I’ll admit it. I am a bit of a grizzled old veteran of the tech industry having been in systems-based solution design and delivery for all four decades of my professional career. That career began with learning to program on mainframe computers in languages like BASIC, Fortran and Cobol and quickly evolved with the advent of the IBM PC (personal computer) in 1981 closely followed by internetworking, distributed systems, client server, wide area communications and the world wide web to name a few of the waves I surfed over my career.
I came into the learning market in late 1999 after hearing John Chambers, who was then CEO of Nasdaq darling Cisco Systems and at the vanguard of innovation and growth in tech in the 90s, when he pushed us all to adopt the Internet and web-based applications as the future of business. Mr. Chambers made a prediction that web applications like ecommerce and, specifically, something called “elearning”, would cause such a dramatic shift on business as to “make email appear to be a rounding error” in terms of overall technology impact. In the nearly three decades since, I have talked to several different fellow company cofounders who all recall that same John Chambers quote as a siren’s cry and call-to-action to join the Internet revolution and transform enterprise learning from “atoms to bits.” It was a quote that “launched a thousand ships” as they say as scores of new vendors flooded into the market to try and capture the attentions and budgets of organizations moving their business needs to the web. Of course, a few vendors won while most lost their campaigns over the years to establish themselves as suppliers and partners to others seeking to get online with their learning. That business has evolved from basic centralized training records management systems to today’s more sophisticated LMS, LXP and specialized portals that operate in online, mobile and even virtual spaces to deliver learning at the time of need in the most efficient and effective ways possible.
But everything in tech goes through cycles and we are now at the forefront of another tectonic shift as generative artificial intelligence transforms how virtually every business operates and how every knowledge worker interacts with their teams and customers and systems. Much of our global economy is hinged directly to the VAST amounts of investment capital being poured into laying the physical foundation for building out AI to support every major business need or market and all business leaders are being compelled to figure out how AI can bring change (and profitability) to their business operations. Many of yesterday’s systems and solutions are perceived as antiquated and perhaps in need of change making us all rethink how we do things today and how, specifically, AI might improve upon on our historical approaches and methods.
Recently, I was struck by another prediction from HR industry analyst Josh Bersin of Bersin & Associates, who said (paraphrased for clarity):
“But the paradigm is clear, and the reason that I’m so hot on this… there (are) many billions of dollars invested, or maybe the word is stranded, in the corporate learning space. Billions of dollars of content, courses, LMSs, assessments…platforms that do video distribution (and) simulations, and that stuff’s going to all come to pass, or rather come to migrate into this new, more dynamic AI first, or AI-centric experience.”
Podcast from The Josh Bersin Company: OpenAI Just Dropped A Bomb On The Learning Market, Oct 7, 2025
This is actually a very powerful insight and represents one of the main drivers for why we feel MetaLark has such strong potential and appeal for the marketplace. By some accounts, there is more than US$350 billion of value in the content global enterprises have amassed that sits inside – essentially locked into – proprietary LMS platforms and cloud directories and content management systems every organization maintains to support their business operations. Conversely, the Large Language Models (LLMs) that underpin all our generative AI efforts demand direct access to all the approved and vetted content our organizations possess and it serves as “feed stock” to those models that demand more and more approved and vetted data to provide better informed results from the prompts we throw at those models to help improve our business operations.
For most organizations, capturing and unleashing the content locked inside their traditional learning courseware packages, from SCORM, xAPI and cmi5 to digital resources like videos and podcasts to PDF files and Office-style documents, is challenging many of these digital assets were never designed to be “open formats” whose content could be easily extracted from their secure packaging. And even if that content could be extracted, teams require the ability to review all those scrapped materials into one centralized and highly-searchable repository using finely tuned methods where analysts can vet what’s good and what needs fixing versus what needs to be retired or deleted before that content is shared with an LLM that is going to assume everything fed into it is of equal value and validity.
MetaLark was designed and built to addresses this business case out-of-the-box. Teams can unlock their content, organize and review all extracted results, and mark the appropriate items for sharing directly into other learning-centric and general-purpose AI applications and models to increase the value and integrity of next generation learning activities.