Wednesday 16 April 2025

A Long-Awaited Revolution in Corporate Learning

Josh Bersin

Corporations spend more than $360 billion a year on employee training, professional development, and skills. And this investment, which we’ve been tracking for three decades, has increased steadily over the last decade, despite two recessions and the pandemic.

Why is this investment so long lasting? Quite simply it’s an operational and strategic imperative. Every company wants to improve productivity, technology adoption, and customer experience and this requires a never-ending focus on learning, sharing information, and employee development. And now, more than ever, ambitious workers want their employer to advance their career and keep their skills up to date.

The topics and issues in corporate learning are dynamic. Today there’s a massive focus on AI skills, management development (#1 priority in SHRM’s recent CHRO survey), sales training, and new career pathways. The healthcare industry, for example, has such a shortage of clinical professionals that companies like Kaiser Permanente, Providence Health, NY Presbyterian are building their own nursing academies.

Yet despite this massive investment, corporate L&D has stayed still. Companies are sitting on legacy training platforms, legacy content, and legacy organisations and roles. Our most recent benchmarking survey found that only 13% of companies believe they are effectively delivering on the job skills for their employees and only 14% building strong managerial skills to help develop their teams.

Yes, we’ve innovated along the way. Companies have experimented with micro-learning (23% adoption), adaptive learning (13% adoption), skills-based learning (17% adoption), VR, and simulations. Yet despite these innovations learning leaders tell us they’re not keeping up.

We recently interviewed 40 chief learning officers and heard a litany of issues. Platforms are hard to use, employees can’t find what they need, and L&D teams are bogged down with dozens of instructional design tools. And given these challenges, companies build local training teams with duplicative tools in every business function.

Our research tells us the problem: corporate learning is saddled with old tools, under-investment, and dated operating models. And today, thanks to AI, it’s time for a revolution.

Legacy Platforms and Content	Legacy operating models
LMS systems	Needs analysis by consultants
LXP systems	Slow content development
Static content systems	Publishing model prevents updates
Lack of user-driven personalisation	Inability to personalise for individuals

Let me explain.

Legacy Platforms

More than 80% of corporate training solutions are built on the 30-year-old “learning management system” or LMS. These systems, which were architected in the late 1990s, serve as master tracking systems for training. Originally developed to manage compliance programmes, today they hold hundreds to thousands of courses, videos, articles, and assessments. They’re designed to track and manage content, not to be easy to use.

One of our banking clients told me that it takes a minimum of six clicks for employees to start a course, after they’ve browsed through tens of thousands of objects. Once aspiring to be as easy to use as Amazon.com or YouTube, these systems feel like legacy systems in a world of social media.

Many vendors have innovated: platforms like Degreed, Viva Learning, 360Learning, Udemy, LinkedIn, and Docebo let employees find things quickly, build skills libraries, and deliver great content. Yet despite these innovations, the volume of content gets in the way. So, companies have to build custom journeys, learning paths, and search tools.

AI can transform this experience. Soon employees will be able to ask a question and the platform will find the answer, deliver the content, and tutor the employee to learn more. And that will force us to consider the question: do we need to build courses or can the AI assemble content for us?

Legacy Content

And this leads to our second challenge: the billions of dollars invested in legacy content. Despite the success of YouTube, TikTok, Khan Academy, Udemy, Coursera, and other systems, companies rely on “courses.” These long form programmes are not specific or actionable for busy workers.

There’s nothing wrong with a course paradigm for education, but business people don’t have time. The typical YouTube watcher only spends a few minutes on a video, and that behavior has changed the way we learn.

I’m not criticising the hard work that goes into instructional design but remember the level of volume we need. Our client Rolls Royce told me that training in the maintenance of a single jet engine, if someone tried to learn it all, would take 500 years of learning to complete. We need a way to build content faster, more dynamically, and with pinpoint precision at the point of need.

And we suffer the problem of timeliness. If it takes 90-120 days to build a programme, this means maintenance and updates will be slow. Most corporate systems, programmes, and offerings change all the time, so we need a learning solution that lets us update content daily.

And consider the needs of a front-line worker, an executive, or a manufacturing professional. These individuals may want a 10-minute summary, a podcast, or a quick update from a course, forcing L&D professionals to try to author every topic in every format. Our research shows that more than 50% of all L&D spending is allocated to instructional design, content development, and content licensing.

Legacy Operations

And this takes us to the L&D operation itself. We’ve studied L&D operations for years, and they haven’t changed very much. While some companies now rely on employee-authored content and use podcasts and other media innovations, the core “instructional design” process remains. Our new benchmark study shows that only 12% of companies believe they have media experts in-house.

One of our clients, a global financial services company, told me he has 110 instructional designers in his team. L&D teams need video producers, assessment experts, LMS administrators, and a myriad of programme managers and schedulers to manage live events and workshops. Today much of this can be done automatically by AI.

And operations get complicated very fast. Consider a luxury brand we work with who does business as country specific business units around the world. They have an L&D leader in each county, each with their own design and delivery team, localising and translating content. The corporate group is trying to standardise tools and platforms, but you can imagine the challenge. Nobody in the operating line wants to give up authority to “corporate” to tell them what to do.

The Result: High-Value Efforts With Challenges in Speed, Cost, and Adoption

Despite this energy, the last decade has been tough. L&D teams have often been left out of skills-centric investments (much of which went into recruitment) and the LMS systems of the last two decades remain. Investors have stopped funding L&D startups (most have been burned), and PE-backed firms like Cornerstone and LTI have gobbled up many of the players. There has been a lack of innovation, a lack of investment, and a lag in L&D impact.

Just to give you a sense of progress, here statistics from our latest L&D benchmark survey:

Only 13% say they regularly deliver exceptional learning experiences.
Only 12% have advanced skills in media and AI.
Only 18% feel totally connected to company’s long term workforce plans.
Only 19% believe L&D technology is fully optimised for employee experience.

As I meet with Chief Learning Officers and L&D leaders, we find no lack of passion or enthusiasm for the learning mission. Yet when we ask them “how well are you integrated into the strategic imperatives of the company,” they often shrug their shoulders.

Why? Hampered by these challenges, they’ve had a hard time keeping up with the company’s needs.

Enter the World of AI: All This is Going to Change

We awaken today in a new world. We now have the tools, technology, and freedom to reinvent. AI, one of the most amazing new technologies we’ve seen, is tailor made for the learning, skilling, and career challenges in our companies.

As we describe in our Rise of the Superworker research, almost every company now aspires to be an “AI-first” organisation. 92% of CEOs expect AI to dramatically improve productivity and IT budgets have increased by 62% to fund this transformation. And as we know well, reskilling and redeploying our people is at the core.And in the world of L&D, AI is truly a game changer. Unlike many of the incremental innovations of the past (LXPs, skills libraries, MOOCs, and more), AI lets us start with a clean slate. And my advice to you is to “think big” and let go of the past. This is the opportunity of a lifetime.

	Corporate Learning The Old Way	Corporate Learning The New Way
Paradigm	Publish, launch, market, and assess skills	Enable every employee to become an exponential Superworker
Content	Design, package, and launch courses, curricula, and programmes	Use AI to generate content dynamically from sources, enabling employees to learn when and how they want
Technology	Lock the user interface into the LXP, LMS, portal, or learning platform	Let the AI platform deliver content anywhere: voice, chat, video, courses, or by AI tutor or coach
Business focus	Arrange content into role-based learning, focusing high level content for higher level staff	Let anyone learn anything, democratising learning: executives can learn tech; technologists can become leaders.
Operating model	Function as a cost center, focused on service delivery, employee experience, net promoter, and utilisation	Dynamically operate as a consulting function, building solutions quickly that meet urgent timely needs – focus on the problem, not the solution
Structure	Performance consultants aided by instructional designers, producers and content experts	SMEs and businesspeople drive the solutions, with L&D staff serving as experts on dynamic content generation, standards, and scale
Delivery	In person events, online courses, virtual in person events, VR, and mobile courses.	All of the above including voice agents, chatbot, and personalised developmental experiences in the flow of work.
Value to the business	Upskilling, onboarding, leadership development, technical skills, company specific compliance, operations, and functional skills.	Hard-hitting business value solutions that mix “learning” with “real time knowledge management” and performance support.

The Big Opportunities Ahead

Finally, let me review the ten biggest changes we can expect, each of which help L&D accelerate value, time to market, cost-effectiveness, and impact.

Faster Content Development – AI can significantly reduce the time required to create learning content. For example, AI-driven tools have cut content development time from 40 hours to just 8 hours.
Automated Course Creation – AI can generate structured courses from existing content in minutes, allowing for rapid deployment of learning materials.
Hyper-Personalised Learning – AI enables individualised learning experiences, where each learner can interact with content in a way that suits their needs, rather than relying on predefined personas.
Multi-Format Learning Options – AI allows learners to choose how they consume content, whether through traditional e-learning, podcasts, videos, or interactive avatars.
Real-Time AI Coaching – AI-powered agents can provide real-time coaching and guidance within courses, making learning more interactive and responsive.
Automated Content Tagging & Management – AI can auto-tag learning content and track skills development, reducing the need for manual cataloging and improving content discoverability.
Seamless Knowledge Integration – AI blurs the lines between knowledge management and learning, allowing employees to access learning resources dynamically as they work.
Efficient Learning Operations – AI streamlines administrative tasks such as learning journey creation, compliance tracking, and reporting, making learning operations more efficient.
Instant Translation & Accessibility – AI can instantly translate learning content into multiple languages, making training more accessible across global organisations.
New Roles & Skills for L&D Teams – AI is shifting L&D roles from content development to content curation, requiring new skills in managing AI-driven learning systems.