November 4, 2025
5 Min. Read
Using AI to speed up current learning approaches wastes its true potential. The real breakthrough comes when we embrace a new paradigm: harnessing AI to architect learning custom-fit to business purpose.
By Sandra Moran
Chief Marketing Officer, Schoox
Every learning leader can point to a new “AI feature” in their platform. It’s exciting, it’s faster, and it’s certainly innovative, yet much of it still revolves around accelerating or augmenting current approaches for continuous innovation, not transformation.
AI is already being used as a tool to meaningfully revamp work we already do. Currently, 71% of learning leaders say they’re experimenting with or integrating AI into their work, according to LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report.
Yet if we keep looking to AI to help us accelerate our existing process, we can only expect incremental progress in return.
What our industry needs instead is discontinuous innovation: a full reexamination of what learning leaders accomplish for the business, a redefinition of L&D’s daily work and a new paradigm around how we design, deliver and support employee learning and development.
We can reach this new paradigm by harnessing the currently untapped potential of AI.
Why AI’s Potential in L&D Is Still Untapped
There’s no denying AI’s impressive progress so far. Tools now turn scripts into multilingual training videos in minutes, translate at scale and curate thousands of documents to surface relevant content. These advances save time, but they don’t solve the deeper problem, which is a glut of content and a gap in impact.
Quickly generating more courses without more purposeful architecture is ineffective. It’s time to move into the phase of use where AI architects learning fit for the business and enables leaders to deliver training and development that ensures desired outcomes.
Most corporate learning libraries boast tens of thousands of courses, massive catalogs that disguise an underlying gap between volume and impact. Meanwhile, skills shift faster than most libraries can keep pace; employers expect nearly 40% of skills to change or be outdated by 2030, according to the most recent Future of Jobs Report.
The result is today’s L&D paradigm: a system that relies on approximate matches out of thousands of static courses, but still leaves L&D guessing which training drives performance. AI can fix that, not by creating more content, but by architecting learning around specific business goals.
Imagine a system that maps company objectives to the skills that enable them, generates targeted training for each role, reinforces learning in real time, and links progress directly to performance outcomes. That’s AI as an architect, not an assistant. It’s how we create outcomes, not just “teach skills.”
This is how L&D can be re-architected for business impact. It’s a bold transition and also the doorway to learning’s full potential.
The Missing Piece: What L&D Leaders Must Demand From AI
AI will only fulfill its promise when L&D leaders stop accepting incrementalism. The goal isn’t faster course creation — it’s making learning the engine of organizational capability.
The shift requires a vision for the future and a mindset change for L&D teams, but it also positions them to become true business partners, focusing on strategic work that demonstrably drives outcomes like revenue growth, retention and productivity.
It means that L&D will proactively engage with operational leadership to demonstrate the tangible value of training in terms of business impact, such as increased revenue.
Consider a restaurant chain preparing to launch 70 new locations nationwide. In the old model, L&D was informed after planning. In the new model, it’s integral to execution. L&D will use AI to identify the business-aligned skills needed by role, then they will generate targeted training and track the effect on sales, service quality, retention and other critical performance metrics.
When learning becomes embedded in business planning, it stops being a cost center. It becomes a competitive advantage. This won’t happen just once but continuously, as improvements are identified, employees change, and new opportunities for growth emerge.
This is how we change the conversation in L&D, and AI will empower us to finally achieve it.
Crossing Into the New Paradigm
When AI connects the dots from goals to skills to outcomes, everything changes. Learning teams spend less time curating libraries and more time leading the conversation with the business. The L&D role is transformed.
L&D leaders can sit beside fellow business leaders and say, “Here are three ways we can roll out training for your 70 new locations — two months, four months or six months — and here’s the projected performance impact from each.”
Those conversations don’t happen today. But they’ll be the new standard when AI helps us design learning with purpose.
This is the promise of the new paradigm. AI is an intelligent design partner that frees L&D leaders to do their most strategic work. When learning is architected for business purpose, it finally delivers what every organization wants: growth through people.
The mission of L&D was never just to teach skills. It was to fuel performance. AI now gives us the tools to fulfill that long-standing mission — not only to prove our value, but to create it.
