This is the second installment of TrainingZone’s series ‘Leveraging AI transformation to tackle L&D legacies’. In part one, we explored how to get AI to help with your emergent learning content legacy. Here, we are using the new headspace from that spring clean to explore spaces you might not have been in before. AI opens up a lot more possibilities to show up at your best for the business and for your learners – or at least to start lining up the right conversations to get things moving.
AI-supported career growth
This is (and has always been) bigger than learning. AI can help link better into the broader HR sphere. The prep work for this is having clear job role mapping and breaking down those job roles into tasks needed to complete the role. Speak to your friends in talent management and HR to fine-tune job descriptions, roles, tasks and associated skills. They will probably be doing this exercise for AI-powered career planning anyway.
And guess what? You can use AI to help you with some of these tasks and include a human-in-the-loop for verification. Information and/or microlearning of how to complete a particular task can then be fed into a closed LLM including links to an LMS or SharePoint where that content might already exist.
More focused performance support
AI finally gives us, as learning professionals, a chance to shine with performance support. This includes learning aids to help employees with on-the-job support at the precise moment of their need, where you can ask an AI Assistant a question (learn more about AI and boundaryless performance here).
This will have a huge impact on learners as they no longer have to go through lengthy courses or endure endless searching on an intranet for that one bit of information they need to complete a task.
Interactive knowledge management bots
Your knowledge management or content storage situation might look like the shoe closet in that old flat share, or it might exist but not be used or loved enough. An AI overlay can make things smoother for your learners, whether through pulling knowledge together for a seamless onboarding experience or by better serving your expert communities or functional experts. This can also help address any gripes with your current LMS or other legacy systems. Your audience might see less and less of what’s underneath – which might be a blessing. Make friends with your IT folks and wrangle yourself into whatever they are piloting.
Personalised learning
AI can now analyse a learner’s performance and adapt learning difficulty and type of assessment questions to match their skill level and grow with them. The learner can even partner with that AI to shape this together.
AI can also help curate what happens in between. This can be done conversationally in platforms like ChatGPTt, at a pathway-curation level, in an AI-powered coaching solution or via an AI overlay that offers more dynamic content. A callback to part one in this series: Speak to the providers and partners you already have to make a start.
Nice LMS you got there. Shame if anything happened to it…
Most organisations of a certain size have an LMS (or LXP) nowadays. These platforms have crystallised into the best current way to do several useful things: keeping learning records, storing content and tracking usage, compliance cover, providing a user interface, managing events and enrolments… all the good stuff.
Enter AI. This might NOT be the death of the LMS quite yet, but you might start identifying pieces of what your LMS/LXP does for you that AI can also do, but with more flexibility and personalisatio. Start noticing and noting down these benefits. Your current landscape will have to change and evolve. Look around and ask deeper questions with your new AI-savvy best buddies.
It’s likely too early to take a knife to the big cable right now, and you might still need certain functionalities in place in your emergent future mix. Your learning tech providers will hopefully evolve, too. But NOW is the right time to start developing a sense of where you are and what’s coming, so you can make the right big decisions when they come your way.
Clippy’s comeback 
One of the authors of this series (Lior) would possibly not have a business career right now without Clippy de-facto mentoring them through an internship in the late 90s. Clippy was a context-sensitive animated paperclip in Microsoft products that would chime in with “it looks like you’re trying to do xxx would you like some help with that xxx…” to then offer said help. AI assistants do this with increasing smoothness and accuracy now, taking a more consultative, mentoring approach and supporting people to discreetly help themselves.
We heartily recommend the 2013 film “Her” directed by Spike Jonze as a MUST-WATCH for all L&D professionals interested in AI. It is set in a world where everyone has their own AI assistant like a knowledge management bot. This is the level of futurism that will help us think big enough, as we ponder the future possibilities of how we add value and create impact in L&D.
In part three of this AI series (due to be published end of April 2025), we’ll examine interesting unsolved challenges like assessments and metrics that are key unlocks for tying a future learning landscape together. Tune back in!
