Is L&D's role expanding in the age of AI?

This conversation has really taken off and is so interesting. I'm tagging in a few more community members whose perspectives on this I'd find valuable—

JennMerrill​ and LauraSpielvogel​, since I saw you reshared the article on LinkedIn, I'm curious what about it felt most resonant or what you would add to the discussion. 

JeffBatt​ and DevlinPeck​, I'm always curious your take on new technologies since I think you have a really deep engagement with and understanding of AI. 

CrystalBass​, amalialm​ and SMcNicol​, tagging you in since you've shared some interesting examples about using AI recently. 

Feel free to tag anyone else you think would make a great addition to this conversation! 

Hi, Katie-Jordan​.

I hope your summer has gone well. Public school has started back in my neck of the woods, which means I get the chance to leave my house even earlier in the mornings to dodge as much traffic as possible driving to the office. 😂😂

Thanks for the tag and the prompt.

Context matters. For example, in my org, my team and I report to the VP of Contact Center. The learning content we create directly supports our 250+ phone agents. Thus, as our business exists today, there is no drastic shift in what we're asked to create (e.g., training on new policies & procedures, product knowledge, and system upgrades, etc.).

Regarding this question, "Where do you see the biggest opportunity, or challenge, for L&D right now?"

From my vantage point, I believe L&D is uniquely positioned to help its leaders frame AI use as a corporate imperative rather than "ad-hoc tools spun up in different departments with no real strategic weight behind it."

Companies are burning through cash because their employees are hitting token limits, but no one is steering the AI ship.

I encourage fellow learning leaders who can influence the AI conversation in their org to do so and quickly.

For me, instead of company leaders settling for incremental productivity gains, they should have folks coordinating and executing moonshots. 🚀🌘

My ELH weekly challenge submission, and final course in my AI series, sits very nicely with the article I think!

AI drafts fast, confidently, and about half of it is wallpaper. This course teaches you to edit it, spot the six tells, fix them without swapping one kind of slop for another, and check the numbers a model will invent with a straight face.

The Red Pen | Rise

Tools used: Canva, Gemini and Rise Canvas

One thing which is quietly funny to me, given this is a thought-leadership piece about L&D bringing quality standards to AI-produced content, try dropping the article itself or some of the replies to this thread into any or multiple LLM and ask it if the content was AI generated.. some interesting results which may be right or wrong but interesting in this context none the less… Perhaps this highlights further the difficulty a casual learner has identifying polished AI generated but wrong content from human authored and fact checked content…. Just my thoughts 

A huge amount of learning has always happened outside formal courses, and todayAI has made that visible and measurable for the first time. When someone can ask an AI assistant "how do I do X" and get a contextual answer inside their actual tool, that's a learning event L&D never touched, never tracked, and never designed. It just happened. That's a real expansion of the addressable surface.

Has AI changed how people learn day to day?

In short: Yes. AI has shrunk the gap between "I don't know how to do this" and "I did it" to almost nothing. People learn by asking mid-task instead of scheduling training. That's faster, but riskier: getting a quick answer can feel like learning without actually building a durable skill, since the struggle that makes things stick often gets skipped. It's also made learning more reactive, triggered by whatever you're doing right now: which is great for relevance but can crowd out the kind of open browsing where people used to stumble onto skills they didn't know they needed. So the real question for L&D isn't "did AI help people get answers faster": it's "did that moment leave them more capable next time, or just unblocked this time."

Has it changed what your L&D team spends the most time on?

I am not part of a larger department with multiple L&D and ID roles. However, the change I would recommend is spending less time producing content from scratch and more time on review, judgment, and governance. AI now drafts a lot of the first pass: outlines, quiz questions, scripts. So the work would shift from "write it" to "check it's accurate, on-brand, and actually teaches the right thing." At the same time, new work has appeared that didn't used to exist: vetting AI tools, setting data/guardrail policies, and figuring out how to measure whether learning embedded in workflows is actually working, not just whether a course got completed.

Where do you see the biggest opportunity, or challenge, for L&D right now?

The biggest opportunity is that L&D can finally tie learning to real outcomes measuring whether skills got applied, not just whether courses got completed. The biggest challenge is that AI adoption is outpacing the infrastructure and governance to support it, while the skills people need keep changing faster than L&D's operating model was built to handle. So it's less "build more courses" and more "build the systems to know what's working, wherever learning happens."

The future opportunity is not just using AI to make more courses. It is building self-improving learning ecosystems that continuously collect signals, analyze them, and adapt in real time. A possible future state looks less like an LMS and more like a Learning Intelligence Platform.

Here we goooo! AI has been everywhere and it's changing all the time. I feel like my opinions on AI has been on a roller coaster because like anything, there are good parts and bad parts.

• Has AI changed how people learn day to day?

Who doesn't love instant gratification? That's been a big change for learning. I can go to a generative AI model and just ask the question no matter WHAT it is. I need to figure out how to do something in Photoshop? I can just ask AI. What about an Excel formula but I just can't remember what it's called? Ask AI. Before, I'd have to know someone who had those answers or, search the internet.

• Has it changed what your L&D team spends the most time on?

I'd say yes/no. The group I work with does all the pieces ADDIE. We have used generative AI to help with the Design part of the process: outlining, some scripting, a bit of storyboarding but we always have a hand in what it looks like. I can only speak to me but, sometimes I dislike what I get from AI and just go do it myself. But, with that help on the Design portion of the process - it has giving me more time to develop some more effective and fun training on topics that aren't natively fun. 

• Where do you see the biggest opportunity, or challenge, for L&D right now?

A big challenge the AI gap that's actually outlined in the article! Now anyone can create training or WBT with the help of AI. That doesn't necessarily means it's good learning. As L&D professionals, we know adult learning Theory, the different processes to create learning, design principals, plain language etc. But someone else who doesn't know those things can ask AI to "create a training on XYZ" get something they see as passable, put it out there not knowing it's not effective. Then we get a influx of bad training others see and think is 'good enough'. It dilutes the good training with sheer volume of 'good enough' training. 

Tagging a few members I'd be interested to hear from: Kate_Golomshtok​ Thomas_Shayon​ Frankie​ KayleneWance​ Nedim​ 

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.