The 4 Levels of Transformation For L&D with AI in 25/26

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 TODAY’S THOUGHTS ☠️

Hey there 👋,

The wall of AI noise on social media is deafening.

I know you feel that too.

It leads to a lot of insecurities, false expectations and an unrealistic understanding of the current state of AI, especially in L&D.

I know this because L&D teams tell me almost weekly.

So, today, I feel it’s useful to explore “What’s really going on” with most of the L&D teams I collaborate with and how they are leveraging AI today.

Spoiler: They’re not building complex multi-step agentic workflows and sipping martinis on the beach while AI does it all. I didn’t want to get your hopes up.

Get your tea or beverage of choice ready, 🍵.

We've got lots to discuss!

P.S. Your app might clip this edition due to size, if so, read the full edition in all its glory in your browser.

 IN THIS DROP 📔

• What the average L&D team is doing with AI today

• How L&D rewires itself with AI across 25 & 26

• The exciting and weird experiment with an interactive AI Avatar

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 THE BIG THOUGHT 👀

The 4 Levels of Transformation For L&D with AI in 25/26

If you believe everything you see on social media, every “AI influencer” (which doesn’t mean much when it seems everyone is in AI today) has a billion agents doing their work while they make millions of dollars.

These statements provide my daily dose of amusement.

Appearances, as you know, can be deceiving.

It’s these types of posts that breed fear amongst many L&D teams I work with. Everyone thinks they’re behind, or at least that’s the perception. But as long-time readers will know, that all depends on your context.

Each team is on a different journey shaped by constraints, resources, and organisational realities

One team’s small use case is a huge enhancer for another.

The reality of what you think the ‘majority’ of L&D teams are doing and what they’re actually doing is probably a bigger gap than you think.

We’re going to shine a light on some of this today.

3 Years, 20 clients and a lot of data later

Being a tech geek in L&D has always worked in my favour.

Gen AI pumped that full of steroids, which has led to the fortunate opportunities to work with many L&D teams on the expanding topic of AI in L&D.

A question I never escape in consulting clients is:

I get why they want some sort of maturity benchmark against fellow practitioners.

It’s not so easy to give that, though.

Everyone is on their own journey, influenced by the factors I shared earlier. What I can, and do share, is an ‘average maturity level’ of where most teams I’ve worked with play in 2025.

Here’s a snapshot of that ↓

They sit on a 2.5 level, if I can call it that.

A zone of both activation and experimentation.

Which I love to see because stage 1 was more common in late 2023 and most of 2024 for me. That’s not to say I still don’t encounter it, but it’s less of a resistance conversation and more of a “What’s the enormity of the possible with this stuff?”

I don’t ever see maturity as fixed.

Not with AI, anyway.

New advancements drop quicker than Ed Sheeran can break hearts with another emotionally torn tune. Moving back and forth through these levels is both expected and encouraged, imo.

This image represents a higher-level view of things in 2025.

So, let’s explore how L&D can transform with AI in the next year.

The L&D with AI transformation model

Ok, what I’m about to walk you through is built on:

1. My experiences with clients

2. What I see and hear from product partners

3. Too much obsession with analysing market trends

It’s a viewpoint, observation, and my best guidance rolled into one.

You can disagree with it.

I believe the next year (and a bit) presents a golden opportunity for rewiring what we do and how we do things as an industry with AI. The fancy consulting firms would bill this as “hyper-transformation” or some insane level maturity model.

As a humble human, I don’t dare go down that route!

What is paramount to understand is that truly changing the face of L&D with AI is one of the biggest transformation projects our industry has ever seen.

Just like with social media and the internet before it.

Don’t fool yourself that this is only a story about technology.

I look at this journey in 2025 through 4 layers:

Level 1: The Current State - AI as an Assistant

80% of the teams I consult play here.

It’s a good place to be, as we all have to start somewhere.

You're (probably) using AI mostly as an assistant right now. By that, I mean the use of one of the many Large Language Models (LLMs) in ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, etc. You could even be doing this within an LXP or LMS if you have AI features bolted on.

At this level, we see the most use in L&D for generating content, analysing data, Q&A and simple info retrieval. Most other industries at this level are doing the same thing.

Level 2: Transition - AI as a Teammate

This is right where we belong as I type these words.

We’re not just looking at AI as a tool, but as a teammate, and exploring what that means for the work you do, how you structure your teams, and how you deliver value in the business.

What we're starting to see is AI's more active role in the form of agents (or agentic AI if you wanna get fancy about it).

AI agents are the next level of generative AI technology that now allows you to automate workflows and delegate tasks with a degree of autonomy.

A simple way to describe the difference between AI assistants and agents is:

• AI assistants work with you on tasks

• AI agents do the task for you (with guidelines and oversight)

(I have a non-techy guide to AI agents for L&D that you should check out to learn more).

There’s a lot of marketing BS around agents right now.

Agents in their true autonomous form are going to be pretty powerful. But don’t be fooled by all those “gurus” online with their n8n/Make/Zapier 150-step workflows.

That’s like a bargain basement version of its potential.

Autonomous agents take a task and do it for you based on the parameters and guidelines you put in place. A really simple way is to think about this like self-driving cars (which are also autonomous, fyi).

Self-driving cars are given guidelines/instructions on how to complete their tasks and the power to make decisions based on that data. They can respond to situations that happen in the moment through their own reasoning.

That’s how they know to take a different route or dodge when someone runs out in front of them.

These tools are becoming increasingly autonomous like self-driving cars.

Agents are going to be transformational, not just for L&D, but society in general.

What's really important to understand is that this is a transitional time because a lot of teams still use and look at AI as an assistant. But those that are forward-thinking are looking at how they use AI as a teammate.

Level 3: Emerging - AI as the Coach + Tutor

Level 3 is what I look at as emerging.

I say emerging, but really, this is happening now.

We're moving to a place where AI moves into the creation of more adaptive and personalised learning experiences. This challenges the paradigm of what we've always known with courses and content libraries.

Maybe, we won’t need them anymore 😱.

We're seeing a new evolution of these technologies in AI tutors and coaches.

[Note: you can explore more of my analysis on AI coaches and tutors in L&D, and a demo of how I use AI coaches in courses, too.]

I’m not saying AI-powered coaches and tutors will replace content libraries and platforms in 6 months. That might never happen, but I do see them challenging the status quo.

They’ll become a prominent piece of these experiences in the tech ecosystem, and they are something that can coexist with that, of course.

What I think we'll probably see is that as more of our audience’s experience is coming through AI tools, these are the kind of things they're gonna be demanding, and we can see the demand for that already.

This has set a new expectation for experiences.

We’ve seen this before with both Google search and social media delivering new experiences our audiences have come to expect. I’m not quite sure we ever rose to those levels as an industry.

AI provides a different dynamic here in not just consuming content but enabling the audience to create a personalised experience based on their context.

We can see suppliers providing AI coaching and tutoring solutions today (check out my friends at Sana).

It’s happening in schools, too. Check out this demo from a new startup that was released just last week. Many more will be coming, no doubt

This level will be the era of moving from transactional to truly conversational experiences.

The question is, how will you survive and thrive in it?

Level 4: Future - rewiring L&D with AI

I label this level “Future”, but in reality, we’re talking end of this year.

This is all about how AI rewires the world of L&D and how we shape it. What I mean by ‘rewiring’ is redesigning what we do and how we do it.

For workplace L&D, this is a complete rethink of how ‘learning’ is designed, delivered and measured. If our audience’s experience is shifting with the use of AI tools, we have to meet them where they are.

We can’t keep pushing out the same stuff or subscribe to current thinking.

I don’t have all the answers to what this looks like, sorry. I have a bunch of ideas and experiments I’m running, but I gotta get paid, so I can’t be revealing all the secrets here.

To shape what I’m talking about here requires a certain level of confidence and comfort in the subject of AI. So don’t skip on that before you try to shape a new way.

Final thoughts

There is much more to say on all of this, but we’ll leave it here for today.

I cannot give you an exact timeline on how this plays out for you, your team and your company. No one can as that is all based on your context.

I say this is all playing out across 2025 as the tech is maturing at a lightning pace, yet that doesn’t mean you’ll apply this at the same pace.

Hopefully, this brings you closer to the reality of what’s really happening today and where we’re going.

→ If you’ve found this helpful, please consider sharing it wherever you hang out online, tag me in and share your thoughts.

Till next time, you stay classy, learning friend!

PS… If you’re enjoying the newsletter, will you take 4 seconds to forward this edition to a friend? It goes a long way in helping me grow the newsletter (and cut through our industry BS with actionable insights).

And one more thing, I’d love your input on how to make the newsletter even more useful for you!

So please leave a comment with:

1. Ideas you’d like covered in future editions

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 👀 ICYMI (In case you missed it!)

1. Klarna reverses its “AI-first” policy by rehiring humans to its customer service teams. It was only a matter of time, wasn’t it? We’ll see more like this, I think. It’s not an either/or situation, humans and AI can co-exist.

2. I spent an afternoon talking to a live AI avatar about critical thinking. No script, no crappy PPT conversions, just a real-time chat with an AI avatar that can see and hear me about critical thinking with AI. I’ll be sharing how to do this yourself next week.

3. This is how Stanford University is teaching collaboration with AI. I liked this video a lot. A common-sense approach to exploring the wildly transforming times we’re in.

 VIDEO THOUGHTS 💾

Do You Know The Best AI Model To Help You?

With so many AI models appearing almost daily, it can be confusing to know which model is best for your tasks.

Should you use GPT-style generative models, reasoning models, or deep research tools?

In this video, I break down a simple framework to help you pick the right AI model based on what you need to do, whether it's writing, strategic problem-solving, or deep research.

Plus, I’ll show you how to combine multiple AI models to get the best results.

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