The 5 reasons L&D is going to embrace ChatGPT

Let’s face it, learning and development professionals are content creators at heart. So generative AI and tools like ChatGPT will likely be the most exciting new tools we’ve seen in a decade.

Consider what corporate L&D professionals do: We identify performance and skilling needs, we study the information, skills and capabilities needed, and then we carefully put together training, coaching, apprenticeship, assessment, simulation and self-directed learning to fill the gap. Generative AI is specifically designed to address almost all these things!

Does this mean it will do away with the L&D job? Not at all — these tools give you superhuman powers to find content faster, put it in front of employees in a more useful way and more creatively craft character simulations, assessments, learning in the flow of work and more.

And it’s about time. We really haven’t had a massive innovation in L&D since the early days of the learning experience platform market, so we may be entering the most exciting era in a long time.

Let me give you the five most significant use cases I see. And more will come.

AI-enhanced content development

Currently, the process of creating training content, including videos, courses, graphics, interactive elements, text, audio and simulations, is time-consuming and relies heavily on manual tools. With the advent of generative AI, this content generation can be significantly accelerated. AI can swiftly produce simulations, videos, graphics, tests and quizzes, PowerPoint slides and more with just a little bit of guidance. Vendors will need to quickly adapt to incorporate these capabilities. For those involved in training content development, this presents a wealth of new and exciting opportunities that cannot be overlooked. 

AI-enhanced content assembly

Once you’ve built a bunch of chapters, through ChatGPT or manually, you are left with a jumble of modules, exercises and in-lesson activities. The next step is to organize them into a coherent course structure and create a rubric that outlines what learners will cover, and in what sequence to achieve a desired outcome. This process of reusing and rearranging content is something trainers constantly engage in. Currently, it is typically done manually or through the use of adaptive learning platforms.

However, generative AI can do this for you in a very intelligent way because the AI knows the skills and capabilities of the individual, and it can tag the skills covered by the topics. Moreover, it incorporates spaced learning, where learners are taught briefly, given time to engage in other activities and then prompted to recall and reflect on the content at random intervals. This approach boosts memory retention by retrieving forgotten information and flattening the forgetting curve. Revisiting material multiple times enhances understanding and retention. The prospect of an AI “teacher” monitoring progress and facilitating spaced learning holds immense value.

AI-enhanced learner support 

That’s far from the only use case for intelligent teaching assistants. Imagine you have created a comprehensive course on a complex operational process, incorporating written text, audio and video materials. By leveraging generative AI to search and index this content, you can create a highly knowledgeable teaching assistant that surpasses your own understanding. If someone has a question, the teaching assistant can provide chatbot-like responses, which can be further improved by human input based on user inquiries. Moreover, learners can continue using the teaching assistant to review and refresh their knowledge after completing the course. This suggests a completely (and I think, better) ubiquitous L&D delivery model.

Our Josh Bersin Company Copilot, for example, gives HR professionals a simple chat assistant to access more than 21 years of research, including case studies, vendor analysis, maturity models and more. We expect to offer it as a companion to our Josh Bersin Academy, filling the gap of a “teaching assistant” or “advisor,” with almost infinite flexibility.

AI-enhanced parsimonious and efficient learning

Fourth is maybe the most disruptive of all: Using Generative AI to avoid training altogether. As an educator, your first priority is to determine the essential background information, mindsets and deep understandings that learners truly need. This involves identifying the technical or professional skills they should develop, as well as advanced skills and perspectives required for becoming experts in the subject.

In the realm of business and professional life, this raises the issue of knowledge management. Do learners need to undergo an entire course on the history of the oil industry, or would a brief overview of exploration, production and distribution suffice? If someone needs to learn how to use Salesforce for their specific job function, they may not require training on the entire suite but rather a focused instruction on essential tasks. Similar situations arise in various businesses, such as addressing customer service challenges or answering technical questions about products.

The challenge with traditional training is that it excels at building skills but struggles with disseminating raw knowledge effectively. However, by leveraging AI, one can feed product documentation, compliance materials and other relevant documents to ChatGPT, enabling it to index the information. Individuals can then search and ask questions about the specific subset of knowledge they need at any given moment. This approach can eliminate a significant portion of unnecessary training content.

AI-enhanced skills, careers and talent intelligence

Talent marketplaces enable individuals to inform companies about their skills and experience, allowing the company to match them with relevant projects. If you then add training content so people can also find content related to that through the skills inference, that makes it a lot easier for you as an L&D team to put together a true capability academy.

Soon, a new wave of intelligent talent marketplaces will be doing that for you in a dynamic way, helping you as an organization keep up with in-demand skills. These talent intelligence platforms are set to revolutionize L&D. While the learning management system is not going away, it’s going to become less exciting as they can’t offer these other higher-level functions.

The shape of things to come

Should you be afraid for your job? Is it time to finally quit and start that cooking podcast? I’d keep that one as a side hustle for now. It’s absolutely true that while a lot of today’s L&D and training content creation jobs will not be needed, the overall impact will be an increase in efficiency and responsiveness to learners’ needs. Embracing these tools is crucial to remaining relevant in the industry.

Moreover, the emergence of AI in L&D will free up professionals so they can focus on higher-level tasks, such as becoming performance consultants and optimizing various aspects of business operations. People who have been in L&D for a long time have some of the deepest understanding of how the company operates, especially if they’ve been working directly with one business unit over an extended period of time, making adapting their expertise highly sought after.

Change is inevitable, and the introduction of technologies like ChatGPT bring new opportunities to rejuvenate the L&D field. And, at the end of the day, remember that you’re a key part of a $300 billion market that will continue to always be needed — as good corporate training, hard and soft skill education and knowledge sharing are among the biggest opportunities in business — human or otherwise.

Josh Bersin is a global industry analyst and CEO of The Josh Bersin Company, a human capital advisory company focused on HR and workforce strategies.