SkillsAware: The Journey So Far

Dan McFadyen (DM)– Hi, I’m Dan McFadyen – Co-Founder and Director at Skills Aware, and also Co-Founder and Managing Director at Edalex. It’s my great pleasure to be joined today by Yasmin King and Mark Keough. Yasmin – do you mind introducing yourself?

Yasmin King (YK) – As Dan said, I’m Yasmin King – CEO of SkillsIQ and also Director and Co-Founder of SkillsAware.

Dr Mark Keough (MK) – I’m Mark Keough – Executive Director of SkillsAware, but also Co-Founder and Director along with Dan and Yasmin. I am really enjoying this new relationship and project as it comes to market.

DM – Perfect. Well Mark, I might direct it back to you to start, just in terms of your vision for SkillsAware, because you’ve had this thought for quite some time – more than 20 years!

MK – In 2000, I was at the end of the very early days of the Learning Management System business, and my business in Australia was bought by TMP Worldwide, who also won monster.com, which at the time was the early mover and shaker in the online recruitment business worldwide. And I got this glamorous title of inaugural Vice President for Monster Learning. So it was like climbing Mount Everest, and suddenly someone saying, ‘Well, what are we going to do?’ and we came up with a couple of visions – one was to do college recruitment which became a very successful business for Monster, I’m very proud of that business; but the second one was to try and match learning and jobs by looking at skills.

So that vision for me started in 2000. And in 2000, believe it or not, so this is 24 years ago, we hired a couple of Australians who came across and they brought with them the Australian training package system and we started to look at how we could use that as big data to try and match the very confusing language of skills in jobs and skills in learning. This is a very short story, at the time I was consulting, I met the Secretary of Labour for the end of the Clinton era and they came and spent a day with me to talk about this and I was working with the top people in the US Department of Labour on this. It was a really big problem about how you match learning and skills and jobs. I remember flying from Boston to San Diego one night to go to the HR XML Committee, which has now moved into the Open HR standard, and I went to the committee meeting, flew overnight, flew back the next night to Boston from San Diego, went to the meeting, and I said, ‘I think we should try and find a way of standardising skill statements between jobs and learning’ and they said, ‘Yeah, we’ve thought of doing that. That’s ridiculous because we just can’t trust the learning people to work with standards.’ So you can imagine that actually happened late 2000, so I’ve been trying to get this problem solved for more than 20 years.

I’ve looked at lots of technologies, lots of issues, and it’s really nice to be here today. The journey has taken me through blockchain as a credential validation idea and then I rejected that because it’s too hard to get. It’s like herding sheep – getting people to work on standards-based skills statements, right? Everyone’s got a slightly different view of what skills are, and it’s a global problem so there is no standardised approach to skills. So this idea has been around a long time but the breakthrough has been Artificial Intelligence and particularly Large Language Models (LLM) which allow us to take disparate language and find a harmonious standard where we can share information and find a common language and that’s what we’re doing at SkillsAware – we’re finding a common language for skills without throwing out all the other language everyone uses to describe skills. So that’s my journey over 24 years in a nutshell.

DM – Brilliant. Now Yasmin, you come from a very different perspective with skills. Can you give us context for that, and how that has helped generate the genesis of SkillsAware?

YK – OK, so my initial background has actually always been involved in either policy or regulation for small business. Then I took on the role of CEO of one of the skills service organisations that were established to basically write, in conjunction with industry committees, the very training packages that Mark just referred to. We did it for all of the services sector, the health sector, and also the public sector, so about 50% of the economy. We did that for seven years. Vocational education in Australia has had quite an extensive amount of reform. In fact, a good friend of mine actually went to the effort of counting how many reforms had occurred over the last 22 years, and it’s currently the equivalent of a reform every fortnight, and so, you know, we could see that yet again when the Labour government came in under the last election, they changed to establishing jobs and skills councils. Essentially my team, who have been working in this space quite extensively for a long period of time, just went – hmmm, we’re worried they’re going to throw the baby out with the bathwater, it’s going to start all over again. We just don’t have our heart in basically keeping on that journey. And because we had run quite a successful business and had done other international consulting, particularly on standards worldwide and other work, we were in a fortunate position to have a strong enough balance sheet for us to be able to say, ‘Well, OK, let’s utilise what our skills are and pivot into doing something else.’

So one of the things we had always seen was the wicked problem – the fact that basically we didn’t believe that there was a skills training problem, we believed there was a skills recognition problem. It particularly stemmed from the work that we’ve done, particularly in the Community Care sector where, you know, there are a lot of extremely experienced people, but they don’t have any qualifications. That’s partly their age, it’s partly because they tend to come from lower socio-economic backgrounds, because they’re poorly paid, highly casualised female workforce – so they don’t have the opportunities. So there’s a really big equity issue as well and we could see that there was an approach from the government to go, ‘Well, the answer is let’s just offer free courses’. But in projects that we then spent the next year or so working on, we saw the evidence of how basically quality was not factored into the picture. In fact, I had one of my people do a mystery shopping exercise of getting an individual support qualification, and found that one organisation said, ‘Well, don’t worry about it. You can get it in six weeks. You only do one in six weeks and we basically guide you through the answers’. These are people who get to work with vulnerable people, and that was a massive concern to us that quality wasn’t being factored in. And yet you had other people who had all of this experience and were basically, you know, not even being considered if they wanted to move jobs because they had no qualification. This whole wicked problem of recognition has plagued the Australian system, and quite frankly internationally. We didn’t see anything in the reforms that were happening once every fortnight that actually even attempted to address them. So I really started talking to some major companies through my networks, and they all said, ‘Yep, recognition is a problem’, but what they wanted was some sort of evidence base, right? It’s just not enough for us to look at someone and go, ‘You know, we want someone who’s independent, who’s doing that’.

So I started looking around and seeing if there is something we could do. We knew that there were toolkits being developed but they were all very manual. Certainly with the work that we’ve done with Higher Ed, we know that nobody liked to do mapping of prior learning. So I had a coffee with a former colleague and said, ‘I’m looking to find a way to attack this, and I’m prepared to stand behind it. There’s got to be a better solution.’ She said, ‘Oh, you should talk to Mark Keough. He’s been tackling this issue for years.’ At the time I made a phone call that afternoon. We then met for coffee in a day or so later and basically Mark sort of outlined what he was thinking. He said, ‘I’ve got a great tech partner that I’ve done work with and I think they’ve got a great platform, and this is a solution that we could build on this, and AI is now accessible and affordable.’ I just went, ‘I’ve been involved in entrepreneurial projects before’. So my attitude with that sounds exactly like, ‘It makes sense. let’s just do it’.

MK – Perfect. So who was that partner, I wonder?

DM – Thanks Mark. At Edalex, over the past nine years, we’ve been focused in the skills space and we develop platforms that enable skills definition. With openRSD we have what is now the world’s largest open library of these Rich Skill Descriptors – atomic level definitions of skills to ensure that we are speaking the same language and that’s critical. And then skills development, with the open source openEquella platform, and Credentialate, which discovers and shares evidence of skills from learning. Those platforms, together, combined help support the recognition and the discovery of skills. So we’re starting to see these threads come together from Mark’s 20-plus-year vision for this and Yasmine, your deep experience in the sector and discovering the need for skills recognition.

For us, at Edalex we strongly believe in giving a voice to learners further on skills. Several years ago, we commissioned some market research that identified that of University graduates only 33% felt comfortable voicing their own skills during their first job search. So again, here we are sending individuals through years and years of education, and yet they don’t know what skills they have.

One of the stories that I love to share from a high school that we’ve worked with, a student who went to one of the educators, and said ‘I don’t have any skills. I only work at McDonald’s’ and we say ‘Really?’ Imagine all the collaboration skills, time management, conflict resolution – all these skills and yet that student didn’t have a voice for their skills; there is no evidence, there’s nothing to back that up to give them the confidence. So I think as SkillsIQ, Edalex and Mark have come together to form SkillsAware, that’s really the heart of our mission, is to give users a voice for their skills and evidence to back up those claims. So with that context, then what is SkillsAware? What does it actually do?

MK – That’s a good question because you know, what was missing in the Edalex world to do this? What was missing in the SkillsIQ world? What was missing in my world to actually be able to execute on the vision? And the thing that was missing was the three pieces of this puzzle. Dan, you and I have known each other a long time. One thing I would say too, is we’ve experienced the benefits in nine months of a trusted partnership. It’s not driven by a venture capitalists driving us to sales, not driven by the tech per se is driven by the need in the marketplace which I think we all agree on and that’s been an absolute joy to work with each of you and the rest of our team on that notion that we are looking to meet needs. That means our development process is cyclical and improves, and it’s going to take some time but what we’re seeking to do is find the right person, for the right job, at the right time. We know there is a wicked problem in the economy that governments have trouble solving, and that is there are people who want jobs, and there are jobs that want people. The two can’t seem to get together. There’s a gap between the two. So taking forward Yasmin’s notion of the self- enablement of recognition, and your experience with that student Dan, what we’re doing now is providing a starting point to end point way in which someone can validate what they have and build a database of their skills, not just a resume but a whole holistic view and so SkillsAware captures evidence, uses Artificial Intelligence, using Large Language Models to standardise those statements, and then store them for a variety of use cases.

The primary use cases we’re seeing at the moment, but there’s more ahead, are the Recognition of Prior Learning towards qualifications, and the other primary use case is Enterprise visibility, in other words, I’ve got 2,000 people, I’ve got 5,000 people, I’ve got 20,000 people, and I don’t know what they can actually do because I’ve hired them on the basis of their resume, or a job description, or their qualifications. They’re all very flaky things. The job description is never quite what it is when you get into the job, the resume is a very shorthand representation of what you can actually do.Then we want people to progress, and we want to hire and resource projects based on people’s skills and capability, not on perceptions or subjective views and so on. What SkillsAware does is provide the tools to allow for skills-based hiring and skills-based resourcing for Enterprises, but furthermore, a long-term database of validation for the individual, about what they can do, and to do it in a language that everyone can understand because it’s a common language. So the other thing it is – it’s a bit like a tower of Babel – it’s taking the various disperate skills definitions from all around the place, that’s never going to be solved, people keep talking about making new skills taxonomies that are simpler and so and so forth. As soon as you add a new one, that just exponentially multiplies skills definitions by another thousand. So, what we need is a harmonisation of skills definitions, not new and simpler. What we’re doing here is we have a tool using Artificial Intelligence to harmonise skills definitions and make them accessible for both employees, for learners, for the public, but most importantly for enterprisers who are trying to just get about their productivity, and their work.That may be a long explanation but it covers all the basis; and that is with SkillsAware in your world, you can actually go from the point of documenting all the things about you to a point where it’s useful in the economy, and that’s the SkillsAware Journey, it’s what we’re aiming to achieve, we’re not there perfectly yet but we’re a long way down the track, and that’s thanks to you both actually and your belief in this vision.

YK – I also think that there’s a fundamental difference in our approach in what we’re saying that the learner has to be basically directing the journey because, I think so much of it is education led, be it qualifications or micro-credentials or whatever and it’s very much a supply driven approach, right? And that’s why there is such poor skills literacy. It’s why your kid at McDonald’s doesn’t know that actually he has got quite significant skills even though he actually probably has done a Certificate III in Retail, because that’s part of the McDonald’s program. But it’s actually not the Certificate III in Retail that is recognised by employers when they see someone’s worked at a McDonald’s. What they see is it’s somebody who knows how to show up, who knows how to follow directions, who understands how to deal with customers including very difficult ones.

So if you you aren’t told that they are things that an employer values then you don’t know what to articulate, and that’s particularly true for the fact that 40% of Australians over the age of 50 don’t have any qualifications at all, I do this regularly, you know, with some of the tradies who come and do work at my place. I’ll say ‘What skills do you think they have?’ and I’m often told ‘Oh no, I don’t have any because I left school when I was in year 10’. Because they did an old style apprenticeship that didn’t actually have a formal qualification, and these are people who are doing extraordinarily complex jobs and highly skilled, but they don’t think that they actually have got any skills. For me, I think part of the reason why this grouping has worked so effectively is that we all have the same value principles that we’re coming from. And that is that we all fundamentally believe this has to be learner-driven, but big benefits are actually to Enterprises because you talk to any organisation and they will tell you recruitment, retention… all of that is high. It’s getting going to get even tougher because everybody’s having thei resumes written and reviewed by AI. There’s an incredible sameness to it all, so how much absolute talent is left on the floor because the system that wrote it, the system that’s evaluating it hasn’t been able to understand what are the real key things that these people can do.

I think the fact that we are looking at this from that conversational style journey of drawing out from people what they need but then evaluating it against standards, and also providing an evidence base means that we we’re creating holistic approach, it’s still fundamentally is for the value of the individual, and for me that’s why we all are coming from the same fundamental principle.

MK – And it’s granular, Yasmin. It’s right down to the ‘what can I do? ‘You know, we all use the example of a barista, right. What can a barista do? Well, you could describe a skill as being a barista, but that’s not very helpful. When you start describing it as being able to choose the milk, choose the beans, negotiate with the customer, understand an order, write the order down, deliver the order, you know, all those underlying tasks, that’s actually, there the tasks that are transferable. We all want our own barista, of course, but I’d like one at home, thank you very much. But the transferable skills are the underlying tasks that they know, and so we’re working at that granular level. Did we say the other day approximately 62,000 tasks we have in SkillsAware? And they’re organized into the 15,000 units of competency in the Australian training system, but they could easily be mapped to other frameworks. So we’ve started with the Australian training system, but it could work with any other system. A lot of that’s down to the work, the platform, you’ve done, Dan, over the years. Like we could not build the top end on this if we did not have such robust, reliable, private data platforms with integrity, such as Equella and Credentialate. So, you know, it’s just fantastic, Dan, to be working with you.

DM – Thank you, much appreciated.

YK – I think it’s also the fact that what we’ve done effectively is flip the model of this concept of you know there’s too much granularity in too much detail and instead of going this is a really bad thing we’ve gone hang on a minute in the world of data that’s a fantastic thing.

MK – You’ve just got to present it in a useful way.

YK – Yeah, and you’ve just got to make it so that it actually has some value to add. So, you know, and sure, you know that granularity is one of the big frustrations of learning providers who are trying to, you know, make money and want to churn out volume, etc. etc. And you can have any colour you like as long as it’s black, as I’m fond of saying. You know, I don’t care that there’s 50 different electives; we only offer two, and too bad if you want the others etc etc. But if you can value somebody against the fact that there is all this granularity and say, ‘Well, hang on a minute, you know, you might not have that skill, but you’ve got that skill,’ then I mean that richness of that task data is actually a benefit, not a disadvantage. And particularly when it’s been developed over 40 years by industry and validated by industry. So, I mean, that for me is one of the things that I have found exciting about this is that we’ve just basically flipped the problem, you know, and we think about it differently.

MK – I’ve got a question for you, Dan. Because you and I have worked together for, what is it, 12 years on different projects, I knew your products very well and I knew how valuable they were. But you’ve always worked on a platform basis and have worked with customers for their end solutions. So, your business model up until now has been to provide good platforms that a customer can implement to meet their custom requirements. And you guys do that so well. You’ve now got involved in an end-to-end solution. What drove you to that?

DM – Well, that’s great insight. And we think about when we talk and think about Skills Aware, we think about a service, right? So service as software, which, you know, we’ve talked about flipping the models. Traditionally, we’ve provided platforms that serve as the plumbing of the skills ecosystem. But for us, one of the, Yasmin, you’ve referenced wicked challenges, and the wicked challenge for us that we love to tackle. I mentioned giving learners a voice for their skills, but let’s broaden that, let’s look at the workforce and workforce transformation and really think how we recognise users, for people, the skills they gain from life, not just from formal education but also informal learning.

For example, they may gain skills from hobbies, leading groups, or volunteering with the scouts. So, what skills are they gaining from non-formal and informal learning, as well as formal learning? The opportunity to support and recognize all that, and then to provide that as an easy-to-use service, that’s a game-changer for us. We hope it will be for the industry as well as individuals. For us, that’s part of why we’re so excited and energised with SkillsAware and the potential it brings. That’s a bit of my excitement shining through.

YK – Mark made the comment that, you know, the right skill, the right people at the right time. We like to say it’s the right skills in the right place at the right time. And for me, an example is talking to one of the major volunteer organizations, a not-for-profit that deals a lot when there’s emergencies. One of the things that really struck me was him talking about how, when there was a major fire, his people, his volunteers, were called to basically be involved in the community to provide support. They had this situation where his employee, the social worker, was project managing what was happening in the community and was completely underskilled. They had amazing empathy but actually no project management skills; that wasn’t their background. At the same time, the former managing director of a major logistics company, a volunteer in the community, was in the back folding blankets they were going to be sleeping in the hall. And he said to me, ‘I don’t know. Who in my volunteer community has what skills? So, you know, for me to actually make sure I’ve got the right people with the right skills in the right place, I don’t have visibility. And I think that really is important. For me, it’s not only about doing the right thing for individuals; I think there’s a societal benefit, right. If we can promulgate this and change people’s perceptions about how you recognize what people can do, particularly as you say, people learn so much through volunteering. I know one of my kids did a Gold Duke of Ed and would say to you that they learned more out of doing that than probably their undergraduate degree in many ways because of the challenges that that brought forward. We don’t really try and drill down what skills those people have learned through doing those sorts of volunteer programs. There are so many people who contribute to their communities that could add so much value to society.

MK – Not just socially, though, economically, because the cost of finding the right person is a hidden cost, a hidden microeconomic cost at the moment. Right? Like, you know, we all go to hire someone, and it’s like a nightmare. You end up with a thousand applications, and as you’ve both said, now the application’s written by AI, the job description is written by AI, the evaluation is done by AI. Like, you’re just never going to get the right person that way, right?

Because it’s a people factor thing, you know, getting the right person, you got to know something about the person. So, um, and that’s costly. So what we’re trying to do is reduce the cost of getting that person with the right skills. I’m updating my label, yes, the person with the right skills in the right place at the right time. We’re just, that’s SkillsAware’s number one value proposition, to reduce the cost of doing that.

YK – It’s a product, it’s about productivity. If we’re serious about productivity, we’ve got to get better at using technology to do things smarter. And it’s not about replacing people, it’s about taking the onerous work that people don’t enjoy doing so they can actually do what they’re really good at. And so it’s not about saying, well, hang on a minute, if we have a lot of RPL, is this going to mean that there isn’t going to be a need for educators? Absolutely not. What it will mean is that those educators can do better in terms of actually training people on the bits that they actually need, as opposed to making them repeat things they already know. And hopefully will basically really help us move away from the whole compliance mentality of training that we have in this country. Because if you’re training for compliance, you’re not upskilling people. So we can talk about lifelong learning and, you know, improving, but if all you’re doing is making people do the same compliance training, there’s no capacity for them to have time to actually upskill.

DM – You’re exactly right. And I attended a learning summit that a local university sponsored recently, and we heard exactly the same thing from industry. Saying, well, if they have 87 hours of required compliance training that they’ve done, and if they’ve moved from a comparable, you know, another company in the same industry, they had that 87 hours last year. There’s just no capacity, cost ability, both from the employer perspective or the employee, to have that mental bandwidth and time.

MK – But from a learning institution point of view, we’re already starting to see evidence that when RPL is done properly, right, efficiently, and there is tangible evidence of this, it increases enrolments and increases the dollars spent by those people who enrol with the learning institution, not reduces enrolments or takes away, yeah, you know, or reduces the incomes. The opposite, because SkillsAware is a recruitment tool for training providers. It’s a way of getting more people into the tent.

YK – And I think the other, I mean, the cost of, I mean, I know in, again, if I pick the care sector, you know, then you know what I hear from employers is that they lose a percentage of people that they recruit during that first induction phase because they go, ‘I’m not doing this again. I’ve done this before. I’m not, I mean, you know, why am I doing it again? I don’t want to,’ and you know, because they have other options, so they move on. So, you know, if you think about what it’s cost that employer to actually recruit that person, try and onboard them, etc. I mean, one employer told me that 13% of their new hires basically quit during that induction phase.

DM – Wow that’s massive, that’s yeah wow.

YK – There’s got to be a better way.

DM – Absolutely, absolutely. Yasmin, you mentioned earlier in the discussion, you know, the equity lens. And I think, you know, when we look not just here domestically in Australia but look globally, for those who, in America for example, those that have started but have not finished a university degree, it’s 79 million people and growing every day. Unfortunately, today those people have a black mark against them because they started but did not finish, and there’s no recognition of what skills they’ve gained through partial completion of that degree, so through that formal education, and everything else they’ve gained through life, through employment, volunteering, hobbies, and all their other interests. So, there’s huge uplifts there as well.

YK – And so many of those people’s circumstances force them to stop. It’s not that they don’t want to do it; often it’s a family challenge or crisis that has meant they’ve had to stop. Certainly, if I think about the care sector, the number of people who have carers’ responsibilities and what they do and how they manage, it means that they’ve had limited opportunities to do other things because of their massive care responsibilities. If you could harness those extraordinary skills that those people have, and they are extraordinary and give them a pathway to another opportunity of employment because their care responsibilities have changed, can you imagine what we would be able to unlock? I think that’s where we really have to start to do more than just use the benchmark of a qualification as evidence. Evidence can come from many different places, and I think that’s one of the really inspirational things that SkillsAware is trying to do, is to say, we’re not saying you can do something and that’s okay; we are validating and verifying the evidence that somebody says they can do something. It’s not just about having a piece of paper. So, that plumber who left school at year 10, you can say, well, actually, you’ve probably got the equivalent of a building qualification based on jobs you’ve done over the last 30 years. You’re a lot more than no I left school in year 10.

MK – Picking up a theme you raised, Dan, just quickly, you talked about the flip of the coin from software as a service to service software. So, software as a service that we’re all used to is things like accounting, like MYOB or Xero, or travel sites like Webjet, Qantas, Jetstar, or Virgin, where you log on to the cloud and you get a service based on their strict set of rules. So, you operate to their set of rules. What we’re doing is in the brave new world of adaptive software, and therefore what the software does, and this is where people talk about AI, but the real benefit of this is that it becomes adaptive and learns. So, that’s why we’re saying we’re services software. What we want to do is there are millions and millions of hiring managers, recruiters, team leaders who are spending an inordinate amount of time trying to find the right person with the right skills. We’re not saying those people are going to go away; we’re just offering them a better service, that’s all, and saving perhaps 60-70% of their time.

DM – One of the pieces of feedback that we’ve gotten from early users was that one was incredibly excited. Just saying, ‘Skills, I have skills,’ and again, it’s a language that people are just not used to expressing themselves in, but we know that’s what industry wants. So, again, bringing that lens, supporting those in HR, supporting those from an organisation perspective, but ultimately coming back to the individual and giving them a voice. And as you said, Yasmin, that evidence to back up that claim. That’s incredibly useful for the organisation but also for that individual to give them that voice for their skills.

YK – That skills literacy piece is so critical because I think even when I see media reports that talk about skills, they mix job roles with the concept of skills mix. There isn’t a universal definition. So, actually having a standardised approach to how you evaluate is a significant benefit. It’s not just going to be the Australian training package system. I think, as Mark likes to refer to, you can plug in any dictionary, any framework, any approach that somebody says, ‘Oh, that’s what we measure against,’ that’s fine. But the issue is you need to standardise it and then make sure that you’re actually validating and providing evidence against it. We’ve started with the Australian training package system because that’s what we have and know, but it could be anything. It could be a digital skills framework, it can be a capability framework for the care sector.

MK – There’s one common theme to what we do, and aren’t we so fortunate to have got the name SkillsAware because it’s exactly what we do. It’s nice that we got in early and got that name. But, you know, the simple question, the simple way of saying it is, when you’re considering a person, do they know and can they do? Simple as that. Everything else is complex language about describing whether they know and can do. But we’re aware that we’re trying to give people a sense of what they know and what they can do, and the utility, the enablement, the empowerment, the agency, if you like, to share it.

DM – Well said. Fantastic, well, great discussion. Yeah, I think that actually sums it up nicely. But, yeah, Yasmin, anything you’d like to add?

YK – No, I just found this whole process incredible. I think we’ve achieved an enormous amount in effectively just under a year.

MK – No, well under a year. We turned the first sod of soil on the 1st of May, from memory. So, you know, we’ve achieved an enormous amount to be where we are. We can’t wait for next year, hey?

DM – That’s right.

YK – Having said that, I mean, it was because we all came with a lot of foundations to build upon and put together. So, you know, it’s been not much sleep over the last little while, but I think it’s exciting because I think it isn’t technology or a service trying to find a market. We are addressing a real problem that exists, and I just think we’ve been fortunate enough to find the right people to come together to actually solve it.

DM – Agree. And I think the feedback that we get when we explain SkillsAware is, ‘Oh, okay, so I work in the travel industry, and here’s my challenge,’ or ‘Hey, I work in volunteering,’ or ‘Hey, I work in industry,’ and everyone gets it. That excitement and that imperative is contagious, and so the excitement is building. Much more, even better things to come.

MK – And let’s be aware, this is adaptive software. So, you know, we are where we are today. It’s not perfect; it’s good, not perfect. It’s going to get better and better and better because it will teach itself how to be better. So that’s great. We’re just the stewards, the shepherds of the process, I see.

DM – True.