How We Think About AI at HeatSpring

AI is everywhere now. It’s in your email, your search results, your video calls, and probably at least three tabs you have open right now. Oftentimes, it’s genuinely useful. Other times, you can tell within a sentence that something was generated, pasted, and shipped without a second look, and that can just feel lazy. The gap between “nice – this saved me time” and “ugh – this wasted my time” is something we think about constantly, because we use AI too.

Where AI Fits In

We use it to build assessments and knowledge checks. To edit video. To generate transcripts and captions. To translate English to Spanish. To draft learning objectives. To package courses into SCORM files. Essentially, we use AI to make structured information more accessible to more people, faster than our small team could do otherwise.

Where Humans Fit In

We also rely on humans for the parts of this work that we feel shouldn’t be automated. Answering student questions on the discussion boards. Customer support. Reviewing every piece of course content before it goes live. Developing real relationships with you, the people learning from us.

The Question We Keep Asking

When something generated with AI annoys us, we stop and ask why. Is it the technology itself, or is it that someone skipped the human step? Very often, it’s the latter. AI slop feels fake. It can look polished on the surface and still be fundamentally wrong, or just bizarre in a way that only comes into focus as you get further into it. The tools themselves often aren’t the problem. Skipping the human-in-the-loop who’s supposed to check the work is. 

Why Instructors Come First

That’s just one reason our instructors are the most important part of HeatSpring. They’re seasoned professionals with experience in the field, running crews, troubleshooting issues, and more, all the while teaching people who are about to go do this work themselves. When we say a human-in-the-loop, we mean those experts who actually know what correct looks like on a job site, not just in theory. 

Coming Soon: Labels on Every Course

Every time we bring AI into a new part of our process, we ask the same questions.

Does this hold up to an expert’s review? 

Would we be comfortable telling a customer exactly how this was made? 

We’re working on a simple way to show you the answer to that directly. Soon, every course registration page will carry a quick label, something like a checklist, showing that a subject matter expert reviewed the content, every time, along with whether AI was involved in developing it and whether AI was involved in delivering it.  We’re still working out exactly what that looks like, but the goal is full transparency about how a course came together.

We’re Not Done Thinking About This

This isn’t a one-time policy we’re writing down and filing away. We’re revisiting it regularly as a team, because the tools keep changing and so does what doing this right looks like. We truly care about your trust in us and in HeatSpring. If we ever have to choose between efficiency and that trust, you better believe we’re choosing your trust.