Sean Stowers, thinking out loud about AI and L&D
Once a month I host a roundtable call with L&D leaders who are working through AI in their organizations. We’ve been running these for a little over a year now, and the conversation has changed shape. A year ago, most of the questions were about fear of AI taking over L&D. The calls sound different now. The panic is mostly gone. Leaders talk about rollouts and vendors and dashboards and where they are on their AI strategy. The tone is calmer, more strategic, more grown-up. Most of them feel like the conversation has matured.
Very little of the conversation is about what AI is doing inside their own organizations.
What I keep noticing on those calls, though, is that as much as the conversation has changed shape, very little of it is about what AI is doing inside their own organizations. We talk about strategies, about what other companies are doing, about what AI means for L&D as a function. We almost never get into the granular, sometimes embarrassing question of what is happening on the ground right now with the people we’re meant to serve.
What we keep paying attention to instead
A lot of that is because of what we hear every day. The voices in the L&D-and-AI conversation are loud and many. We hear from consultants telling us AI is going to remake the function, from vendors with a particular model or prompt library or platform that’s the answer, and from LinkedIn pundits taking confident positions from outside any organization living through it. And we hear voices just as loud going the other way: some telling us AI is overhyped and the promise won’t deliver, others telling us AI is coming for the human side of our work. None of those voices knows your organization, and several of them are selling you something. But they shape how we think about the question, and they shape how we judge ourselves against everyone else.
Then there are the announcements. The case studies, the “we’ve operationalized AI across L&D” ebooks or decks, the highlight reel on LinkedIn from companies that look like they’re way out ahead. These don’t tell you the eight months of false starts, the tool the team quietly stopped using, or the partner group that ignored the rollout entirely. They tell you the headline. And we compare ourselves against the headline, feel behind, and pour more energy into looking like we’re catching up, when often the people we’re catching up to are not as far ahead as their LinkedIn would have you believe.
When L&D leaders do turn the attention inward, it almost always lands on ourselves. We ask how AI changes our team structure, how it can speed up production, how many designers we can operate with now. These are reasonable questions, but they are the smaller ones. The bigger play, the one that decides whether L&D matters in the next five years, is what the workforce we serve is doing with AI right now, and most strategy documents barely touch it.
Have you asked: what's AI actually doing inside your organization right now?
Most L&D leaders, if they’re honest, can’t answer this question for their own organization with any real specificity. The conversations on those monthly calls hover around strategy, around budget, around what other companies are doing. The picture inside the organization stays fuzzy at the level where it most needs to be clear: who is using what, why, with what effect.
Almost nobody is doing the work of getting a real answer, and it’s the work that would tell us something useful. It starts with the people in the organization already using personal AI tools, like ChatGPT accounts they pay for themselves or free tools open in a browser tab, without anyone in the company knowing: who they are, why they haven’t said so, and what they’ve changed about how they work. It carries on past the Copilot license dashboard to find out whether anyone is using what the company bought, and whether anyone is reviewing what comes out. There’s a real conversation to have with the senior person who told her team AI is a fad, to find out what’s behind that. And there’s the gap between what the company has paid for and what people are actually using.
None of that fits cleanly on a strategy slide. The strategy slide says “AI enablement: workforce-wide rollout in Q3.” The honest answer, if you went and looked, is closer to “we have seventeen people in finance who taught themselves Copilot last year, two of whom have started training other people informally, and we’ve never spoken to any of them.” Both are true. Only one of them tells you where the work actually lives.
This is what we mean at WeLearn when we say start with the humans. We mean it as the literal first step of any AI strategy that’s going to work, not as a line of positioning. Patient and sometimes uncomfortable attention to what’s already happening with your own people is the foundation. Strategies, announcements, and efficiency metrics sit on top of that work. When there isn’t any work underneath, they have nothing real to stand on.
Why this work keeps getting put off
The reason L&D leaders keep avoiding this kind of work isn’t that they’re lazy. It’s that nothing in our environment rewards it. You can’t post about it. You can’t put it on a slide as a deliverable, and it doesn’t fit the rhythm of quarterly planning. You can’t outsource it either, because the consultant flown in for a workshop doesn’t know your people, and the vendor selling you a platform doesn’t have a reason to find out. So we put it off, month after month, while the strategy document keeps looking good and people across the business keep using AI in ways nobody in L&D has looked at.
Where the seat at the table actually comes from
What I keep telling leaders on those monthly calls is that the seat at the table they want isn’t something you earn by having an AI strategy. Plenty of functions have one. You earn it by being the only function in the organization that knows, with any real specificity, what AI is doing inside the building already, and what the people inside it need next. That knowledge isn’t on LinkedIn or in a vendor pitch. It’s sitting inside the organization, waiting for someone in L&D to go and find it.
If you’d like to be invited to our monthly AI roundtable discussions, please get in touch.
