- Innovation
How can AI elevate human potential? How can businesses integrate AI to remain competitive? At Pearson VUE, we’re responsibly and ethically embracing the human touch with AI to improve learning and assessment outcomes for everyone.
To find out how AI is enhancing human skills, we talked to our people — individuals making a real-world impact in a particular area of learning and assessments. We asked them where AI will take us as an organization over the next few years, how advancements with AI will transform our customers’ experiences, and how they’re using this technology as part of their day-to-day roles.
Hear from our subject matter experts
Casey Kearns, Director, Product Management
“When it comes to AI, staying true to our human-in-the-loop approach is such a key part of our rules of engagement.” Casey Kearns, Director of Product Management, highlights the importance of keeping our people engaged in our AI strategy.
“We know that AI models can introduce some misconceptions — whether that’s showing some kind of bias or even answering the same question in multiple ways.
What human-in-the-loop allows us to do is keep our people engaged in the process. This is where they’re really the experts — looking at the facts and considering the bigger picture. Not only do they enhance the accuracy of the AI tools, but they make the system we’re using more reliable — ensuring that the technology supports us better — while being aligned with our values.’’
Dr. Edward Feng Li, Principal Psychometrician
'’I expect AI to adjust people's pace of learning and deliver enhancements such as more personalized learning patterns,’' Dr. Edward Feng Li, Principal Psychometrician, paints an exciting picture of the future of education powered by AI.
‘’For assessment, AI will help subject matter experts scale item generation, create complex items (including simulations and multimedia), and identify gaps in content coverage to develop more targeted assessments.’’
Aaron Woodward, Product Manager, OnVUE
“As cheating tactics become more sophisticated — AI is crucial for enhancing security measures.” Aaron Woodward, OnVUE Product Manager, believes advancements in AI technology are poised to revolutionize exam security by proactively detecting and deterring suspicious acts.
‘’With the next generation of AI technology, we’ll be able to refine existing models and train AI to aid in detecting cheating tactics. This includes assisting in identifying unauthorized materials (such as mobile phones) and making sure the candidate taking the exam is the same person throughout the process. By focusing on these advancements, we aim to develop a robust AI system that can effectively pinpoint and mitigate potential security breaches in the online proctoring space.’’
Greg Anderson, Senior Product Manager, OnVUE
''Generative AI will help us to identify common online exam pain points to continue to improve the candidate experience.'' Greg Anderson, OnVUE Product Manager, highlights how AI will accelerate data analysis across millions of exams a year — from weeks to hours.
“Our goal is to employ generative AI to summarize all these insights — anonymously of course — and identify common candidate pain-points to continue to improve the candidate experience. AI is accelerating data analysis — enabling quicker aggregation and pattern recognition of online exam data — reducing analysis time from weeks to hours.”
Amanda Smith, Director, Customer Service
“I think the key with AI is that while we should embrace these tools in our work, we shouldn’t rely on technology only — otherwise we could lose crucial (human) skills.'’ Amanda Smith, Director of Customer Service, highlights ways to use AI as a resource to improve efficiency, balancing it with a human approach when engaging with customers.
“Our end goal from a customer experience perspective is really to allow AI to handle more of the routine, everyday tasks for our customers. We need to make sure we're continuing to fully engage with helping the customer, which includes thinking critically about things, reading through them, and writing things ourselves. AI is great at assisting us with this and will enhance our customer interactions.’’
Dr. Edward Feng Li, Principal Psychometrician
''AI will help identify emerging skills, resulting in better alignment with evolving real-world competencies.” Dr. Edward Feng Li, Principal Psychometrician, shares his perspective of a world where AI bridges the gap between skills that professionals have and skills that organizations expect.
‘’For certification bodies, AI will help identify emerging skills within professions and enhance traditional job task analysis — one of the core psychometric services Pearson VUE provides. This will result in better alignment with evolving real-world competencies. Ultimately, by generating the most suitable assessment content, we’ll ensure that credentials better reflect real-world skills, increasing their value for employers and learners.’’
Aaron Woodward, Product Manager, OnVUE
‘’Exam security is vital to preserving the credibility of a certification.” Aaron Woodward, OnVUE Product Manager, explores how AI can serve as a guardian of exam integrity by identifying suspicious patterns.
‘’AI does not decide you’ve done anything wrong in your online exam. AI helps identify suspicious behavior patterns because it can quickly analyze vast amounts of data — flagging anything suspicious to a human for intervention. It’s protecting the integrity of the credential you've worked so hard for. So that when you highlight your certification or license in a professional environment, no one can turn around and say it’s a meaningless credential because someone else has cheated.’’
Gerry Mimick, Director, Product Management
“Responses are generated by AI, and AI is trained by human experts, which helps maintain the integrity and accuracy of the information we provide to candidates.” Gerry Mimick, Director of Product Management, pulls back the curtain on the meticulous checks our self-help AI applications face.
‘’Our self-help AI applications undergo rigorous testing. We not only use our customers (i.e., test organizations), but we also add a special, cross-functional team of additional testers to expose our AI to a wide variety of content and questions to validate that the answers provided are correct. This approach underscores the importance of combining human oversight with AI technology to maintain high standards of reliability and ethical practice in all our AI-related endeavors.’’
Bridget Herd, SVP of Program Management
“Embrace AI as part of your daily life. Tell your peers at work about how you're using it — and share what you’ve learned.” Bridget Herd, SVP, Client Program Management, suggests starting small if you’re new to using AI. Experiment — both professionally and personally — then share your experiences.
‘’Sharing what you’ve learned and your successes makes it more real — and more relatable for others. No matter who you are, and what you do, there are so many ways in which you can incorporate AI into both your personal and your professional life.
For those who are a bit nervous about it, I recommend starting very small. For example, try having AI draft an email to begin with. Once you start taking these small steps, you can work up to bigger tasks. Given the pace of change with this technology, I don’t think any of us can really anticipate what our AI-driven future will look like — but that's part of what makes it so exciting.’’
Greg Birzes, CTO
“AI implementation across our organization has been principled — it’s been about firmly establishing our foundation, and that foundation is rooted in education.” Greg Birzes, Chief Technology Officer emphasizes the need to educate employees on the responsible use of AI.
‘’Establishing guardrails around where we should and where we shouldn’t use AI — how to protect the interests of our clients, testing candidates, and the public in general. And then educating our employees on the responsible use of AI, which is going to be so fundamental in this new AI-driven era.’’