Luis Garcia has been named president of Senseily, a learning management startup founded by Jacques Fu, the former chief technology officer and co-founder of Orlando unicorn Stax Payments.
Garcia is an established presence in digital learning, an early adopter and leader who launched Full Sail University’s online degree programs in 2007, thereby doubling the school’s roster of degree-seeking students in about two-and-a-half years.
Now at Senseily, he is poised to bring the expertise he’s built in the education space over 19 years to the brave new world of AI-powered learning platforms.
The global learning management systems industry is growing rapidly, projected to expand from $18.26 billion in 2023 to $47.47 billion by 2030. Some of that explosion can be attributed to all that’s made possible by artificial intelligence.
Orlando Business Journal caught up with Garcia to learn what he envisions for the future of learning and how Senseily will help drive that.
What attracted you to joining the Senseily team?
The people that started this, they’re a group of entrepreneurs that have achieved incredible success. Jacques as CEO and developer, and [Stax founders] Suneera Madhani and Sal Madhani as great advisors. They could have easily self-funded Senseily, but they’ve decided to raise money locally as a leadership statement. They want to be a strong spark that ignites a lot more investment into the technology ecosystem of Orlando. The investing mindset is traditional in Central Florida, and Senseily wants to bring change. That made coming to Senseily very appealing, because I love this city and I love this ecosystem.
What is Senseily, exactly?
It’s an AI-powered learning platform intended for enterprise-level use. There are other AI platforms out there that show people how to monetize their expertise, like Kajabi, Disco and Teachable. But we are focusing on businesses first.
Do you have clients?
We do. We already have a contract with a major state tourism agency to create 52 different courses, with ten versions of each one, for different kinds of learners. We’re in a stage of development where there’s a lot of interaction between our team and the client, getting the scope of what they need and translating that into video slideshows with text and voiceovers generated by Senseily’s proprietary technology, which we call Cognition. By the end of the year, clients will be able to submit voice and video samples so we can create instructor avatars in the likeness of the instructor. We already have a good prototype.
What kinds of courses is Senseily creating for the client?
The agency is creating courses to teach business owners how to market themselves effectively. There’s one on how to use TikTok to promote your business. There’s a version that works for a coffee shop owner, another version for a business that rents out kayaks. The agency is providing us with enough information about their audiences that Cognition can create a version that best meets that learner’s needs. During the learner’s onboarding process, they will answer questions that lead them to the module version that suits them.
What does Cognition do?
There are different engines that are good at different things. ChatGPT is good at writing, but it can only access information up to 2021. Google’s AI platform Bard can search the internet. There are other models, too, and Cognition does what’s called ‘orchestrating’ — taking the best elements from each engine and orchestrating the outputs we need.
You’ve created a lot of courses. When you look at what Senseily can do now, and so quickly, how does that strike you?
I’ve launched hundreds of courses, and every course took months of development and involvement from a lot of people. In the end, I had one version of that course. Today I would have a bunch of different versions right out of the gate and bring that process down to a couple of weeks. The efficiency is mind-blowing, and the quality doesn’t suffer. But it just didn’t exist back then, so you can’t spend much time brooding over the past. Before long, we’ll be able to create many more versions of a course, in just a few minutes.
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