Forum Discussion
Is L&D's role expanding in the age of AI?
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.
Thanks for sharing your perspective DShaw. I was hoping to hear from you, given the AI-focused content you've been sharing here lately!
I think you make a great point that this only works if organizations treat it as a change in function, and that probably is both the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity.
The article talks about making the gap visible to leadership and helping them see the value of L&D taking on this kind of role, but I imagine making that case looks different in every organization.
I'm curious what others here think could help leaders really see the value of that shift.
Thanks Katie-Jordan. On what helps leaders see the value of the shift: in my world it's risk, not capability. I run technical training for a large UK business, and most learning here has always happened on sites or between shifts, long before AI. What's changed is the volume and confidence of informally produced content. I see people generating a "training guide" in minutes and it looks polished, and that polish is the problem. In the compliance heavy areas I work in, a plausible but wrong guide can get someone hurt. That framing gets leadership's attention far faster than any argument about L&D capacity or strategic roles. Once they see the exposure, resourcing the embed step (quality baked into the templates and standards people create with, rather than L&D reviewing everything after the fact) becomes the obvious answer rather than a pitch.
Oh yeah, that's such a great point! I love the point that polish can be part of the problem. It's so easy for something to look credible without actually being accurate, and I totally see the risk with that.
If leadership can see that risk, then building quality into the tools, templates, and standards people are already using starts to make a lot more sense than trying to review everything after it's created.
This is such a helpful real-world example of what that shift can actually look like. Thanks for sharing!