The future of L&D: How AI is revolutionizing talent development

The field of learning and development is undergoing a major transformation in the company of artificial intelligence. For organizations to remain competitive in today’s rapidly evolving work environment, they must keep up with these advancements. 

The rise of AI in L&D

L&D is now widely accepted as a value-add across the most successful organizations today, helping to develop, engage and retain their most valued employees. According to LinkedIn’s 2022 Workplace Learning Report, “opportunities to learn and grow” are the most highly rated culture-drivers worldwide.

However, L&D practitioners, who usually help others in their organizations adapt to change, are now faced with adapting to change themselves, as AI tools become more accessible in everyday life. The most popular of these tools, the generative AI ChatGPT developed by OpenAI which recently received a multi-year $10 billion investment by Microsoft, has expanded the possibilities of what is possible in L&D today. This article explores the benefits of using AI in talent development, as well as exploring the possible challenges and risks of doing so.

The benefits of AI in L&D

Increased efficiency and scalability. AI can help increase the efficiency of L&D practitioners at all levels, allowing them to better scale their offerings and reach more employees with less upfront effort. As AI tools expand and become integrated into the systems we use every day, they will drive efficiency at an even faster rate. For instance, Microsoft has recently integrated ChatGPT into its Bing search engine and announced plans to further integrate it into other Microsoft products, like Word. This level of accessibility will allow L&D professionals to quickly draft initial workshop outlines, implementation plans, communications and detailed content on a variety of subject matters.

Personalized learning experiences. AI can help L&D practitioners quickly develop personalized learning experiences, tailored to the individual needs of each team or individual. With the correct amount of input information entered in a prompt, an extremely individualized learning journey can be outlined in seconds, with robust learning material developed with a few more follow-up prompts.

Increased ROI. The potential for increased ROI is not just highly likely, but already being achieved in some organizations that are using AI effectively. By quickly creating more customized content, employees can receive the learning they need when they need it as opposed to traditional learning approaches that are often event-based and developed in a one-size-fits-all method.

Virtual coaching. AI will soon be able to provide virtual coaching on-demand, making these services more accessible and convenient for employees at all levels to reap the benefits of an often-costly service. While AI in its current form is nowhere near on-par with highly experienced certified coaches, it is not inconceivable that in the near future they will be able to exhibit more conversational skills, empathy and critical thinking.

Interactive simulations and gamification. AI can create interactive simulations and help gamify learning to make it more engaging and more likely to stick. Role-playing scenarios with peers are a common tool used to practice new skills before using them in real-time. With AI, these scenarios can be customized, in real-time, to an employee’s needs, when and where they need it, not just during group workshops.

Possible use cases and example prompts

Training outline:

You are a trainer, facilitator and L&D manager at a successful tech company. You are professional, smart and well-spoken. Write a training workshop outline on best practices for one-on-one meetings with employees for managers. Make it engaging, interactive and useful.

Engagement activities:

What are some examples of interactive exercises that I could facilitate virtually to drive engagement and learning on meetings best practices? Provide me with five examples and a description of the activity.

Description and learning objectives:

Can you provide a high-level description of this outline? Provide me with a brief overview and learning objectives.

Communications:

Can you create a relaxed and helpful Slack message to a channel for managers only? The Slack message should aim to inform and advertise the new offering to managers to get them and their teams to participate in it once launched.

Interview prep and gamification:

Let’s gamify the interview process. You are the interviewer. I am the interviewee. For each answer that you judge me to have answered in a satisfactory and correct manner, you will give me one point. For each answer that you judge me to have answered incorrectly, you will subtract one point. After five questions, give me a tally.

You are a hiring and L&D manager at a large tech company working on their people team. You are looking to hire a director of learning and employee engagement. Ask a relevant interview question related to the subject matter expertise someone in that role would be expected to have every time I ask you to ask me a question.

Please start by asking me one question. I will submit my response. I would like you to give me feedback based on my response with areas for improvement.

Personalized learning plans:

You are an expert trainer and certified coach in the ___ industry. You are developing learning plans based on your team’s professional development goals. You have a new manager that needs to learn basic skills management skills across five one-hour virtual sessions. Create a lesson plan and outline for each session with a focus on one core skill per session. This new manager is an excellent communicator and develops her team well, but they need help delegating work and leaning into productive conflict and debate more.

Suggest a couple of books that focus on these topics in a business environment to supplement the five sessions.

Naming:

Give me name suggestions for an onboarding program at a company named _____ in the ____ industry. The new hire orientation is focused on culture transfer, department overviews, and our brand story. I want a catchy name instead of just calling it “onboarding”. Our brand is seen as smart, progressive, at the cutting edge and is in the hyper-growth stage. Give me 10 suggestions.

Challenges and risks

Ensuring data privacy and security. Organizations are rightfully concerned with employees feeding potentially confidential information into these public tools like ChatGPT. But, as AI tools begin to become monetized, we can expect them to begin to offer Enterprise License Agreements where an instance of the tool can be privately accessed by all employees within an organization’s existing IT-infrastructure, negating the risk of data leaks.

Copyright infringement and liability. Recently, Getty Images sued a generative AI image creation tool, Stable Diffusion by Stability AI, for using its expansive, copyrighted image library to train their software. This case, and others like it that will follow, will set the precedence for how AI companies will be allowed to operate in our market. How will this case affect the company of an employee who used the tool to generate images that look similar to a Getty image that they then used in a marketing campaign or internal presentation? Questions like these will have to be answered and in the meantime, it’s best that L&D professionals err on the side of caution.

Addressing skill gaps. Organizations need to address the development of new AI-related skills as the roles of many professionals will change once AI is more widely adopted. Training on how to input the proper prompts to get useful outputs will be critical. L&D professionals will shift from being creators, as many instructional designers are now for instance, to primarily serving as editors. Their work will be focused more on customizing content to their company’s culture, fact-checking information and facilitating or program managing.

Creating a culture that supports AI-driven learning. The importance of creating a culture that supports and embraces AI-driven L&D cannot be understated. Culture plays a critical role in the successful adoption and implementation of any change initiative, and AI’s adoption is no different. Its introduction into everyday work-life has to be a well-planned and implemented endeavor with buy-in garnered from across the organization.

Inaccurate information. The current state of AI is such that it cannot be trusted to give completely accurate information all the time. ChatGPT itself has a “limitations” warning claiming it “may occasionally generate incorrect information.” As such, any AI output should be thoroughly reviewed and fact-checked by a knowledgeable professional that is equipped to make judgements on the fidelity of the content.

Ensuring ethical use of AI. Organizations should consider writing AI-related policies that directly outline which areas of work are acceptable for AI-usage and which are not. There are also ethical issues that must be addressed, such as:

1. Bias: AI algorithms can perpetuate and amplify existing biases based on the data it has learned from. Organizations should actively work to reduce bias in AI algorithms by conducting regular reviews, testing for bias and implementing a rigorous fact-checking process.

2. Job loss: AI-powered L&D and other emerging tools can nearly automate certain tasks and processes, leading to the fear, or reality, of job loss for some employees. Organizations should invest in upskilling and reskilling programs to support employees whose jobs may be impacted by AI.

Conclusion

While the emergence of everyday AI use will be a huge boon to L&D professionals in terms of efficiency and productivity, the ethical concerns and risks counterbalance the benefits at first. As generative AI becomes more knowledgeable, effective and nuanced though, the benefits will far outweigh the risks.

Ultimately, L&D departments and businesses that do not begin to at least explore these new tools may be left behind as this technology empowers their competitors. The future of L&D lies in AI use, with possible use-cases yet to have been discovered, let alone perfected. All L&D teams should begin to invest their time in exploring generative AI tools and the possible use cases that may make their jobs easier while also making them more effective and productive.