Philip Huthwaite in conversation with Learning News

To celebrate the arrival of 5app's new CEO, Philip Huthwaite, he joined Learning News' Rob Clarke to talk about his background, the challenges facing L&D today and his ambitious plans for 5app. 

Watch the video above to get the lowdown, or take a look at what Philip had to say below:

What is the main challenge facing 5app?

We're in our next phase of growth, which is exciting, but that comes with its own growing pains. We've built an elegant learning experience that enables our customers to deliver their own content or utilise our market-leading content bundles, so now it's a question of how we capitalise on that with the right processes and data-driven decision making, so we can deliver more at speed and scale the business to the next stage.

What is 5app's USP?

Our platform is elegant, simple and extremely easy to use. This is something that comes out time and time again when people are assessing 5app against the competition. Our competitors typically take weeks, if not months, to set up a new installation, and the same to deliver a new learning initiative. You can do the same with 5app in days, if not hours, which is a game changer in this fast-paced environment. 

We've also worked really hard on the user experience to make it easy to use and adoption friendly. We haven't focused on feature bloat for features' sake, which typically means you end up with a clunky system. 

What are the wider challenges facing the sector this year and going into 2025?

You'd have to be living under a rock if you haven't heard the talk of AI in the L&D sector! But that does mean that we're falling into a trap where lots of vendors are adopting AI for the sake of AI, and it can easily become a gimmick. 

But AI is absolutely here to stay. It's extremely powerful if used correctly, but we as a sector must make sure we're looking at the problem statement first to determine what AI solution will ultimately deliver an optimal learning experience over just adopting AI for AI's sake. If we take the problem statement first and make sure the solution fits that, it'll be a win-win for both providers and learners.

How is 5app's product roadmap a game changer in the L&D sector?

We have an elegant solution, and therefore our roadmap is adopting AI in an elegant way to really support and enhance the end learner. Initially, we're focusing on supporting the existing learning experience, for example with personalised learning, to make sure the learner can get more value out of the content already in the platform, making sure it's delivered in a timely fashion and making sure it's more digestible. This is coming earlier on in our roadmap.

We're also working on using AI where the end learner won't even know they're using AI. That part is about making processes, number crunching and data analysis more efficient. These are usually considered some of the unsexy uses of AI, but this is what really sets your platform up for success.

Time is money, so anything you can do to make the setup of learning content more efficient is going to be a win-win for us as a supplier and the end consumer. We're also working on some new modules that will help us expand into new categories, but we'll need a whole new interview for that!

What's on the to-do list for you at the moment?

My to-do list is as long as my arm at the moment, but I'm in race horse mode and focusing on delivering incremental value. 

I set out a six-month plan for the business prior to joining, and now I'm in that validation phase. We've got two ears and one mouth for a reason, so I'm listening to our team members and listening to our customers to validate that initial plan and tweaking it accordingly before I put my foot to the floor and go full steam to execute it.

A non-negotiable part of that six-month plan is putting in Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). I'm a firm believer in OKRs to set out that North Star of the business to make sure everyone knows the direction of travel to make better decisions. It's good for us and good for our customers!