Ep#103: Revolutionizing Team Learning: UJJI’s Journey in AI-Powered Document and Workflow Management ft. Ludmila Milla (Co-founder & CEO, UJJI)

[00:00:01] AI-powered learning management platform, UJJI, helps teams better manage documents and workflows [00:00:04] Adil Saleh: Greetings everybody. This is Adil from Hyperengage podcast after a long time. We took a quarter break since September 23 and just thinking through things and putting things together personally and professionally. So we came across, just to give you a quick note, came across a lot of ed tech startups back in 2022 and 2003, document management software solutions and teams that are working in that domain. And the moment I saw a platform from UK and the team that they have named OG, I straight got in contact with the CEO. She's sitting right here with us. And it's a really exciting platform that is helping teams to better manage their documents, manage their workflows, manage their. Of course it's more of an AI powered learning management platform. So we have Ludmila with us. She's a CEO and co founder of Ujit. It's a SaaS platform more for teams struggling towards learning management internally and for also their customer education as well. So thank you Ludmila for taking the time. [00:01:22] Ludmila Milla: Thank you. Thank you Adil for having us, especially being the first one this year to do this. So thank you so much for having us and giving us the opportunity to share a little bit of what we are doing here. [00:01:33] Adil Saleh: Yeah, you're so welcome. And I'm so stoked to drive this conversation with you because we always hunt interesting platforms, unique platforms, because after this AI, you know that after chat, GPT four, everybody is trying to build a product coaching software. We've got in the sales domain for marketing teams, for support team, customer success teams. [00:01:57] Building Uji: From Idea to Execution [00:01:57] Adil Saleh: So I was looking at your journey into OG. Of course, you're working for quite some years now as a CEO, but what was that real turning point in your life where you thought, okay, I've done a lot of this, I've done for other businesses. I know learning management inside out, I know how to apply AI into it. What was that one thing that you thought, okay, we got to be something that we got to build this platform as a service, as a subscription service to help these businesses, especially in the UK. And of course, tell us a little bit about your first thoughts. [00:02:38] Ludmila Milla: Cool. So just long story short, I'm originally from Brazil. I've been in the UK for five years now. A little bit more than five years. Back in Brazil, I used to work in HR for quite a long time and then I had my two first business. So I had a prop tech and also a coaching company that we developed and patented the methodology and grow through franchising. So it was more a face to face structure, but helped me to understand how people learn and how people put in practice what they were doing. Once I moved to the UK, I always knew that I wanted to start something again. I'm entrepreneur by heart, so those people that are always trying to make the best of it. I started my executive MBA here in Oxford, and when I was doing this, I reconnected with a friend from France that is also brazilian, Rafael, my co founder. He was doing his master in venture capital and he talking. We got to a point that we both had teams that were growing before he built two corporate ventures in the past. So we both had the pain of how to grow a team and guarantee that everyone was able to do what they are supposed to do right. And especially when the business are scaling. When you are very small, you have the founders very close, and then everyone knows everything that is happening and they are able to be very proactive on what they are doing once you start to grow. And then this is not only for startups and scale up. So when you look for my experience in big corporations on HR, you see that the managers need to be a lot of time. They have to be on top of everyone to guarantee that everything is being done. And not just because people are not good enough or because they don't know, it's because they don't have the information and they don't know how to put this in practice. So this is where Uji started. We applied for the incubator in Oxford, and then we spent the first bit of UJJI validating the methodology that we have, the learning methodology that we have. [00:05:00] Adil Saleh: Very interesting. And I'm so glad that, of course, a lot of people can have ideas when they're just having a morning exercise, it's that easy and that simple. But of course, how you make that idea to an actionable execution. And that execution, whether you fail or succeed, you are able to execute it. I'm so glad that you actually validated it with the best of the communities out in Oxford and you made sure, okay, whatever hypothesis we have, we're going to get it to the production and hand it over to people that are actually going to use it. [00:05:37] UJJI's AI-powered Coaching Platform Helps Users Take Action on Learning [00:05:37] Adil Saleh: Could you just briefly tell us a little bit about that process validation process? [00:05:41] Ludmila Milla: So, during the incubation process, we did a lot of research on exactly where the edge tech was going. And this was before it was in the beginning of the pandemic. We started Doji in 2020. So it was even before this whole AI stuff exploded. But one thing that we knew at that moment, and I think now it's even more true for everyone is that content is not a problem, right? Everyone. You can find anything that you want even before you google everything and then you get the information, you YouTube everything and it's there also. Now with check GPT you can find even faster everything that you need. Content wise. The problem was how people really absorb this content and actually how they put these impacts on their daily life. So during my coaching experience, I saw a lot of people that they were brilliant and they get a book and then they read and say, okay, that's great, but can you help me how to use it? But it's really tricky to see someone that is so smart, so clever and it's not able to put in practice something that they read. So the whole idea of UJJI started with this. How can we make learning something that is actionable and people can do putting practicing daily in their daily lives something that becomes a habit. And this was what we researched for a while in Oxford and tested with neuroscientists there. And I think because Rafael and I, we both had businesses before, we always believe in this as a cushion part of things. So you just need to get things going and create. And we keep saying like, you should be ashamed of your first product. You are not building something that is going to last forever. You are going to iterate this quite a lot. So this is what we have done since the beginning. We tried to put things up and running as fast and as much as we can and then see what happens. It's not about the idea. The idea is going to change quite a lot and you have to be passionate about the problem that you are solving, the marketing that you are solving. But actually I think as an entrepreneur you need to be passionate about having a business. And it's not about you. It's about making something that really works and people love it. [00:08:19] Adil Saleh: It's about making an impact and willing to do whatever it takes to build something that can make an impact. Of course we're going to get into the use cases, more of that. I'll just put one forward because that recently happened with me. I love to hire people. I love to fire people as well. I hire and then I fire faster if I make our own decision, which you do most oftentimes when you're a startup. So we are also a startup. B two B SaaS company. We have a podcast that is going as a GTM two. It's more of a product marketing and all. I've hired a team member. We do everything inside notion, every documentation, training center, all of that. Ever since notion came on the Internet. So we were one of the early adopters of notion. So now one of the team members that we recently got rid of, and it's not bad. It happened for her good. We asked for the feedback on an annual dinner and she said, I learned a lot. There was so much that I was so much overwhelmed by not knowing a lot of things. But I would say if somebody that replaces me on this role, I would love for you guys to have a better training center or better training modules and all these kind of things. We have everything scattered, to be very honest. Like, we have 1 million documents. Just to make sure that we get these guest onboarded documentation for discussion points, talking points, all of that pre booking workflow, post booking workflow, and then our onboarding documents for the product people that are coming in that are pretty smoothest because we are going very high touch. But at scale, when we think of serving 200 and 5300 customers, paying customers, companies can be not as big, but let's say we have like 300 customers like Uji. We need to make sure that we make those documentation repeatable, seamless, and they're delivering information and people are retaining information. And that girl I'm talking about, he was having really hard time. I was facing it because being a CEO, sometimes you have like four or five different things that you have to do consistently every day. So it's so hard for you to repeat yourself every day. We had this documentation, but she was not able to retain that information. I've tried many things like I've created videos on loom, treated some documents, making long slack messages as well, but nothing seemed to work because she was not able to retain that information. So that is one use case. [00:10:59] How UJJI Helps Startups with Employee Onboarding and Training [00:10:59] Adil Saleh: So how do you think that just talk about startups that are listening to this episode, how it best works. [00:11:07] Ludmila Milla: This is a great example and it's exactly what we keep chatting about with our clients is that, as Rafael would say this quite a lot, we are not all Coca Colas of this world, right? So we don't have all the budget and the time to create a learning and development team inside of the companies. But it doesn't mean that you don't have the knowledge inside of the company. And as I mentioned, the content is there, as would be for anything else. The knowledge is also in the company. But the way that this is delivered and the way that this is easy access for people is chew in a very boring old way. So imagine you arriving in a company and then suddenly someone will say, okay, read this, 1000 pages here and then you are going to figure out what you have to do. On the other, if you put yourself in a position of the employee, you say like okay, but I have no clue. It's still what you expect and how can I spend my time doing this? So OG is exactly this learning and development person in scale for this company. So imagine that you have all this knowledge in your company and then we capture this knowledge and then we deliver this in our methodology that we see the high adoption and retention rates that we have at UG. So everyone goes through this test, learn, apply methodology that you help people to get into a small session that could be a podcast like or a video like session explaining what they need to learn. But then they get a real life task that they need to put this in practice. So they get something like okay, review the last mail that you sent to a client or then try to speak to someone in the customer success and ask those questions. And then when people are involved in this process as adults, you really learn what you need to do instead of just retaining some content that is not something that you are going to put in practice. So you just know that it's there, but you don't know what to do with this. So what we do is we get this knowledge that is always catered around the company. Sometimes companies doesn't even have the documents that you already went really far with, creating all the notions and looms and stuff. Sometimes we don't have. And then you have the managers trying to replicate these and telling the same story again and again and again to everyone. Or even if you have startups and scale ups, we change quite fast. So imagine you are launching a new product or you are launching a new feature and you need everyone to be on the same page. How can you guarantee that everyone is getting the same information and they know what to do with this? [00:14:03] Adil Saleh: Yeah. Why? I brought this up on a recorded call because I just had this conversation last night with my co founder. So because I was curious, like if anybody has a feedback. So he mentioned that she gave this feedback on a dinner table and she said that this is something we could have done better. So I'm glad that we met and I've got more insights and we'll definitely catch up on how we can work together towards this problem because we have a lot of knowledge base inside, tons of docs. I can write books on it. This is a little bit about use cases and Ug. [00:14:43] UJJI: Improving Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration for Remote Teams [00:14:43] Adil Saleh: Could you tell us a little bit about your customers, how many teams are using UJJI and what kind of segment are you targeting for the first? You've got there for about three years now, so you're getting closer to the product market. What kind of teams? [00:14:57] Ludmila Milla: We launched commercially within October 2022, so it's been a year or so that we are really commercializing and we have today around 35 forge companies using UG. And what we see is that our target clients are companies between 50 to 300 people that are really struggling with their knowledge base, but they are not companies with their own LNG professionals full time trying to replicate this training. So this is what we really target. And we see that the companies that have remote workers, especially outside the UK, so we have a few use cases that are really interesting around people that have part of the team here in the UK and parts in Africa or India or Eastern Europe, and how you make this information flow and how you guarantee that people are getting the right culture and they feel part of what they are doing. So because UJI has a lot of tools like leaderboards and communications, and then people can share their knowledge between the team and send information, this really brings the team together. [00:16:25] Adil Saleh: Yeah. Cool. [00:16:26] UJJI offers an AI-powered learning platform for companies [00:16:26] Adil Saleh: And could you also tell us a little bit about your onboarding to the moment? This product basically absolutely fits into your processes and start delivering value. And how long is the process, how does the process work? [00:16:42] Ludmila Milla: So we have two different plans for our clients. We have the starter plan and the pro plan to onboard your team. At OG, it's like minute, you just need to upload the list of users or give their users an access code. They can download the app and go straight away and start using this. So it's really easy for onboarding the whole team. In the starter plan, you have access to the contents that is straight in the platform. So we have more than 400 hours of training on soft skills, behavioral skills and technical skills already in the platform for the users. Then on the pro plan, you start uploading your own content. And this is as fast as we can transform your knowledge base in minutes using our AI. And then this goes straight to the platform, you just validate and then it goes straight live to the app. So it's usually a couple of days until the clients really gather the material or even if you don't have the material. We invite the user to a call with her AI and then in a quick workshop we extract the knowledge and then based on that, we create the learning. So we have a really powerful customer success team that we will lead, help the onboarding, and we use flola. That is a great partner, probably they have been in this podcast before. So Flola is a big partner of us and the whole onboarding goes through. [00:18:22] Adil Saleh: Yeah, very interesting, very interesting. I was coming to the customer success like post saves. [00:18:27] UJJI interview with Ludmila Milla [00:18:27] Adil Saleh: What kind of activities are you tracking, talking about starter plan that you have? I assume that this is more of a self start plan, more of a product led growth motion. Is it right? You want people to just get on board and seamlessly and use all the documentation, consume all the documentation as templates, standardized templates. [00:18:46] Ludmila Milla: So we do have all the training that we developed internally. So around communicates everything that we know that these startups needs on soft skills. So we have communications, problem solving, adaptability, negotiation and so on. So those trainings are already uploaded in the platform. And then what leaders do they share? We usually choose the pathway of the month that we want everyone to go and create a bit of context. So we have insights dashboard that the leaders can see what's happening in the company, who is really engaging, how many hours people are taking on that. And also we start to sharing sites of what we are really seeing as a company mood or what people are learning and where are the skill gaps that they have. So those are the information that we track. And this is all live in the dashboard for the decision makers. [00:19:46] Adil Saleh: Very interesting, very interesting. And looking at your customer success as you, how much of it is digital, like how you're staying on top of data points, let's say as a team using the product, how you're monitoring my usage in order to make sure if I'm going on the right path. Am I successfully onboarded, am I adopting to the platform? Am I going to retain or not? How likely am I going to expand if I have more team members in it? So are there any data points or any data driven decisions that you're post sales? [00:20:17] Ludmila Milla: Yeah. So from the decision maker side, we have these insights dashboard that we can track like adoption rates and rotation rates. So we have our adoption rates today they are around 70% of the companies and we have clients going up to 9100 percent and the industry average is around 12%. So we are doing quite well. And our retention rates after 90 days, the average is about 50%. But we have clients sustaining this as high as 80%. So those are the numbers that we track. And then this is shoot for the decision maker live in our portal so they can see how this is going. And also our customer success team will engage with them using the flow. So we have this flow with the activities that we suggest them to do. So there is the invitation for the team we share how we imagine this happening on our hands, how they could communicate this, how to choose the pathway of the month, how to share things. We have integration with Slack and Microsoft team, so how they can use this, so all this information and we have our customer success team really engaging with the decision maker to guarantee that they are on top of this flow and they know what to do next. [00:21:49] Adil Saleh: Very interesting, very interesting. [00:21:51] UJJI Conversation with Ludmila Milla [00:21:51] Adil Saleh: So now thinking about a team of 150 team members split across all the posts, like customer facing that are consuming documents, product teams that are consuming documents a lot. So if you think as OG, is it more fancy towards customer facing teams or product teams or is it also for the developers? Because they have different documentations, you know that, right? So they have all their features pretty much documented. Whatever they build, they put it on public like dev docs that they build. So if a lot of these platforms that came with podcasts might be listening to episodes, they build those products for developers. So is there any opportunity for them to integrate into OG or anything similar to this? [00:22:41] Ludmila Milla: So we really engage with all teams in the company. So the idea is to create pathways that make sense for them and because we create the learning in a way that people understand what they need to understand and then they can have access to everything in more detail. So imagine what we do a lot with technical teams is that someone can come and do. We can create, for example, a mixed panel training and then share the best practices around that company on how to do this and what are the features that they can implement. And then this becomes part of the documentation and then that you can have the link for the full documentation on how to get it. So this is the idea that you really share the knowledge for everyone in. [00:23:31] Adil Saleh: Any area of the company and talking about your customers, like 35 teams, 35 companies that are using, what is the major segment of customers using this platform? Is it more customer facing teams, more product teams? [00:23:48] Ludmila Milla: We have a very big hit around sales and customer success. I think this is where a lot of the use cases lay, especially on objection handling and all this training on success cases that they want to share and so on. We have a lot of onboarding processes and also around all the policies and stuff that people need to know about cybersecurity or about the whole onboarding journey. So this is something that's happening quite a lot. And we do have a lot of people that just come for the starter plan and then they want to train their teams on all the that gives. [00:24:31] Adil Saleh: You an opportunity to make sure you give them the best service to make them successfully widely successful and then expand them. I would love to see touch on just 1 minute on what kind of tools are you using to make sure that you're staying on top of those activities that they are performing inside your platform as a starter plan. [00:24:53] Ludmila Milla: Yeah, so we monitor a lot hours of training and start to see if we have any sort of lumps and see if something people are disengaging with that. And then how can we reengage the user. And I think this is the biggest thing that we do quite a lot. So we use a lot of different channels like email marketing or so on to guarantee that we bring people back to the app. So this is one thing that we do quite a lot. And then if we see that at some point what happened is that the companies start to understand that it's just the point of the iceberg and we have companies just moving from the starter plan to the pro plan. Okay, now my team is used to this and we really want to start building our own content. So this is where we have an upsell that is pretty interesting for us to do. [00:25:51] Adil Saleh: Amazing. I love the fact that you're more focused on a startup plan, how you can expand them for their good, so they can do more, they can have their own documentation, create their own templates, and automate their workflows. Interesting. [00:26:06] Chat with Ludmila Milla about AI Reading Comprehension [00:26:06] Adil Saleh: So one last thing before we push out. I know it's pretty much on time. So what is the ten X feature that you have in your product? Okay. [00:26:15] Ludmila Milla: I think this AI conversion is something that people really engage with. So it's not only about summarizing documents. I think this is something that is quite easy to do. The thing is that how to really help people to engage and learn and retain and put in practice something that we can transform. So this is, I think is what we really make that is like. [00:26:46] Adil Saleh: Are you talking about the collaborative aspect of your platform? [00:26:51] Ludmila Milla: Yeah. And especially how we integrate the AI feature on reading these documents and summarizing this, but actually how these summaries are delivered. I think this is the shift itself that is not just giving people smaller content, it's a smaller content with actionable. [00:27:12] Adil Saleh: Steps now, keeping it short and sweet, but actionable. [00:27:17] Ludmila Milla: Yeah. [00:27:20] Adil Saleh: That's why things get lost in translation, because there are so many things of it to take action on and you cannot get a gist of some actionable pointers that are helping you lean towards action fastly. It's about it, these startups, I myself am a startup. I can see it right here. It's all about leaning towards action fastly. Making mistakes, fastly learning, fastly learning from other people's mistake. You cannot live long enough to make them yourself anyway, so it's all about making sure you leverage technology as much as possible. I really appreciate your time. It was super insightful. Your energy was infectious. And I'm so glad that some lady coming out of this background know validating the product inside Oxford and building this and helping these companies. And we'll definitely touch back for some more conversations on how we can incorporate into our smaller, tiny little bit company and how it helps. [00:28:18] Ludmila Milla: Amazing. Thank you so much Adil, for having me. [00:28:21] Adil Saleh: Thank you very much.