Anson Green, Senior Manager of Digital and Automation Upskilling at Tyson Foods: AI-Powered Tools Are Transforming Worker Training

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Welcome to WorkforceRX with Futuro Health, where future-focused leaders in education, workforce development, and healthcare explore new innovations and approaches. I’m your host, Van Ton-Quinlivan, CEO of Futuro Health.

Today, I’m happy to welcome Anson Green, a trailblazer in workforce education who has made an impact during his long career at the local, state, and national level, particularly in boosting economic prosperity for high -risk populations. In his current post working for Tyson Foods, one of the world’s largest food companies, he can have a global influence as well.

At Tyson Foods, Anson leads digital and automation efforts aimed at upskilling the company’s diverse frontline team members who constitute 90 % of the workforce. Previously, he was state director of adult education and literacy for the state of Texas, where he expanded integrated pathway models within the Texas community and technical college system, amongst his many other accomplishments.

He is also the host of the Behind Every Employer podcast, which I was happy to join as his first guest. Thanks very much for joining us today, Anson.

Anson Green

Fantastic. I’m so happy to be here today and I’ve been looking forward to having this conversation.

Van

Well, I know that my brief intro didn’t do justice to the range of your work experience, which includes teaching at public schools and colleges and directing programs at a community college, in addition to your work at the state of Texas and at Tyson Foods. So, is there a through line between all of these jobs?

Anson

Yeah, there really is. The through line kind of is this nexus of entry level, lower skilled workers –English language learners that are looking for career growth, looking for their next job or their first job — and then, it wasn’t until I looked back, but technology just seemed to always integrate in and out of that, in and out of my career in all the jobs I’ve had.

In 1997, I was teaching a welfare-to-work program for individuals that were getting a high school equivalency and we were doing some of the first online webpages back in 1997, 1998. I would have to go home and upload them and the students could watch them at a case manager’s computer in our workforce center. I presented in ‘98 at a conference — and I remember this distinctly — there was no internet in the hotel and I was presenting on our student webpage and they had to trunk in like a big cable from the front office to get some internet into the conference room. So, it goes back that far with technology at San Antonio College. I started the first e -learning courses there in ‘99.

And, you know, in the State of Texas, we just really expanded distance education and digital literacy for students, which really served us well when I was state director. I was there during the start of the pandemic and we were just able to scale our system of services across the state so much quicker than many other states because we already had the infrastructure and the training and our teachers to do that. So, here I am at Tyson doing some of the same stuff on kind of a much bigger scale.

Van

Well, the population that you have expertise in working with, you talk about the entry level, low skill, English language learner, first jobs…I mean, this is a very complicated population to work with and yet you come to work every day excited to deliver some best practices that give them mobility and access to this great economic opportunity. What are some learnings that you’ve had that that can inspire us to be able to work with this population well?

Anson

Yeah, it’s a great question. I think I kind of draw from several different parts of my career and it really starts with demography and workforce planning. I get so inspired because our future workforce is so much more diverse, so much more language diverse. That’s the replacement workforce, the taxpayers of the future and they’re coming in with lots of challenges and needs that our educational systems sometimes are not ready to address. To me, it’s just this economic stability and economic growth for the United States and for states that are seeing big changes in their demography. That just drives everything for me.

Then there’s the fact that our kind of legacy education model sometimes almost fights against bringing the technology to scale with these populations. I think that’s really kind of the sport I love to play in because it’s really got this huge piece of just economic growth, future growth for the communities that our workers work in, and the health of our companies. We can’t remain competitive with our companies if they can’t educate and train that more diverse workforce.

Van

I remember from my past life in the California Community College Chancellor’s Office, one of the learnings there was that if a student goes into remediation and is in there for over a year, they just never get out. So, you talk about legacy education model, fighting against some of these practices. Give us an example of how employers are stepping in to work with the English language learner population, for example.

Anson

Absolutely, and you bring up such a good point because those education models, the remediation models, they’ve just proven not to work for years. I taught remedial reading for two years at a college and it really drove me out of doing that kind of working into something where I could really make a difference. It’s so funny, you have that lens, that overlay of kind of constraint, I would say, in our education models, our standards, everything that we do in education seems to have this overlay of almost a deficit model of what potential is. In the private sector, you don’t see that.

If I were to tell you a profile of a worker at Tyson that has never been to school, comes from another country, doesn’t speak English and they’ve never had much education in their native language, and they’re really low skilled…if you saw the profile of that worker, you’d say, like, they’re only career prospects are landscaping or home health or cleaning houses or something like that.

Well, we’re running robots with individuals like that at Tyson Foods, and companies are doing that all over the place. They’re not letting those kinds of constraints keep them from — going back to my previous comments — growing their company and growing the technology. It’s because those workers want to work, that they can be trained. They’re very, very mobile in terms of their models of how to get things done, and they figure things out.

And then, the technology is becoming much easier to use and so we’ve got this really sweet spot where robots that five years ago would have taken an associate’s degree to be able to run, I could teach you how to run it this afternoon, Van. So, it’s one of those things where I think we’re really letting the technology match the growing need of our employers and our workers to stay up with that technology so they can stay competitive and bring wages home to their families.

Van

Well, let’s continue down that path. I mean, you mentioned your work at Tyson is exclusively focused on developing and implementing training for new digital and automation upskilling technologies. Ooh, that’s a very long phrase. Tell our listeners about that and what you see changing for entry -level workers, aside from these robots becoming easier to use.

Anson

That’s a lot, yeah, and I wouldn’t relegate it just to robots. I mean, technology is everywhere and in all jobs now. If you think of the three Rs, reading, writing, arithmetic, or, I say the fifth literacy, because I throw in English language — I say digital is probably becoming more important than math or writing is at work for many, many workers. It’s not just about automation.

Digital tools, digital devices are being used everywhere. I think the important piece there is that we’ve got to, first off, build models that help train that workforce and help meet that growing demand because employers don’t have an option not to advance with technology. It’s that or perish in the labor market and the job market.

And we know we can do it. I do it every day. It’s about bringing my background and expertise with low skilled workers. It’s about bringing the education and training expertise that I have, the English language learning expertise that I have, and the digital together and that’s the gap I see with businesses, often, is they don’t have kind of this hybrid modalities, this training development workforce that understands those different dimensions that are really what are required for future workers and current workers.

So it’s a great place to be in terms of those skill sets, but it’s one that I see really lacking out there. It goes back to those legacy models, because learning and development has legacy models too. And I think it’s just we’re at this really big crossroads, I think, in what it’s gonna take to be competitive for our businesses.

Van

Digital being the new basic skill is one of the learnings I’m taking away. Now, let me ask you this, Anson. If I were a new training and development person stepping into Tyson with 60 % of its frontline workers being immigrants — many of whom have language and skills gaps as you talked about — how would you advise me to begin designing a program to accommodate that type of diversity?

Anson

I think there’s a few things that are just about how you think about that work and then how you do that work. The first thing is you have to believe that it’s possible. And even for me, as long as I’ve done this, when I was getting into automation, I was not sure how low I could go with training, meaning how low of a worker workforce skill could we really take the training down to.

Then I went and saw workers that were really low skilled, like I’ve previously described, and they were doing this already. So I’m like, “Well, we’ve already arrived there.” So you have to believe as a learning and development specialist that it can be done. And a lot of times that’s the major constraint is they’ll say, just like they do in public education, “Well, if they’re not at this grade level, or if they can’t speak English, we can’t do this.” And they just have these models that constrain what is possible so the first step is this kind of effective realignment of what is possible.

But then it is about really knowing a few things that are very important. One, within companies that have diverse workforces, there are people that know how to communicate and train those workforces. They may be interpreters, they may be shift supervisors that are bilingual. There are individuals that are getting the work done every day with these populations. And so that’s one area where the learning development specialist has to say, “I need to find those individuals because they’re gonna be the secret to helping me unlock this connection that I need to make on education and training.” This is a collaboration piece. First off, it’s finding those technicians, asking around, going to plants or operational facilities and finding out how work is happening already. So, there’s this kind of exploration piece. And then once you’ve kind of got your cohort of supporters and those subject matter experts that can help you calibrate, if you’re lucky, you have someone that’s an English language learning expert in the group.

But then what is really wonderful is now the technology — ChatGPT, various AI, courseware tools — are helping you calibrate the training down to levels that you need to do this work and get it down to.  It used to be the case that, you know, if Anson had to create a training and get it down to a sixth grade reading level, that was going to take me a long time to manually do that and use my expertise and maybe use Microsoft Word to check the word grade levels. Now I can do that in ChatGPT or other tools in five or ten seconds and get phrases and paragraphs and whole trainings brought to the level I needed at. Then you can do the same thing converting things into other languages.

This brings in the untapped area of training in other languages, which is not done as often as it should be and needs to be. But now the tools allow it to be done at a very inexpensive price. I can go convert my training to forty different languages in about fifteen or twenty minutes if I already have a training course. It’s about knowing what those tools are and leveraging those to create something that’s going to really get to your workforce that you’re trying to train.

Van

You caught our attention, especially, for example, using a ChatGPT to translate the training into something that maybe let’s say a fourth grade educated person would be able to digest. So what is the phrase that you would be asking the chat?

Anson

Yeah, you call that the prompts and writing to me is the biggest area of exploration that everybody listening needs to think about is how to write prompts for ChatGPT or other engines like that because that’s like your search terms in a Google browser. There’s great courses in LinkedIn Learning and other places to learn how to write prompts. You can find stuff on YouTube as well.

Writing prompts are descriptions of what you want. You gave a great example of getting something down to a fourth grade level. I’m going to use things that I’m familiar with, like standard work instructions for how to operate a machine. So, I have a standard work instruction that might be written at a college level by an engineer and I can barely understand it myself. So, sometimes I ask ChatGPT, “What does this mean?” Sometimes my prompt is just like, “What does this mean, colon?” And then I paste in the standard work instruction just so I know what it means. But then I can take that standard work instruction and I can write a prompt that says, “Revise this at a seventh grade level and check for readability.”

Ten seconds later, I’ve got a new revised phrase. Then I can start going to lower grade levels. Here’s the trick though: I have found getting below seventh grade level becomes tricky when you’re doing technical things because you’re using technical vocabulary. So what ChatGPT tends to do is replace technical words with toys and stuff like that because it’s trying to write something for a child. So it’s about writing the prompt and calibrating it correctly. I’ve found there’s a great sweet spot between sixth and seventh grade level for quality.

I always give this example when I talk about doing this and everything I described takes my work from taking three weeks to develop something to like an hour with ChatGPT alone. I did 126 of these standard work instructions on how to run a robot. Then, after I’ve kind of massaged them down through the technology to a low level,  I take it back to the technician that is the robot expert and I say, “Check these to make sure they’re still correct, because I’ve put them through this washing machine of AI and got them down to the level I want.” I did 126, and only two of them came back that needed a little tweaking. So to me, that’s a really good return on investment of my time and it allows me to get what I need quickly at a level of quality that is required.

Van

That is such a tangible example of how the technology becomes a game changer. I wonder also about the implications on all the English language instructors that are out there who are struggling with the growing population that they’re working with. Anson, how would you change how they are trained?

Anson

Yeah, I think first off, it’s not a competitor to the people. It’s a tool and an aid and that’s always really important to keep in mind because with automation and with AI, people have this fear of replacement. From what I see, it’s about shifting and allowing you to get to the quality, cognitively heavy skills that you need to be applying to this work anyway and it gives you more time to do that. So that’s what I love about it. All the mundane stuff of taking things down to lower grade levels and all, I don’t have to do. I need to focus on the delivery model, the quality, you know, all these different types of other things that are as important or more important sometimes.

My advice is to dig in and start to use it and play with it as soon as you can because there’s nothing like kind of getting bit by the bug when it comes to using this stuff to bring value for outlining courses. I mean, I use it to do outlining to say, take this large piece of text and write it in five bullets because I need five bullets to put on a PowerPoint slide or put into a courseware program. So, it’s about getting familiar with that information.

But you bring up English as the second language and other languages. The one thing I can tell you is it is very good at that. And, you know, things like Google Translate and all are very good. They’re not perfect. And so every time I’m doing things in other languages, I can leverage a team that can help in a wide variety of languages to kind of double check my work. I just did some stuff the other day in Swahili. And what do I know about Swahili? Nothing at all. But I did the ChatGPT and then I use a courseware system that creates the videos for us using an AI avatar that is basically the instructor speaking Swahili. And then I can send it back to a Swahili interpreter and say make sure this is correct and they always send back edits. I know it’s not perfect, so that’s where this kind of high skilled thinking has to come in where you’re really applying your expertise and expertise of colleagues to make sure that the product is high quality.

Van

Now, Anson, tell me about this digital navigator service model that you use at Tyson. How does it help your workforce? What is it?

Anson

The digital navigator is something actually that goes further back than Tyson for me. I started this in the state of Texas when I was the state director. That’s a massive system. We had 90,000 students and programs all across the state of Texas and we were doing lots of work in distance education, lots of work in digital skills. The gap that we found was twofold. One, students need support, too, teachers and instructors need support. We knew out there in our field across the state of Texas — and we have the same at Tyson — there are these maniac mavericks out there that love digital, and they’re in our classrooms and they’re coordinators in programs and we decided to kind of create a cohort and basically a job description for someone that would become the go -to person in their region or in their community to support teachers and then oftentimes, in local programs, to support learners.

This is what became so critical because when the pandemic hit, I knew I had like 140 digital navigators across the state of Texas that I could basically deputize and send out there to help us scale our program services online, which was still a massive feat as anybody can imagine that went through that. But it’s a unique skillset. I remember when I started talking about it, it really caught on and it was before I even really knew what we were gonna do with it because there had always been career navigators who helped people get jobs or figure out their career path. And I just used one day at a conference, this digital navigator and all of a sudden, people were emailing like, do you have a job description for that? What is that? We need that. So I knew they got bit by the bug of the importance of this. It’s really been scaled up. Now you see it in many other states and I’m not gonna say Texas was the first in this, but it becomes so important for learners but the teachers also, and I don’t want to leave that quotient out of it because a lot of our workforce is not there yet on technology.

We went so far in Texas to create a call center that students could call or go online for, but they could even just call a 1 -800 number and get help on how to navigate in a browser or something when it’s nine o ‘clock at night and they’re trying to do their online course and they can’t figure out where their download went. So, yeah, it’s a critical element to scaling on both the teacher and the learner side.

Van

I forgot to ask you when we talked about digital skills being a basic skills to get started, what if somebody doesn’t have the basic digital skills? Is there a resource that you would be sending to your other employers who are struggling with this issue?

Anson

Yeah, the workforce is out there. We’re very fortunate because it’s the adult education and literacy workforce that is in every state and every community in the United States. For the last decade, it has had an increasing focus beyond reading, writing and math, to digital. That’s really the only workforce out there that has that nexus of the digital knowledge and the ability to teach that low skilled workforce. And that’s what you’re looking for is like, to show somebody how to log into their email system and create a complex password. You need someone that knows how to work with English language learners and understand how to make a dollar sign with the shift key and the number four and things like that.

So, that’s the kind of workforce that you need if you’re a business and they’re willing and have a mandate to collaborate with businesses. It’s a no-cost solution. It’s in your community and they have a job to do for businesses, so it’s a great connection. It’s one that, of course, I know and love because I’ve spent most of my career in that world. It’s an invaluable resource, but it’s not tapped by businesses near as much as it should be. I have a work group of businesses I work with that kind of help connect them to those resources and things like that.  I get called on to do that frequently because it’s kind of a hidden jewel in everybody’s community.

Van

Thank you for that tip. Two more questions, Anson. What excites you about the future of learning?

Anson

I’ve done some reflection on this recently, actually. I was excited in the late 1990s with the internet and with getting adult learners and entry level workers using the internet and opening email accounts and all of that. I just loved that kind of cutting edge of ‘this is a new technology.’  I feel like that’s the same place we’re in now with AI and with automation. We have this kind of new onslaught of technologies that are rapidly evolving much quicker than the internet did in terms of deployment.

I love mentoring, coaching, cheerleading our public sector partners at colleges and our schools and our business partners along that path. So I feel like it’s like a second fusion of this kind of confluence of technologies that are coming out so quickly and people are wondering how to do this or what’s the best option or how do I build this? It’s really disrupting things.

I think education training is gonna be so different looking in the next few years than what we’re used to. I use an avatar -based AI training system that allows me to bring a subject matter expert right into the training program and I can make it say whatever I want. I don’t have to have the trainer from the college on the phone to help me build this or have a meeting in person with someone that’s a training expert. I can use them, send them some information, get their standard work instructions, and I can create and bring a live instructor through an AI chatbot or AI avatar right to the learner. And so that gives us a lot of value in terms of being able to get the expertise straight to the learner without having to do all this extra scheduling of experts.

Van

Well, that technology is certainly disruptive in a wonderful way. That’s another great example. So, let’s end by having you tell our listeners about your podcast Behind Every Employer and why you started it and how they can find it.

Anson

Sure. You can find it on any podcast app — Apple, YouTube — just look for Behind Every Employer. I started it because I really love having this conversation that we’re having now about this kind of connection of employers to work in entry -level workforce. The Behind Every Employer name is based on the fact that behind every employer is a workforce of entry -level workers and I felt like we needed a forum. There were so many podcasts on high skilled work and STEM and all these other types of things, but not a podcast that was dedicated to entry level workers and what businesses are trying to do to help out on the fronts of immigration, on the fronts of education and training and English as a second language. We’re in the middle of doing a series on AI. And so it’s a way for businesses to tune in and kind of hear what other businesses are doing because the peer sharing is critical at a time like this. We are so happy to have you on as one of our first guests.

Van

I certainly had a lot of fun being on that first episode.

Thank you very much, Anson, for being with us today. I mean, all the examples you gave us on how technology is being leveraged for the low -skilled workforce was super insightful, and I’m sure our audience learned a great deal.

Anson

It’s a pleasure. Thank you for having me on.

Van

I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan with Futuro Health. Thanks for checking out this episode of WorkforceRx. I hope you will join us again as we continue to explore how to create a future -focused workforce in America.