Everything Chief Learning Officers need to know about what to expect in 2026 and beyond. 

If you think about how you work day-to-day right now, how different is it from a year ago, or the year before that?

If the last twelve months proved anything, it’s that change doesn’t queue politely. And tools often seem to move faster than teams. 

Today, companies that are winning are rapidly adapting and changing how they work - and learning is leading now. 

Companies with strong learning cultures are 92% more likely to innovate, 52% more productive, and 17% more profitable than their peers.

In 2026, the job for L&D leaders is simple to say and hard to do: help people learn and lean into AI without drowning in it.

So here are the big themes for L&D in 2026, in the thick of the AI era where agents join the team and judgement becomes the skill.

 

1. Agents arrive as teammates

Software agents have moved from chat to doing. They read and write across your systems and take actions. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index describes the rise of the ‘agent boss’ , where every employee orchestrates a small team of digital colleagues.

The mandate to L&D teams not already doing it? Start enabling performance, which means teaching how to brief, validate and escalate with agents as part of real work. 

 

2. L&D as a growth function: redesign the work, then build the skills 

L&D isn’t a course factory, it’s the engine for growth. In the AI era that starts with the work itself: map the tasks, decide where agents help and where human judgement stays on the hook, then build the skills to make that new design run. 

Chief People Officers’ near-term priorities are to co-design AI with tech, map the impact on roles and tasks, redesign jobs, and then roll out serious upskilling and reskilling. 

Run L&D like a product team with a simple roadmap tied to business outcomes, not activity. Partner with operations to rewrite a few high-volume workflows, decide the human–agent split, and publish the skills, practice and mentoring that make the new model stick. 

Measure time to proficiency, error rates and internal moves, and keep iterating. If you get the sequence right, the learning follows the work and performance follows the learning.

 

3. Measure outcomes, not activity

This reframing of L&D from training to enablement comes with a test: show what moved the needle.

Swap ‘completions’ for time to competence, error rates, cycle time or renewal intent, then design backwards. 

 

4. Human coaching and mentoring matter more than ever

AI can draft, summarise and distribute work; it can’t build trust, stretch judgement or help someone navigate the messy bits of a role. That is why human coaching and mentoring are more important than ever in the world of AI. 

Done well, it moves the dial; employees in mentoring programmes are 49% less likely to leave, 86% of pairings meet monthly, and 89% of mentees improve within four months.

Automating the matching, nudges and scheduling typically saves around 45 hours per programme, so your team can focus on outcomes, not admin.

 

5. Fewer, better platforms that calm the day

L&D leaders are prioritising delivery and consolidation. 

Choose tools that feel beautiful and simple, bring learning, comms and skills into one place and give you honest usage so you can cut what does not help. 

Why? Attention is your scarcest resource. Employees are interrupted roughly every two minutes during core hours, with an average of 117 emails and 153 chat messages in a typical day.

Vodafone combined a dozen comms channels into one ‘single version of the truth’ using Thrive, lifting TNPS by 2.9 points, CSAT by 1.7, pushing first-contact resolution to 80%, and cutting complaint arrivals by 22%. 

L&D’s job is to deliver help where work happens, and track adoption so you can prune what adds noise. 

 

6. Compliance gets practical with the EU AI Act

Think of the EU AI Act as basic hygiene for AI. For most L&D use it boils down to two simple habits from August 2026: tell people when an assistant is involved, and label any realistic AI voice, image or video you use in learning. 

If your tools start making higher-stakes calls, like who gets onto a programme or how someone is assessed, add a human double-check and keep sensible records.

 

7. Frontline first, designed for phones

Deskless teams are still often expected to figure it out on the job, with patchy access to training and tools designed for office workers. The result is uneven performance and avoidable errors. 

The fix is short, contextual help that runs on the device in someone’s hand, works on shared kit, and gets people back to the task in seconds. 

Burger King’s mobile-first onboarding with Thrive saved over £180,000 in labour hours, cut turnover by 20%, and reduced home-delivery order errors by 23%. 

 

8. Managers are your multiplier

When managers coach, learning sticks and performance follows. 51% of CHROs named leadership and manager development as their top priority for the year. 

At St Austell Brewery, Thrive’s clear pathways and lightweight manager workflows cut turnover by 3.2%, and put 178 people on development tracks. 83% of managers said it made their job easier. 

Give managers short scripts for career conversations, ten-minute prompts they can use in one-to-ones, and simple review loops tied to real work. Nudge inside the tools they already use, and track behaviour that matters 

 

What L&D leaders need to do today

If there is one takeaway for 2026, it is this: treat L&D as a growth function. Design the work, then build the skills that make it run. Put agents to work where they help, keep humans for judgement and coaching, simplify the stack so learning lives where the job happens, and meet the basics on AI transparency without fuss. 

The teams who do that will feel less noise, see faster competence, and stay ahead while everyone else writes another plan.

Find out more about how AI is revolutionising learning for Thrive customers.