The Future of Learning and Development is Business-First

By Lefteris Ntouanoglou, CEO and Founder of Schoox

Businesses often view learning and development (L&D) as a cost center rather than a strategic partner for improved business performance. But that mindset must change. True transformation can only occur when organizations adopt a business-first approach to L&D, where every training initiative can demonstrate impact on business performance.

The Problem: L&D Exists in a Silo

A siloed approach to L&D presents a critical risk. L&D teams often track completions and assessment scores, but rarely connect learning to larger organizational goals. More training won’t solve this issue. The solution lies in establishing stronger connections between training content, the skills your people need, and business goals. It’s about delivering targeted, strategic learning that improves the metrics most important to the organization. 

Redefining Business-First L&D

A business-first approach begins with one question: What does our company want to achieve? Whether the answer is to increase revenue, improve the customer experience, or something else, your L&D strategy should demonstrate an ability to continuously improve employee performance to achieve company performance goals. Success requires close collaboration between learning leaders and operational teams. When learning becomes an engine for achieving performance goals, organizations view L&D as a profit multiplier rather than a cost center. 

From Vision to Reality: The Schoox Learning Impact Suite

For years, we’ve helped organizations connect learning to business outcomes through skill-based development, which is why we’re particularly familiar with the challenges and limitations of traditional learning approaches. Manually mapping skills to jobs, identifying L&D needs, and creating training content for large frontline workforces is a monumental task that requires large teams and even larger budgets. 

We built the Schoox Learning Impact Suite to make business-first L&D achievable at scale. With AI as the connective tissue, our platform empowers L&D teams to deploy strategic, targeted training programs and measure their impact on performance objectives. 

With AI-native tools like skills mapping and clustering, training gap analysis, and micro-assessments, L&D leaders can accomplish tasks that once took months in minutes. The Learning Impact Suite is specifically engineered to keep a “human in the loop” by automating work such as sifting through thousands of courses to find relevant content, while ensuring critical human checkpoints to edit, add, or delete AI-generated outputs along the way. 

The Learning Impact Suite helps L&D leaders accomplish four critical tasks:

• Identify the most relevant skills for every job.

• Map how those skills impact business metrics to reveal where better training can have the greatest effect.

• Quantify the business impact of improving those skills, for example, by demonstrating how a food safety course can reduce waste. 

• Generate training plans with purpose-built content to help employees build specific skills. 

Our AI models don’t rely on vague projections. Instead, they provide practical, data-informed performance improvements based on business goals. For instance, improvements in menu knowledge and upselling skills can increase average check sizes at one restaurant location and compound when rolled out to hundreds of servers across the enterprise. The result is a more transparent conversation between L&D and business leadership about the value of improving the skills of existing team members. 

The Future: Smarter, Faster, and More Connected Learning

The Schoox Learning Impact Suite represents a significant leap toward our mission to change how enterprises train their frontline workforces and develop their people. The next step is to equip these organizations to create a powerful feedback loop: better training leads to better performance, which generates better data and leads to more impactful training. 

Over time, this creates a virtuous improvement cycle—training becomes more targeted, business and employee performance improve, and new data refines the process. It’s a flywheel effect that allows organizations to generate and fine-tune learning content at incredible speed. Companies that embrace this level of automation will move faster, adapt better, and outperform competitors who rely on outdated approaches to learning and development. 

Unlocking Human Potential

When we founded Schoox, our goal was to help organizations leverage learning differently by connecting it to something bigger than checkboxes and compliance. Today, with innovations like the Learning Impact Suite, that vision is finally within reach.