This Is Your Moment

Despite the admirable attempt at patronizing us as a profession, you all know full well that what you announced today will decimate thousands of peoples’ jobs. Whether it’s because the tool is actually capable of that, or because the people with the purse strings in many organizations will believe it enough to take the opportunity to cut costs now and think later, the impact is the same. Many people who have used your product regularly and contributed to your bottom line, whether by choice or obligation, will be out of work and forced to find new careers so that you all could prosper. So hooray for you, Articulate. 

Hi SarahSterner-66​ ,

I understand the concern you’re raising. You’re worried not only about what these tools can actually do, but about the decisions companies may make because of what they think the tools can do. I don’t want to dismiss that.

I also want to share some context for why we built what we did.

Over and over, in health checks, feedback sessions, and thousands of other conversations with our customers, L&D teams have told us they’re being asked to do far more, at an aggressive pace, with fewer resources.

They told us they needed the SMEs they already work with to do more than review content at the end of the process. They wanted ways for those experts to contribute more directly, while L&D could still establish the standards and guardrails. They wanted more choice in the kinds of content they and their SMEs could create. And they wanted Articulate to work more easily with the other tools and systems their organizations already use.

Those needs are a big part of what shaped this launch. We did not build it around the belief that L&D expertise is becoming less valuable. We believe exactly the opposite.

A huge amount of learning already gets created outside L&D today, by sales teams, support teams, managers, SMEs, and others who hold expertise closest to the work. L&D often plays a critical role in shaping that learning, but no single function can be present in every moment where knowledge needs to become capability.

Much of what gets created outside formal learning today ends up as a deck, a document, a recording, or something generated with a generic AI tool. That is already happening across organizations.

We want L&D’s expertise to reach more of that work. Their standards, judgment, and understanding of what helps people actually learn and perform matter because information alone doesn’t build capability.

That doesn’t mean everyone becomes an instructional designer. It also doesn’t mean the expertise of an experienced L&D professional can be reduced to a prompt. It means that expertise can influence far more of the learning happening across an organization.

If an organization assumes that access to AI, or what we launched this week, means it no longer needs real expertise and judgment, I think that’s a mistake. Technology can extend what experts are able to do, but it doesn’t make their expertise irrelevant. Organizations that lose that distinction may move faster in the short term, but they risk compromising the quality of the learning they create and ultimately the performance and business results it’s meant to support. That’s part of why this community’s expertise, and the standards you set, matter more right now, not less.

Will the work change? Yes. Some of the production work will become easier and faster, just as it is in many professions right now. But our belief is that this makes the distinctly human parts of L&D, including judgment, strategy, standards, understanding the learner, deciding what people actually need to be able to do, and knowing whether learning is working, more important, not less.

I also know that doesn’t eliminate the anxiety you’re describing. But I wanted you to hear directly from me that the intent behind this launch isn’t to make the people who built this profession irrelevant. It’s to build technology that gives their expertise much greater reach. And we have a responsibility to keep listening closely to this community as the way people work continues to evolve.

Noele_Flowers​  has already offered to connect with you directly, and I’d be happy to join that conversation as well.

Frontline seems designed to correct the bane of L&D's existence - anyone in the organization can put anything on a slide and send it to the entire company as "training". Depending on the training creator and their level in the organization, that "training" is now official - for as long as people can locate it. SMEs will always create training. There's no way to stop it and part of the reason is because the reach of L&D is limited. 

However, I have two very large concerns: one about Frontline and one about the reframing being discussed for L&D professionals. First, I agree with SarahSterner-66​ about Frontline and the new products costing jobs. Executive leadership at the vast majority of American corporations view L&D as a cost center the company needs for compliance. When cost reductions are needed, L&D is the first department on the cut list. Arguably, part of this view is self-inflicted because even as executive leadership has moved toward data-driven decisions, L&D has struggled to produce quantitatively measurable learning and/or show that information effectively to executives. Basically, leadership at most companies view L&D as an obligation and if they can fulfill that obligation with one person and an AI, that's a done deal. The perpetually low salaries  and increase in contract roles for instructional designers to create specific training support this. To some degree we have put ourselves in this situation because even if we can point to the numbers showing our training works, we aren't telling the right people in leadership in words that they understand or care about. 

Which leads to my second concern. Both the opening and closing keynotes talked about L&D professionals moving to become strategic advisors, leveraging the technology to increase the reach of our expertise. This idea is being shared across many platforms in the industry. What is not being discussed is if the majority of executives believe L&D is an obligation that provides little or no value to the company, how exactly is an L&D professional or team supposed to convince said leadership to change their view? I have been designing and delivering quantitatively measurable training for almost 15 years - most of that for sales teams at international companies - and have pointed to the numbers showing this training impacted the bottom line this way at executive meetings. Yet, the view persisted that L&D didn't cause the change. The learner must have done something different, the customer conditions changed, any number of reasons it wasn't due to training. 

So, if AI assistance can extend L&D expertise (Frontline) and we can become strategic advisors in organizations where leadership really wishes L&D wasn't necessary and that same AI can grant that wish, how are L&D professionals supposed to explain to executives that AI doesn't replace us? This is especially true in small to midsize companies where there is often one or two people doing all the L&D work, constantly fighting the SME-created training and "we need that yesterday" battle. No one has yet provided steps, suggestions, or a plan for how to convince executives L&D actually not only has value to the company but, if leveraged properly, can increase the company's overall value. 

I really have no fear for my job with the advent of Frontline or Nova; my employer still finds that my work with SMEs and my contributions to our learners are still valuable, thank goodness.

But I do worry about novice instructional designers. The tasks that AI agents are completing are the ones we novice designers handled when we were first learning to sort content, understand how it contributed (or didn't contribute) to performance goals, and decide how to present it in a logical way a learner can absorb and apply. These are skills that novices need to grow into.

So I'm not worried that thousands of jobs will disappear in an instant; I'm more worried that we'll have developed cohorts of terrible designers who will forego the A of ADDIE, ignoring the critical thinking that goes into asking crucial questions and distilling heaps of information to bare essentials, all while keeping everything congruent.

In the advent of all of this automation, I feel it's more important than ever to provide mentorship opportunities to novice designers, to let them explore AI tools, but only as a comparison to what they've come up with in their own noggins. To be able to critique and redirect AI outputs requires experience that novices don't have. They need to put in the work to gain that experience.