{"id":47860,"date":"2023-05-08T19:55:21","date_gmt":"2023-05-08T19:55:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staging.totara.fortyapp.com\/articles\/ai-tools-leave-learning-development-nowhere-hide\/"},"modified":"2024-08-02T20:47:09","modified_gmt":"2024-08-02T20:47:09","slug":"ai-tools-leave-learning-development-nowhere-hide","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/staging.totara.fortyapp.com\/us\/articles\/ai-tools-leave-learning-development-nowhere-hide\/","title":{"rendered":"AI tools leave learning and development nowhere to hide (and that’s good!)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The hype cycle and emotion of generative AI feels like a black hole at times. Will the amount of low-quality content produced become infinite? Will all our jobs fold into nothing and vanish from this universe? Or can a global super-intelligence finally deliver on the 4 hour work day that\u2019s been promised since the 1920s?<\/span>Like many, I\u2019ve been \u2018on the tools\u2019 and experimenting. I\u2019m a learning technologist, with some historic AI experience. Beyond the hype I want to understand the real implications for human development in the workplace, and for L&D professionals in particular.\u00a0<\/span>So here\u2019s my personal AI snapshot as of May 2023: across L&D it\u2019s time to let go of rigid structures and rote\u00a0content planning.<\/a> The machines will gobble those up within months. But there\u2019s vast potential for advanced learning desig<\/a>, focused on outcomes, to shift behaviour and meet business goals like never before.\u00a0<\/span>To me, applications like ChatGPT<\/a>, Midjourney<\/a>, Dall-E<\/a> and others seem to be having the same impact as browsers and search engines did on the 1990s internet. Everything becomes more accessible, more accelerated. Old use cases vanish (have you sent a fax or bought a MiniDisc recently?), while others change (how many in-person conversations do you have each week now, vs someone in 1993?).\u00a0<\/span>Time and cost dynamics get upended, and it\u2019s hard to predict how that will play out. On the one hand there\u2019s the obvious, and in my view well-founded, concerns that AI\u2019s remapping of the skills landscape<\/a> will disrupt jobs at speed across the economy. On the other hand, humans have adapted<\/a> through many, many waves of technological innovation going back to the discovery of fire.\u00a0<\/span>Our responsibility as\u00a0L&D professionals<\/a> is to understand and help shape that adaptation process. The nuts\u2019n\u2019bolts of it from an L&D perspective are that content production will become much quicker and more easily scalable. But the complex, human nature of the industries we sit across means broader transformation will be lumpy. Reality is stubborn: look at the legal profession, for instance, where AI has seemed on the verge of replacing junior research functions for more than a decade, except it still hasn\u2019t quite happened.\u00a0<\/span>What <\/span>will<\/b> happen for us in L&D is a sharp focus on whether having abundant learning content generates any real tangible outcome.<\/a> Which is a question very much worth asking.\u00a0<\/span>At every L&D conference or meetup I\u2019ve ever been to, as an L&D profession we talk about sophisticated learning designs that will genuinely shift behaviour. About customised pathways, personalised experiences<\/a>, continuous feedback,<\/a> always-on coaching.<\/a> About the ways we know we can lift careers & organizations together.\u00a0<\/span>But after we leave those conversations, full of ideas and energy, too often we fall back into the same old routines, the same old patterns. We design familiar content in familiar ways (click-next and sheep-dip) as the only safe or acceptable option. The \u201cdefault\u201d position.\u00a0<\/span>Well, that\u2019s precisely what AI will expose. This \u201cL&D default\u201d will be even more ubiquitous. As <\/span>Martha & the Vandellas<\/span><\/a> said – or was it Vin Diesel? – we\u2019ll have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.\u00a0<\/span>And for me this is cause for great optimism! When I work with the new wave of AI tools, and see what my colleagues at Totara are experimenting with within our learning technology platform, I see so many achievable innovations:<\/span><\/p>\n