This is Part 3 of a series examining what I learned about customer education by completing ten professional certifications in thirty days. If you missed any previous articles in the series they are all linked at the bottom of this one.
Ask most customer education leaders to choose between a program leveraging more human elements and one created by AI tools and they will probably tell you there isn’t really a choice there at all. The size of the team, the budget available, and the pace at which the product evolves are usually the deciding factors. A small customer education team supporting a rapidly changing SaaS platform has no choice but to lean into more scalable methodologies. What is often lost in that conversation: a live human program that is out of date doesn’t feel warm, it feels frustrating.
In a SaaS environment where products evolve constantly, accuracy is the floor. Everything else, warmth, personality, engagement, is what you build above it. A scalable program that accurately reflects the current state of your product will always serve learners better than a warm program that doesn’t. Having now experienced programs that made very different choices on this dimension I can tell you that it has a serious impact on the perceived value of the information being shared. I found myself wondering, if this part is wrong how can I trust anything in this course?
One platform I encountered during this journey made a deliberate bet on personality and community. A consistent human presence anchored nearly every session. They became someone whose name you recognized, whose energy you came to anticipate, and whose genuine enthusiasm for the subject made the content feel much more conversational. (I’m looking at you Rita Cidre!) Expert guests were brought in to add texture and variety. Even the follow-up communications felt personal rather than automated. The program was warm, engaging, and memorable in a way that most certification experiences aren’t. That platform was Semrush — and their approach to customer education is worth examining regardless of your industry. I have taken numerous courses with them because the content is so interesting and engaging.
Another platform made the opposite decision. Every program followed an identical structure. AI-generated voice and visuals ensured complete consistency across the entire content library. There was no face, no personality, no moment that felt unscripted. You knew that slide three of every module was going to have the same generated face to greet you. The production was incredibly clean and professional. The experience was repetitious making it easy to tune out. Content fatigue is real. Given the scale of the platform and the likely pace of its product evolution that choice isn’t arbitrary. For whatever shortcomings it may have had, it was an accurate reflection of the current state of the product. That matters.
Anthropic managed to deliver both. Live human speakers. Real passion for the subject matter. Genuine variety. A program that clearly operated at scale while never sacrificing the warmth that made it worth completing. How? In part because their content was designed around principles rather than features. This means it ages well regardless of how quickly the underlying product evolves. When your curriculum isn’t tied to specific UI elements or feature names a live human can deliver it today and it will be accurate for a good long time. Accuracy and warmth stopped being competing priorities the moment they stopped teaching features.
Ultimately it is your learners who will tell you whether you got it right. Customer education programs exist primarily for one purpose: to give learners the knowledge and skills they need to succeed with your product. If they are engaging with your content and walking away more capable and confident than when they arrived you have chosen the right approach. As I have said many times, create the most impressively produced program of all time. Get Industrial Light & Magic to produce your visuals, have Morgan Freeman do the voiceovers. If the material doesn’t connect with your learners, they may walk away entertained but will they be able to use your product? Start with their needs and let everything else follow.
The warmth vs. scalability debate is real in customer education. More often than not it is actually a constraint to be managed, not a choice to be made in the abstract. Know your team, know your budget, know your product velocity, and design the most accurate and engaging experience those constraints will allow.
Next week in Part 4: Currency is a Feature, Not a Footnote. What happens when a well-produced, genuinely enjoyable certification program teaches you things that are no longer true? The answer is more damaging than you might expect, or maybe it isn’t but you already came this far. Might as well stick around and find out.
Missed an earlier article in this series? Catch up here:
Part 1: The Research and Why It Matters
Part 2: The Philosophy Question – Are You Teaching Features or Outcomes?
Part 3: Human Warmth vs. Scalability – A False Choice
Part 4: Currency is a Feature, Not a Footnote
Part 5: The Learner Experience Layer – Content Alone Is Not Enough
Part 6: Summary and Key Takeaways
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