Forum Discussion
Is L&D's role expanding in the age of AI?
We just published a new article exploring how AI is changing the role of L&D.
One of the core ideas is that as more learning happens in the flow of work, L&D's role may expand from creating learning to helping ensure learning is effective wherever it happens.
I'm curious whether that resonates with what you're seeing:
- Has AI changed how people learn day to day?
- Has it changed what your L&D team spends the most time on?
- Where do you see the biggest opportunity, or challenge, for L&D right now?
How is your organization approaching this? I'd love to hear your perspective in the comments!
1 Reply
My answer to your 3 questions first…
Has AI changed how people learn day to day? Yes, but less in the “I did a course” sense and more in the “I asked something and got an answer in ten seconds” sense. It seems formal or informal training is no longer the first place anyone goes.
Has it changed what we spend time on? For me it has shifted the balance from production towards standards and tooling. Less time building each individual thing, more time building the thing that makes each individual thing good by default. That’s the ‘Embed’ step in practice, and it’s the part I’d argue is doing the real work in the article’s model.
Biggest opportunity and challenge are the same item. The article is right that nobody hands you the architect role. But the shift only works if the organisation resources it as a change of function rather than an extra duty bolted onto an already full workload. Otherwise ‘Enable’ just means more content and no more capacity to shape it.
In the article the line that resonated most was the design systems comparison. When prototyping tools put design in more hands, designers didn’t disappear, they built the component libraries that carried their thinking into work they never touched. That’s a genuinely useful model for where L&D goes next.
