On Monday, Cornerstone OnDemand announced its acquisition of Talespin, a spatial learning company focused on workforce skills development.
Talespin’s extended reality learning technology encompasses virtual, augmented and mixed reality and allows employees to learn in the flow of work in contextually relevant virtual worlds that simulate real-life physical, behavioral and emotional situations, according to Cornerstone’s March 19 press release.
Talespin’s immersive learning content is now available within Cornerstone’s Content Subscriptions and can be integrated into its learning solutions for all customers. Additionally, Cornerstone customers can now use the Talespin platform to create and deploy out-of-the-box, customized or self-created immersive training for use cases across industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, finance and retail to address skills gaps and talent shortages.
This includes Talespin’s AI-powered, no-code XR content authoring tool, CoPilot Designer, and its generative AI immersive learning labs services offering, according to the press release.
“As a leader in learning and talent experience for over two decades, we embarked on a journey of redefining the future of work,” says Himanshu Palsule, Cornerstone’s CEO. “We’ve evolved to provide engaging, personalized tools centered around growth for employees to pave their own path. A natural evolution from personalized is providing truly immersive learning experiences through spatial computing and GenAI. Talespin is another important step in our vision to provide a holistic, integrated continuum of learning solutions with the right content at the right time — and now — with the right modality.”
The cost of the acquisition was not disclosed in Cornerstone’s press release.
According to a March 19 blog post by industry analyst and expert Josh Bersin, while Talespin has been a smaller player, their impact on the market could now be huge.
“With Talespin you can use GenAI to build character-based content in minutes to hours, instead of days to weeks,” Bersin writes. “Over time the Generative tools are getting better, enabling companies to build lifelike character-based learning at scale. And the scale goes far beyond having a nice character and presence to interact with. Talespin’s latest development tools let you create characters that have almost unlimited scenarios for response, creating an environment that feels like a real person. This not only lets companies build content faster, it lets Talespin address more complex use cases: sales training, management training, negotiation, ethical situations, and more.”
According to Bersin, this presents a huge potential growth opportunity for Cornerstone, which already has 20+ platforms operating within its business and has continued to grow its revenue to more than $1 billion since it went private in 2021.“While VR training has been around for a while, most companies don’t know much about it,” Bersin writes. “With Cornerstone’s sales muscle and all the new buzz about Apple and Meta’s headsets, this growth curve will accelerate. And the applications for this are everywhere: from operational training to leadership scenarios to safety and even first-person shooter safety. There’s nothing like a real-world scenario to teach you something you don’t really understand.”
