The first installment of this series ‘Leveraging AI transformation to tackle L&D legacies’, presents a seven-step beginner’s guide to support L&D in navigating this challenge.
With AI speeding up the pace of change, you already know you have an emergent learning content legacy to deal with. What’s more, your actions now will likely create another legacy that must be later dealt with as technology progresses.
As a learning and development professional, it’s important to ensure your management of emergent learning content legacy is an ongoing practice. See the positive side – this can be a great source of fruitful experimentation and learning as an organisation, plus an opportunity to leverage AI.
To help you on this journey of content legacy management, here is our seven-step programme:
Step 1: Stop making it worse
Resist the temptation to make more content cheaper and faster just because you can. Most of learning’s challenges were never about lack of content.
Resist the urge to do “stress-shopping”. Just like in life – this isn’t the answer. Don’t lock yourself into more contracts with more things unless you have VERY good reasons to. And if you sign, don’t lock yourself in for too long.
Step 2: Out with the old. Then take a deep breath.
Use this time to do a proper cleanup and clean out of your stash. Enter AI, which can help you with curation. This includes tagging, analysing and deciding which content to keep and which to delete. Be ruthless.
The way people work, and the skills and tools they might need to do their job might change drastically. This means a lot of your content will likely need reviewing accordingly.
Starting points include:
- Personal productivity
- Performance management
- Preparing for key career moments
- Common tools – such as Excel – and how AI changes the collaboration with it
- Research and information management
Identify key topics that are shifting for your key audiences (you’ll be in touch with the most salient changes in your organisation right now, so start there).
Next, upgrade or refresh your content. As you do this, think about how you can keep this flexible enough to be ongoing. AI can help with this too.
Finally, review your catalogues and providers and edit ruthlessly. Let AI help you with the analysis. Think about it: If someone can chat to AI about a topic to get up to speed, what would an e-module have to be like to better that?
Step 3: Assemble your squad
Check in with the providers and organisations you already partner with (online content, facilitation, platforms and so on). Check the contracts. If you’ve done it well enough, there should be some provisions for upgrades and new features. And if not yet, make it a part of your next contract conversation.
Keep it short and flexible as your landscape evolves. Make the time to check in with your providers to find out what their roadmap is. They’d be delighted to share. And if you are a big enough client and/or willing to pilot things, you could have a chance to influence what gets prioritised. Use that chance.
Lean on your partners and providers to handle content volatility
Content volatility is at the highest level we have seen in our careers. It can literally change from one week to the next. For example, when Microsoft Copilot for Web recently removed some of its features, all the training material had to be re-written to include these changes.
The same applies to new topics like AI Agents and emerging AI Tools. For the “generic content on AI upskilling” leave your current digital learning content providers to do the heavy lifting. You won’t have time to continually update content as there are so many other strategic projects to focus on.
Take note of your partners willingness to experiment
How your partners respond and how switched on they are will give you a good sense of where they are on their own journey (note: nobody has figured this out yet!).
Check their openness to collaboration and experimentation. As you look to streamline your portfolio, make this a crucial part of your considerations on who to take next steps with. Make your partnerships the most fruitful you can so they take the load off of you.
Step 4: Consider new ways of working and skills needed
How people work is changing (or at least it should), yet a lot of training content or programmes for both hard and soft skills doesn’t reflect any of that. There’s obvious upskilling on tools, of course. But there might be topics in your soft/human skills or leadership development programmes that might not be quite right anymore.
Additionally, how people consume content, take notes and absorb information is also getting more fluid. Your printed workbook might no longer be cutting it. So cut it. Or people might need to start thinking about delegating to AI agents, or teams of agents. How good are they at that (if they never really delegated before)?
What does AI mean for your unique context?
Donald H Taylor’s Global Sentiment Survey 2025 shows that artificial intelligence is still the #1 hot topic for over 3k L&D professionals. “AI” as a skill is probably not granular enough for practical implementation so you will want to dig deeper into what that actually means in your context.
This is not just about upskilling yourself as a learning professional. It is also about how to bring AI into learning in the flow of work, better learning experiences and learning delivery and impact. Your role is to help your organisation with this.
A lot of this will link into longer-term contracts, design logics or blended setups. Think about how you will manage AI integration. This may include making your existing providers do some of the heavy lifting and leaning into your workforce community, rather than telling folks top-down how it should be.
Why not think about using AI in skills assessments? You could also make learning more personalised, with a coaching or curation component for the practical side (something which is often missing in “knowledge transfer” learning assets).
Step 5: Evolve how you think about modalities and content
Inject AI into existing content,. For example, you could integrate it into interactive conversational practices to help with suggesting examples, providing feedback, exploring scenarios, and adopting a more immersive approach. We always wanted to do more of this, and it was often prohibitively expensive or required complicated technology. Now this is getting easier and quicker we can use it.
Now is the time to pilot!
Start experimenting with AI. Make good friends with your existing providers who are probably working on things in that space and stay close to what is coming so you can get a few pilots going.
You heard our warning about creating more content earlier. Focus, instead, on investing in your “in the flow of work” performance support (Clippy 
Note: As delivery modalities evolve, there is also a thought to be had about your LMS/LXP and the role you see this playing in the future, but that’s a post for another day.
Step 6: Safeguard the heirlooms
Not everything in that attic is for the skip. Some artefacts or rituals have cultural and sentimental value that you might want to keep as that’s the stuff of legends. Identify what that is (NOT everything!) and find a meaningful way to take it into the new world.
Step 7: Make a plan
Try and get a gauge of where you are with cleaning up, doing new things and how you want to start shifting this.
Take a step back. What are the key things you need to consider? Everyone’s most burning platforms will be a little different. Make this a part of your new ways of working. Pick the next project you are working on and use that to (re)define what the new(er) world will look like, and what elements, tools, processes and principles you would like to apply.
Build in a little more time for that to make them reusable, and get those building blocks set up with the conversations and decisions needed to do this well.
Make time for cleaning
Clean-ups are never fun but they are worth it to help keep content relevant. If you can’t schedule a big project to tackle things at once, dedicate some time for it and be expedient with when and how you schedule it. For example, a good time to do this is towards the end of a contract, so you can start with a clean slate. Or over summer when it’s quiet and you have extra resources. Or, perhaps as an extension of a key project you got approved.
This will never feel smooth and neat so whatever you can get done will help you free up that space for the new.
If you are waiting for a sign, this is it!
Spring is in the air, but this isn’t about one change you’ll hope will “fix it”. The transformation will continue, so this is both about getting a grip on your emerging learning content legacy without putting it off for too long. In addition, it’s about building a practice for you as a learning team to use.
Remember, AI is there to help you with the clean-up – so use it. Doing so will help you incorporate it fully into your AI transformation.
