? What is the real problem? Is LearnOps a real problem? And is that what you're solving for?

SPEAKER_01 4:08

Yeah, so it's a it's a great question. Um, I think LearnOps is the next part of our big vision um into the next big phase. So when I first started the company, we started with one workflow, um, and uh LearnOps was the vision, you know, and now um, and we launched that in 2019, a single workflow. Our contract value was under $10,000. It was really hard, but we had this bigger vision of building an end-to-end LearnOps platform, and that one workflow allowed us to sell our way into actually working into the vision. It took some time. So today we power enterprise learn ops for a lot of the biggest companies around the world, which is very exciting, and um, naturally, contract values increased as the product matured. The biggest the next part of our our vision is really to unlock all workforce enablement where Cognota powers not just learn ops but talent ops and HR ops all in one operating system so that these teams can work better together to solve big company issues versus today they work a little bit in silos, like I'll solve this business goal with an HR strategy, I'll solve this business goal with a talent strategy or a learning strategy, whereas they all actually need to be working together to properly solve the problem, and they just don't have the plumbing to easily do that, and we provide that uh to them. But we wanted to get the proof point that we could do this really well in LearnOps first, which we we've accomplished, and um we'll continue to scale that uh as we do it. The real problem that we solve is that learning professionals are good at at delivering the learning. When you hear about learning and development, you think about content creation or the learning management system, but the reality is that corporate learning and development market is a $370 billion industry. $130 billion is invested directly into programs. So that that is money that every single learning and development person touches. If you look deeper into the metrics, only 25% of LD leaders feel confident that they can talk to the measurement, the impact value of the dollars they invested for the business. And then there's two other metrics that are important. Forty-two percent of them say that they don't have enough budget to do more for the business, and forty-eight uh percent say that they don't have enough uh capacity to do everything the business does. So our thesis was: well, what if you could make these leaders more confident in the measurement? I bet you that the need for more resources and more budget that that bottleneck would actually reduce. So that's the focus. How do you actually allow them to figure out and get ease of access to data to run their business function effectively? That solves the capacity and the resource bottlenecks issues. And so a LearnOps platform connects all these workflows that often happen disparately, like intake to prioritize the right requests from business partners, alignment to business strategy to make sure you're only saying yes to the to the investments or to the initiatives that will yield the highest impact and ROI for the business, being able to manage budgets and capacity of your teams all in one place, because a lot of the times these L and D teams are very decentralized across the enterprise. So, how do you allow them to operate decentralized but centralized data sets back to the CFO office? So it's a very complicated esoteric problem to solve, but actually a very expensive problem for companies not to solve it, and where um we have a responsibility to do it in a mission-driven way.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

That's that's great to hear. You know, it looks like organizational transformation is very difficult and sometimes almost impossible because you know, as organizations become more complex and even within the same teams, different people learn differently. So, how do you overcome such complexities to still help that companies allot value from their employees?

SPEAKER_01 8:49

Yeah, so for us again, we just focus on the operations layer, which is the back office of how do you run your business function like a business function? Um, but still, these organizations, because they've been working harder, not smarter, when it comes to learning operations, because of disparate IT tools or manual processes, believe it or not, even in an AI world, these teams are using Excel spreadsheets and email often for some of the work processes that they they have to manage. Um the first step is operational maturity insight, meaning if the best practice is at this level, where do I stand today as a function or as a team in order to know what I need to do next to get to that best practice? So in Cognota's sales process, we actually built a proprietary maturity assessment based off of like hundreds of companies and worth of data. And our reps or salespeople or consultants, they do this free LearnOps maturity assessment for customers to bring time to value into the sales process versus it happening when they buy the software. For us, it's valuable because it actually helps us understand if we can help the company or not, so we don't say yes to the wrong deal. And to the customer, it's valuable because we're adding value to them right away and it builds trust and credibility, that we're not just selling you know software that won't fulfill the promise. But it's very important to note that we don't do the transformation services. We'll make them aware of what steps they need to take. We give them the software to solve the problem, and if they need actual transformational support, then we have partnerships in place with retired chief learning officers or strategic alliances with like Deloitte, for example, where we can introduce the customer to them to do the actual transformation work.

SPEAKER_00 10:57

That's amazing. Well, one further road before uh as we're running out of time, but you know, you've talked about this maturity assessment that you do. How do you ignore the naysayers who think that you don't have sufficient subject matter expertise in the learning and education function and capability?

SPEAKER_01 11:20

Well, we we we we work with the leading chief learning officers, chief talent development officers who are part of this LearnOps maturity partnerships that we have. So there's a lot of trust and credibility because the best thought leaders in the world helped us to develop that assessment. And then we're also the leader when it comes to LearnOps software. And the reason we're trusted and the leader is because we help build the ecosystem around LearnOps and what that actually means. So we have a community of practice at learnops.com that's free for the industry to participate in. We launched the world's first Learn Ops certification program, kind of borrowing the HubSpot playbook for the HubSpot Academy. There's likely not one marketing person on the planet that doesn't have some sort of certification from HubSpot. So the same thesis is to create free resources with micro certifications to get people certified in areas of LearnOps, as well as doing a quarterly free workshop to learn about LearnOps and to get certified in it, where we actually co-deliver that with a chief learning officer in the industry. So we build trust in this ecosystem move that we did for category creation, and then that allows us to sell software really well because people trust us as the LearnOps leader.

SPEAKER_00 12:49

That's perfect. Well, Ryan, it's been fabulous having you on the show today, and that's a lot of food for thought that you've given to us. So thank you very much for that. To our listeners, once again, thank you for tuning in. And of course, my name is Anne. And my guest was Ryan Austin, the founder of Cotnoda. Please like, share, and follow our show. You know it does so much for us. And on behalf of the AIP podcast, till we meet again.