A few years ago, I was out to dinner with friends — the kind of conversation-filled evening where the energy is high, the drinks are flowing, and the topics bounce from pop culture to trivia to random facts. At one point, someone asked a question that no one at the table could answer. There was a moment of silence. And then, like clockwork, someone pulled out their phone and said the words we've all heard (or said) a hundred times:

“I’m going to Google it.”

That was a learning moment, although nobody actively called it that. No one labeled it “training” or “education.” It was just a group of people living their lives, bumping into a knowledge gap, and instinctively using digital tools to fill it. That’s the world we live in now — and that moment says a lot about how learning behaviours have changed.

And yet, much of what we do in learning and development still reflects a different era, one focused on how we train and educate people rather than on how their learning behaviours have evolved.

 

The Gap Between How People Learn and How We Train

Emerging technologies are transforming the workplace at an accelerating pace. From AI tools that summarise reports and generate images to platforms that personalise the flow of information, new capabilities are emerging all the time. But here’s the thing: These technologies aren’t just changing what’s possible — they’re changing what people expect.

We often view new technologies through the lens of training. Can we deliver faster? Can we scale easier? Can we automate more? These are valid questions. But if we only focus on training and education, we risk missing a much larger shift happening right in front of us.

Training is structured, planned, and formal. Learning is constant, contextual, and often informal. Most of us interact with learning in the wild every day — we just don’t call it that. We solve problems by watching YouTube, we learn new skills via TikTok tutorials, we ask ChatGPT to rephrase that confusing email. These aren’t future-state use cases. This is now.

 

The Smartphone Rewrote the Rules of Learning

The rise of the smartphone changed everything. We carry access to the world’s knowledge in our pockets. The barrier between “I don’t know” and “Let me figure it out” is thinner than it’s ever been in human history.

It’s not just the access to information that’s changed — it’s the relationship we have with it. We’ve become conditioned to expect immediate, personalised, low-friction support in the moment we need it. And that shift wasn’t driven by a learning strategy. It was driven by the evolution of how we live our lives in an increasingly digital world. It happened organically.

It’s no longer about “I’ll learn that later.” It’s “I’ll solve that now.”

The shift is subtle, but it’s profound. And in many organisations, our learning strategies haven’t caught up.

 

AI Will Be the Next Big Shift — But It’s Bigger Than We Think

Right now, AI is making headlines for how it can generate content, automate tasks, and bring efficiencies to our work that we’ve only dreamed of. That’s important work. But it’s only scratching the surface.

The more AI becomes embedded into the flow of work and daily life, the more it will shape how people solve problems and develop skills. Just like we don’t think twice about Googling something, we’ll soon have AI copilots integrated into our tools, helping us write, plan, design, and even think more clearly.

In fact, the future will likely remove the friction of even needing to consciously choose to “Google it”. The integration of AI into workflows will solve knowledge and performance gaps as they surface, in the moment, to support people. You won’t even have to ask for help.

And once that becomes the norm — once your workforce has access to AI tools that make them faster and smarter — the expectations around learning and support will shift again. People will expect the support they receive around their performance to be:

• Instantly available.
• Context-aware.
• Embedded into their tools.
• Continuously personalized.

That doesn’t mean formal learning programmes go away. It just means our role expands. Training and education will always matter; it just won’t be the default solution to helping people learn. Learning has always been something people do constantly, not something they attend occasionally.

What’s different today is that technology gives us the opportunity to play in that space in a more strategic and intentional way.

 

What This Means for L&D

So where does that leave us?

It means we need to rethink our role. We can’t just be training providers anymore. We need to be learning enablers. That means:

• Supporting learning in the flow of work — through performance support solutions and embedded resources.
• Partnering with technology — not just as tools for delivery, but as catalysts that change how people behave.
• Understanding evolving behaviours — so we can meet people where they already are instead of dragging them to where we want them to be.

It also means we need to let go of some old assumptions. Learning doesn’t need to be formal to be valuable. It doesn’t require a login for the learning to count. And sometimes, the best thing we can do isn’t to create content — it’s to remove barriers that prevent people from learning on their own.

 

The Shift is Already Here — Are We Ready?

We often talk about the “future of learning” as if it’s some distant horizon. But in many ways, that future has already arrived — we’re just not fully engaging with it yet.

The smartphone transformed learning behaviour without asking for permission. AI is doing the same, but faster. The question we need to be asking isn’t “How do we use this technology to train people?” — it’s “How is this technology changing the way people learn… and how do we support that?”

The role of L&D is evolving. Not because we want it to — but because it has to. And the good news? That evolution opens up incredible opportunities to make learning more relevant, more effective, and more human than ever before.

We just have to meet people where they are — in the real, contextual, digital world they live and learn in every day.

 

David Kelly 

Chairman at Learning Guild

 

Don't miss the Day 1 opening keynote session with David at the Learning Technologies 2025 Conference, taking place on Wednesday, 24 April at 09:30-10:30 BST.