Exploring L&D Trends: Insights from the 2025 Global Sentiment Survey

Introduction

Nolan: Welcome to the Learning and Development podcast sponsored by Infopro learning. As always, I’m your host, Nolan Hout.

My guest today truly needs no introduction, but I don’t think they’d call it a cliche unless you actually follow that up with an introduction anyways.

So, joining us today, we have a very special guest, Donald H Tyalor. He’s a recognized thought leader in learning and development in the fields of workplace learning and learning technology. And he’s been here for over 30 years. When he’s not on the podcast, he’s either speaking at any number of keynotes around the globe, or he’s helping early-stage founders turn their dreams into reality with their company, Emerge Education. And on top of that, Donald has been producing an annual L&D Global Sentiment Survey for over a decade. And the 2025 version of that just came out a couple of months back.

For those that didn’t get a chance to review that, now’s your time, but also that’s what we’re going to be talking about on the podcast today with Donald Taylor. So, if you haven’t read it, buckle up, we’re going to uncover not just what were the trends of this survey, but we’re also going to look at how it compared to some of the previous years that really helps us get a peek into the future possibility of the future possibilities of what might be coming for us in 2026 and the rest of this year as well. With that, let’s go ahead and meet our guest. 

Donald: Great to be here, thank you for having me.

Nolan: Thanks for joining the week after what must be one of the busiest weeks for you over there at LearnTech. How was the event for you? 

Donald: As always, I met a lot of interesting people, had some great conversations, but I do feel this year, as we’ve moved on, and we’ll look at this during our chat. We’ve moved on from the view of AI by L&D in 2024 to the view this year, which is more mature, and there’s a lot more going on in how people think about things.  I felt that as an event, I went, but more importantly, I felt that the community was reflecting a more mature view of AI. 

Donald Taylor’s Background & Journey in L&D 

Nolan: Interesting. Let’s get into it. But before we do, Donald, to get a little bit, how we start with every podcast is learning more about our guests and your story arc and where you are today, but not where you are today, but how did you get there?  Can you give us a quick origin story of Donald Taylor? 

Donald: I, unlike most people, I didn’t fall into learning and development. I chose to get here. I started off training to be an English language teacher, which means teaching English as a second language to adults—not a teacher in school.

Did that coming out of university and have been in the field ever since, doing everything you can do: setting up companies and selling them, being a classroom teacher, designing courses, designing some of the first online courses in the 1990s.

I have been running and chairing the Learning Technologies Conference since 2000, and running this survey for the past 12 years. I’ve chaired an institute to support the growth of the L&D profession for 10 years.

It is all about now for me—going through that very practical side of doing L&D. Now it’s all about trying to devote as much time as possible to support the next generation of L&D professionals and help them get where they need to be.

Overview & the Goals of the 2025 Global Sentiment Survey

 
Nolan: Lovely. Speaking of the survey, a lot of what we wanted to talk about was the 2025 Global Sentiment Survey that was published a couple of weeks ago in February. I would love to learn a little bit more about what the goals of this survey are and then, most importantly, what came out of that? What were the interesting things that we took away this year?

Donald: The goals are pretty straightforward. I’ll explain that it might sound a bit odd and unambitious, but they make sense if you think about it. The goal is to get a pulse check of what L&D professionals think each year about what’s happening in the field. And for 12 years, we’ve asked a very simple, straightforward question: What do you think will be hot next year?

Now that sounds, as I say, incredibly unambitious. And if you asked one person what they thought would be hot, the answer would be a big nothing. Who cares? But if, as we do, you ask it of some three and a half thousand people from a hundred countries, and if you then have that data over a decade, suddenly things start getting interesting.

I don’t claim it’s a representative sample. This is self-selecting. People choose to come and answer it, which means they are enthusiastic about it. I’m also sure that it’s not something that necessarily reflects what’s going to happen this year in L&D. People say, “I’m enthusiastic about that this year,” but the people who choose to answer the survey are the innovators and early adopters on the Everett Rogers diffusion of innovation curve.

But what’s interesting is trying to determine which things they say are hot will be more widely adopted later. It’s not true that everything that people think is hot will get widely adopted, but it is true that everything that is widely adopted was once thought of as being hot by these people who are at the cutting edge. And we’re tapping into what people think is exciting. That’s the rationale behind taking this pulse check every year.

Historical Trends in L&D and Adoption Curves

Nolan:  It is interesting to always understand how long it’s going to take on that adoption curve. I was checking and saw Brandon Carson, the CLO of Docebo, was at Starbucks. Before that, I saw somewhere he said, “Hey, I was looking at my notes from 2012, a conference, and I had written down what’s hot: mobile learning.” That was something everybody talked about, but the investment never really followed. Even today, there are companies like Airst and others doing text message learning, but it is interesting to see how some things get talked about and when the investment actually comes down the pipeline.

Donald: Mobile is a good example of something that was super hot and topped the table in the first survey in 2014. Then it slowly declined over the years. I took it off a couple of years ago because I give people a list of 16 things to choose from. That’s a classic case of something that was hot because everyone wanted to know about it, but it became business as usual.

And mobile is still doing interesting stuff, but that’s less in the delivery of training. It’s more into reinforcement and behavioral change. It is certainly the case that mobile delivery, in the sense of taking content and pushing it out in a mobile format, went pretty mainstream within about 10 years.

The same thing is happening with VR and AR. What was super exciting burst up in our table and then fell away. Now it’s moving into—not business as usual for everyone—but it’s no longer something that is going to be the answer to everything. It’s an answer to some particular issues, and a very effective one.

What you have is a classic situation on the survey, generally, where if something enables L&D people to do their existing roles in a more convenient way, then they’ll adopt it. It takes time, but they’ll adopt it. Typically, I find that from something being hot on the survey to being more widely adopted, it takes between two and five years.

That’s not true of everything, though. And I’m sure in our conversation, we’ll look at some of the things that have been exciting in the past and haven’t been adopted, and some of the things that probably should be more widely adopted but perhaps won’t be.

Key Findings from the 2025 Global Sentiment Survey

Nolan: Let’s dig into that. When you started looking over the 2025 survey, which was released to the public a couple of months ago, it means you collected it very recently—it’s pretty hot off the press. What were some of the emerging trends that we were seeing in this year’s findings?

Donald: The key trend that we saw this year has to be seen in the context of what happened last year. Last year, we had what I call the AI shock. If you look at the results, there’s evidence in a variety of places that AI was dominating people’s thoughts.

The first bit of evidence is that AI absolutely topped the table last year in terms of the number of votes it collected. It was by far the biggest vote we had ever seen for anything on the table. To give you some context, it accounted for 21.5% of the vote. Now, that doesn’t mean that only 21.5% of people voted for it, because people can vote up to three times. It means that probably 66% of people voted for it, and we’ve never seen that before. Previously, the highest vote was 13%. That was massive last year.

What was also interesting was that, beyond people saying it was super hot, the other question I ask is: what’s your biggest challenge in workplace learning? That’s a free-text question, and people can put in whatever they like. Some people write little mini essays, but 60 people simply pressed three keys on their keyboard last year—AI, return—bang, that was it. When asked what’s your biggest challenge, 60 people said it’s AI.

It was both super interesting and also super scary for people.

The Impact of AI on Learning Trends

Donald: If we look at the context for this year against last year, the big trend this year is not so much AI. AI did go up this year, which surprised me—we’ll come to that. But last year, AI sucked up all the votes. Almost everything else took a hit last year. It was what I call the ‘AI shock.’ People were voting for AI and associated things—skills and personalization. They shot up, and everything else dropped down the table.

But this year, value made a comeback. There are three options on the table associated with value, and those three things shot back up this year to the same level they were at in 2023. To picture it in your mind: 2023, everything’s normal; 2024, bang—AI jumps up, everything else drops down. This year, most things keep going downward, but three things moved back up again. They are: showing value, performance support, and consulting more deeply with the business.

These three have always behaved differently from the other options on the table. They’re all associated with value, and they all recovered their position this year.

What that tells me, along with some other evidence, is that this year we’re recovering from that AI shock. We still think AI is important, but we also think some fundamental things are important too—like showing value. That has returned as a key theme this year. There may be lots of reasons for it, which I don’t know—you might want to guess at.

AI’s Role and Impact on L&D

Nolan: It’s interesting that those two are connected because I wonder how many people who are choosing “return” understand the push to adopt something like AI to drive more return. If I’m not investing here, or if I’m unsure, maybe I should give it a bit more thought. I wonder how many people are thinking, “I need to be showing return. I’ve always known I needed to show return.” But now, with AI, it might feel like an easy button for return. Not that it’s necessarily easy, but I wonder how many people are thinking, “If I’m able to implement AI, I bet I could get some quick returns,” and that might seem a lot easier than some of the other options on the table.

Donald: There are two possible explanations for it. One is exactly this: AI is a great way of collecting data and showing a correlation between the activity we’re doing and the impact on the business. There’s another possibility, which we’ve seen some evidence for: AI could take my job away. I’d better start showing value quickly, or there’s a risk I might not have a job next year.

Understanding Value in Learning and Development

Donald: There are two possible explanations for it. We don’t know which is which. We don’t know what’s in people’s minds when they’re voting. Interestingly, in response to the question, “What’s your biggest challenge?” I categorized the answers into nine groups using an algorithm. The only category that has consistently increased its proportion of responses each year for the last four years is related to resources.

Have you got the time? Have you got the money? Have you got the people to do your job in L&D? That’s increasingly seen as a problem for people.  And the phrase that characterizes that is doing more with less. People do feel that they have to get on with it; the feeling I get is that people feel they have to do an increasingly difficult job with the same or even fewer resources.  I feel, my gut feeling is that people feel that 

showing value is important because they may feel that they’ve got they’re being asked to do more with less and that if they don’t show the value they’re not going to have a job at some point this year. 

Nolan: Some of it is, you mentioned last year, there was a bit of shock—what is this? What’s going on? A lot of the fear was, “Will this take my job?” So people sat back to observe. But this year, maybe there’s a realization: “It might if I don’t do something.” It has that potential. I can’t sit back and wait. I’ve got to create my own destiny here—start leveraging AI and show that I am the enabler. Without me, AI can’t unlock the value. It needs me to help unlock that value.

Donald: I hope that people are feeling that. Last year, there was still a sense in some quarters that AI was a flash in the pan, that it might go away at some point. I don’t think anybody feels that anymore. People accept that, for good or for ill, it’s part of how we’ll be doing business from now on. We better get on board with it.

Nolan: Absolutely. As you mentioned, AI almost seems like an umbrella that’s impacting some of these areas. The first one was “return.” What was the next one on the list? I had forgotten.

Donald: Overall, there are three options that together reflect the theme of value: performance support, showing value, and consulting more deeply with the business. The idea is that you consult with the business to identify problems, implement something that supports performance, and then return to show the value created. They’re connected in that way.

Normally, over time, the votes that these options receive tend to go down. I mentioned mobile delivery earlier—it started at the top of the table and eventually dropped to the bottom, and I took it off the list. That’s the typical progression. We get excited about something, then it either becomes business as usual or fades away.

What’s interesting about those three options is that for five years up to 2023, they didn’t decline. In fact, they slightly increased, which is unheard of. Nothing else on the table behaves like that. Clearly, people see them differently. What stood out in 2024 was how they, along with everything else, were affected by AI—but then uniquely bounced back this year.

As I said earlier, it looked as if people returned to what was important to them. Showing value became a key priority again. Additionally, individual countries also saw a resurgence in the options they had traditionally favored.

In the Netherlands, for example, performance support has always been highly valued for various local reasons. It took a hit last year but bounced back this year. In Ireland, coaching and mentoring had the same pattern—down last year, up this year. In Poland, microlearning has always been well supported. Again, it took a hit and came back.

Again, and again, we see two things happening: globally, people recognize that value is important; locally, they return to what has traditionally mattered to them. This reflects the AI shock and then a return to foundational priorities. Many countries show this same pattern—I’ve given you three examples, but there are more.

That shows a return to normality for L&D in the sense that there’s less of an AI shock now. We’re viewing the world more coherently. Are we ready to take advantage of AI? That’s a separate question. What I’m talking about here is sentiment, not usability.

Consulting with the Business & Industry Parallels 

Nolan: One interesting thing you mentioned is that the connection to the business has been important for a while. There’s less of an AI shock now. We’re viewing the world more coherently. Are we ready to leverage AI? That’s a different matter. This is about how people feel, not about whether they’re equipped to act.

I was talking with a different gentleman about the role of consulting in L&D and how it’s now center stage, especially in today’s context. I do wonder about that maturity curve. I started my career in IT and tech, in custom development work, and that’s mostly consulting. I remember at that time, IT was going through its own maturation. This was a decade ago, and the number one topic everyone was talking about was the connection to the business. We needed to understand the business problem we were solving before developing technology. I see L&D trailing slightly behind tech in its adoption curve. As I transitioned into L&D, I realized I had seen this before.

It’s interesting because what happened in IT was that the support systems that helped them do their jobs better also improved significantly. Things like coding, low code, no code—automated processes—what they now call DevOps: Development Operations, code check-in and check-out, adding security. Everything around the IT professional’s role was innovating rapidly. As a result, the skills that were once in high demand didn’t need to be developed as intensely because tools were being developed to handle them.

And now, with IT, if anyone has tracked that industry, AI has completely transformed the landscape. I was talking to a gentleman who had launched an LMS product from scratch, sold it, and was starting another learning technology business. He mentioned attending a Silicon Valley founder event. He said he felt bad watching people come on stage to talk about how they had spent two and a half years creating a beautiful application. I turned to my friend and said, “Man, we’re leveraging AI. We could have done that in a week.” And he realized it was sad to think of it that way, but it was the reality. Those people had invested two years, but if they had started today, it might have only taken them two weeks.

This idea of AI—or more broadly, innovation—helping us do task-based work faster makes the skill of connecting to the business increasingly important. Do you feel there’s going to be, or is there already, a trend in that direction? I’m not sure exactly how the survey measures this, but has this idea of connecting to the business and serving as that business interlock been trending upward, or has it always remained steady since you began conducting the survey?

Donald: We look at that option—consulting more deeply with the business—which has always been in about the same position in the table. As I said, it took a hit last year, but it bounced back this year. In terms of what I know anecdotally and from talking to people outside the survey, there’s a real sense now that AI is changing everything. And if you want to be serious and have an impact, then you absolutely need to be consulting with the business.

I know that people are starting to realize that AI doesn’t just help you do your existing jobs faster—though that’s true; you can create content much faster with AI—but it also helps you do things you couldn’t do before. The people who aren’t very imaginative are going out and asking, “What can we use AI for?” The people who are smart are going out and asking, “What problems have you got? Now, if I had an army of smart people, how could I tackle that?” Now, substitute AI for an army of smart people, and I’ve probably got an answer.

That mindset—the idea that you go out and ask about the problem first—is crucial. But generally in L&D, that isn’t how people approach the job, because the tradition, since the profession has existed, has been that we revolve around the production of content. That’s possibly holding us back, because yes, AI can help content be produced, but it’s so good at that, it almost reduces the value of content to nothing.

Shifting Mindsets in L&D ‘Be a Problem Solver’

Donald: Then, if we’re not the people who produce the content, what are we? I’d argue we’re the people who support performance—at an individual and an organizational level. But that’s a shift from being the people who produce content.

The key thing for L&D going forward is to make that mindset shift—from being a fulfillment house creating courses to being a problem solver, helping individuals and businesses flourish.

Nolan: I don’t know how long ago—70/20/10 started coming into the fold. But I always say it’s the funny paradigm where we’ve roughly agreed that 70% of what we learn is on the job, 20% is peer learning, and 10% is formal. But if we look at our investment and where we spend all of our time, it’s on the 10%.

Understanding how we flip that, as you mentioned, is going to be the key. And it’s not via content—or at least not content the way it’s designed today. It’s about creating a chat agent that can take somebody who joined the company yesterday and start having them produce value today—not having them go through a training, but instead saying, “Hey, this is how it is. Watch this camera, it will show you what to do.” It will teach you on the job.

Practical Applications of AI in L&D 

Nolan: Interesting. You mentioned AI was high last year, obviously, and everything else went down. This year, those things crept back up. But you mentioned AI stayed high as well. Within that, what sub-themes are you thinking of when you mention AI? You talked about the reason people are leveraging it, but what are people actually doing?

Do you sense that time gap—like when we talked about mobile learning back in 2014, and then it eventually petered off—how long do you think it’s going to take for that adoption curve? Do you think it’s going to be much shorter because the innovation is so great? Are you seeing anything in either those surveys or in the conversations?

Donald: I, with my co-author Eglebin El-Skyter, have done three pieces of research in the past 18 months looking at how people are using AI. We have another survey coming out in September, focusing on how people are using AI in L&D. There’s no question that people are using it to produce more content, faster. That’s the key benefit they see. And they do that in a variety of ways—partly by using it to help create content faster, and partly by using it as a sparring partner for going through ideas, as a translation tool, and so on. But generally, it’s all focused on producing content. And that’s not by a small amount—it’s easily the greatest use of AI in L&D.

But it’s not just how L&D is using AI—it’s also how L&D imagines AI can be used. That’s unfortunate because there is a whole range of other things we can do with AI. For example, using a chatbot for performance support tools. These already exist. We have simulation and coaching packages that can help people get up to speed faster.

They can also be monitored during conversations to check if they’re using words, phrases, or approaches that are effective with the person they’re speaking to. That’s one example of a coaching package. There are ways of surfacing and extracting implicit knowledge—for example, when people are having conversations in Slack, something can sit in the background, understand what’s going on, compare it with what’s in emails and elsewhere, and pull out common themes and thoughts important to the organization. These can then be codified and articulated in a way that makes previously hidden knowledge available for everyone to access.

Now, that’s something we haven’t done before—chatbots, simulation coding, and also extreme personalization. Of course, we’ve done personalization in the past, but extreme hyper-personalization—what Danny Johnson calls it—is going to become the norm very quickly.

I’d like L&D professionals to look not just at how AI can help them move faster in what they’re already doing, but also at how it can vastly expand the range of what they do. I’d love to see more of that. Not least because the standalone course—as we call it, the course that gets produced and taken regardless of whether it’s suited to the learner—has a best-before date. We don’t know exactly when, but the clock is ticking. It’s got between two and five years.

Within three years, people—particularly younger employees accustomed to hyper-personalized experiences in commercial applications—will be asking, “Why on earth am I doing this?” There’s a better way, and it will become a differentiator for organizations in terms of employment if they can offer something that feels more customized to the individual.

Personalization and Leadership Development

Nolan:  There are a couple of applications that are interesting in the commercial world, and understanding the adoption of those is important. One of them is advertising. A lot of people accept the fact that they’re going to get personalized ads based on conversations—not even just things they search for—and they prefer it that way. Personally, I come from an advertising background. I always say: collect the data and show me ads that are relevant. I want to know what’s important.

For anyone who watches shows on Netflix or similar platforms that have commercials—those ads are all unique to you and relevant. They include things you might want to know about or highlight things that were in your blind spot, whether you need them or not. Maybe it’s the latest gadget that sits on your shelf—who knows? But there’s an increasing acceptance of that personalization.

For people—especially the younger generation—personalization is taken for granted. There’s no other way; that is the way. And if you start showing them things that aren’t personalized, they’ll almost feel taken aback. “What the heck? Someone must have sent this to me by mistake—this isn’t for me.” There’s an immersion in that expectation.

The other thing I’ve been discussing with some people is our launch of an AI leadership coach that’s available 24/7. We’re still exploring adoption—we don’t know yet. We’re experimenting internally and with some of our clients to measure it.

My hypothesis was this: during COVID, all these virtual therapists came online. BetterHelp was a prominent one here in the U.S., and I’m sure there are others globally. Initially, it felt like a shock to the system. People thought, “This isn’t going to work. People want to talk to a person.” But then the question became: do they really? Do they want to dress up, commute, and sit in an office? Or would they rather pull up their phone, talk to someone immediately, and have an abundance of options?

One of my in-laws lives in a remote town in Alaska and has a highly qualified therapist—how else would someone access that level of support out there? The value was there, and the crowd adopted it. Even then, people said it was great, but there was still bias. Patients felt judged by their therapists, and that bias absolutely exists. The only way around that is to remove the person from the equation, which presents an interesting use case for AI.

We’re already seeing that people are willing to accept virtual help. They don’t need to sit next to their coach or go to their boss for support. AI is going to open up new options.

You mentioned the shelf life of content—leadership content, in particular, is going to shift dramatically. Traditionally, you sit in a classroom for three hours and learn about managing younger people. Then, three months pass—you haven’t hired anyone new, and the same team dynamics continue. Suddenly, you receive an unexpected email. That’s the moment you need help.

If you can message your coach right then—“Hey, I have an issue. What do I do?”—and the coach can not just give you a Google result but actually interview you and help you reach the right answer, that’s real leadership coaching. I don’t want to sit in a classroom, learn theory, and then scramble to find the answer later when the situation hits. I don’t want to rely on Google or feel like I’m bothering someone by reaching out for help. I want an instant answer—right when I need it.

It’s interesting how all of these things are converging—this personalization is transforming both the content itself and the delivery mechanisms companies use.

Donald: And that’s quite a radical step. But of course, you could go beyond that. An old Microsoft Clippy, back in the day—an email or message comes in saying, “I’m a bit worried about this,”—that would trigger you to say, “I need to talk to somebody about this.” Your Microsoft Clippy leadership coach could pop up and say, “Looks like you’ve got an issue here. Do you want to talk about it?”—before you even think about it.

For a lot of leaders, that might be really valuable because many might launch into their default response at that stage. Even just considering that there could be an alternative could be valuable for everyone involved. We’re not thinking about things this way yet, but it’s not going to be very long at all before it becomes common. I feel absolutely sure—particularly, I think, in the leadership space.

Leadership development gets funded because it’s the leaders who write the checks for it. They’re looking after what they see as crucial to the organization. And if that funding is in place, you get some organizations providing this kind of support for managers and leaders. And it would be for managers, not just top people. They’re going to chat with friends in other organizations who are going to say, “You don’t have that in your workplace?”

Suddenly, it becomes a differentiator. Working in a place where you’ve got that degree of support makes it far more attractive. Suddenly, everyone wants to get on the bandwagon—because if you don’t, you’re not going to get the best people working for you. And I can absolutely see that personal development and support in leadership—an area that is quite tough—will be a differentiator in the future.

Challenges for L&D in 2025

Nolan: Wonderful. We talked a lot about what people are interested in and where their focus is. One of the things I want to unpack as we wrap up is: what are those big challenges? What do you think are the top challenges people are going to face as we look ahead to 2025? What are those big things? What are the top two or three problems? I guess I could guess—something related to AI—but what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve noticed, either in your survey or in conversations?

Donald: In terms of the challenges—interestingly, AI or technical issues were the biggest challenge last year, but not this year. This year, the challenge that had been pushed down to number two last year—strategy and talent—rose up to be number one again. The idea of us operating at a strategic level became more important this year. I think that’s further evidence that the AI shock has passed. It’s still very important.

Nolan: But it’s not as important as the business needs. I think, for me, looking at how we’re using AI in L&D to focus on faster content production—that idea has to change. Because if we associate ourselves too closely with content, we align ourselves with something that is rapidly becoming commoditized. People throughout the organization will be using AI to create content—not just us.

Donald: Why would you bother employing an L&D team? Now, I’m not saying that L&D’s content isn’t good—it is. The question is one of perception. People won’t see it as being any different from what’s produced by John in the mailroom or Jane in the canteen. If that’s the case, what else can we do? As I mentioned earlier, there’s a whole range of other things we could be doing with AI. But to embrace that, we need to shift our mindset.

Donald: As we said right at the beginning, it’s not about just finding something to do with AI. It’s about understanding the business problem—how can we solve it, and can AI help? That’s the mindset shift L&D absolutely needs to make. It’s the biggest challenge we face this year.

Nolan: Yep, I totally agree. I think it’s always a challenge, but this has added fuel to the fire, as you mentioned, because alternatives have presented themselves. It reminds me—my first job ever was selling small business websites. Website building. Squarespace destroyed that business. Right? If you can do it yourself…

Donald: Why pay a company a thousand bucks to get something that’s only slightly better?

Nolan: Exactly. What’s the point?

Donald: And I think that’s a really good point. I don’t think anybody is saying we can get super high-quality stuff being produced. For most people, it is good enough. And that’s a killer because it’s cheap

Closing Thoughts

Nolan: Absolutely. I think that’s a key challenge. As we wrap up, Donald, is there anything else you wanted to share? I know we didn’t get to touch on everything, but was there anything big that you want to make sure you leave people with? Or do you think we captured the main points of the survey? Also, could you spend a second helping people understand where to go to get the survey?

Donald: Go to the website—donaldhtaylor.co.uk—and I’m sure you’ll put that in the notes, Nolan. Thanks. That’s the trick, and you’ll find it there. I’m going to leave people on this note: I’m in my sixties now, and I’ve been working in L&D all my adult life—from when it was quite normal to smoke in offices and before the World Wide Web was born. I even remember when email was exciting. Before all that, I’ve seen the world change, but in all of those years, I don’t believe there’s been a more exciting time to be in L&D than right now. There’s so much possibility and need for it. This is the time to do it. I wish I were in my late 20s again so I could start all over. I’m not, but I think if we can approach it with that mindset, there’s a great world of opportunity. Rather than fearing the risks, I think there’s no end to what we can do.

Nolan: What a great way to end on an optimistic note. I also agree. I think this is a call to action for L&D to recognize that AI is a great leveler. If we look at the global players in this game—I gave you that analogy of the gentleman who said, “Hey, I could create what that person did in two years in two months now”—that is going to level the field. And what will be the competitive advantage that isn’t easy or quick? Your people. If you don’t have that people resource, it’s incredibly expensive. And it takes a long time to bring your culture and your people back up to that level. As L&D, we control a lot of that resource.

Wonderful way to end it, Donald. Thank you for investing your time with us. Take a couple of days off to recover from LearnTech, and we’ll catch up with you again sometime soon.

Donald:
Thanks very much for having me.

Nolan:
Thank you