AI Is Not the Problem in L&D
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Like everyone else, the nonstop stream of posts about how AI will revolutionize L&D is hard to miss. New tools. New workflows. New shortcuts. Supposedly a better way to do everything.
At first, the excitement was real. Faster drafts. Faster prototypes. Less time staring at a blank screen. Automating the tedious parts of design. That part is true. AI absolutely increases speed.
But after using it more, one question kept surfacing.
What is this actually making better?
Production speed was never the real bottleneck in L&D – that is if you don’t consider the one co-worker who is always behind schedule. In my almost 30 years of designing online instruction, building content was rarely the biggest frustration. In fact, it is often the part many of us enjoy.
The real frustration has always been making L&D work inside an organization.
The random request that shows up without context. The impossible deadline. The lack of executive support. The unclear performance problem dressed up as a training need. AI does not fix those. If anything, faster production may just increase the volume of noise.
The field feels captivated by a very shiny object. And it is shiny. But L&D has never had a shortage of tools, models, or theories. That has never been the problem.
The problem is how people work together.
L&D is people working with people to support people. Clarity. Alignment. Accountability. Those are human issues, not software limitations.
No one should worry about a lack of innovation in this profession. Perhaps the bigger concern is our short memory.
Every time something new appears, we act as if the hard problems disappeared. They did not. We just renamed them.
Anyone logging into their Second Life University lately?
