regarding students’ learning progress, where they might be struggling and identify topics to focus on in their subsequent sessions. “The last area relates to immersive simulations and scenario-based learning practice. We are currently developing what we call ‘rooms of the future’ in an EU‑funded project, where learning spaces are equipped with VR, AR and IoT technologies.” Michele Quintano: “We offer all students on our longer programmes access to an AI co-pilot and faculty members are working with participants to build new ways of learning through generative AI (GenAI) together. A central consideration right now is that while a co-pilot or tool like ChatGPT can help you build a structure or framework, you then need to add value to the content.” Luigi Gangitano: “We have been exploring possibilities around the metaverse and VR technology a lot in the last few years. We also have an in-house production company that not only produces content, but also applications in VR and immersive learning. This is proving to be very effective in the industrial manufacturing space and is being incorporated in our provision of corporate education for manufacturing companies. “In terms of the content, we no longer record videos; it’s all GenAI-generated and it’s extremely effective because teachers don’t need to come to the studio and students get top-class video content with perfectly spoken English, Spanish or whichever language suits them best.” What is the role of digital platforms in executive education and lifelong learning? How do you choose the right platforms to meet your needs and those of your students? Raffaele Oriani: “In terms of the objective, I think the role of different digital platforms is more or less the same, but what’s important is transforming them into collaborative environments. This has a lot to do with the incentives students need to go into the classroom, exchange ideas and have face-to-face interactions. Another big issue, in my experience, is the decision to change platforms: it would be good if providers could make change management policies easier in this area. This issue not only relates to the migration of content from one platform to another, but also to the user experience of staff and faculty members, as well as the students.” Luigi Gangitano: “My mantra these days is change management because adoption is hard for everyone. It’s hard for staff who need to change what they do, so we provide training and support for each one of them. It’s even harder for students, who should not overly focus on the tool. So, we employ co-design and proper UX design techniques to build easy-to-use services.
“Even simple choices, like building a separate portal for lifelong learning experiences, can have, in hindsight, its shortcomings. FLEXA, our AI-based lifelong learning solution, was designed with an excellent user experience. Still, we needed to put in a lot of effort to constantly invite our alumni to access and use its features. Using marketing automation, nudging and psychological activities, we keep them engaged. “During FLEXA’s development, we learned that making services available where the users spend most of their time online is more important than the technology we employ and the features we propose. This was a contributing factor behind the strategic choice to have a single front-end where our digital service is available, because once students get there, they can access their lifelong learning, assessments, AI and all the other features we designed for them. Taking the first step is the real challenge.” Olga Ivanova: “We had different, fragmented platforms that were good by themselves, but it was challenging to encourage users to
22 Ambition • ISSUE 5 • 2025
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