WHAT IS IT?

I was first introduced to Project Cortex at Microsoft Ignite, a technology conference in Orlando on 4-8 November 2019.

I was standing in the audience listening to CEO Microsoft Satya Nadella talking about the key new announcements and this one particularly stood out for me.

When I saw how people can find documents, people and drill down into information across their organisational network, I thought to myself, "Hello, this is Delve on steroids."

Then my second thought was, "oh wow, this changes everything especially around encouraging people to tag content - and how much time it would save trying to FIND stuff inside the company".

My third thought was, "Crap. What does this mean for departments like Learning and Development. Here we have the "machine" curating resources and personalising the experience so that the user can find information and people at their fingertips ACROSS the entire organisational network. What does this mean for the types of SKILLS people will need - do they any now that they can rely on the system to basically find stuff for them.

Do they need curation skills? Do they need skills in building internal networks and communities when it basically does the work for them? Do they need any skills in how to search and critique/evaluate/discern what they find (because assuming there's a level of TRUST that the content is correct?"

So I got myself into a tizzy and decided to just take it one step at a time and explore what it's about - then deal with the big questions of what's it MEAN for modern workplace skills?

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