Special thanks to CoRise for hosting this session and Sourabh for sharing the video with us.

Technological advancement has reshaped the landscape of learning and development (L&D), responsible for empowering employees' growth and developing their knowledge, skills, and capabilities to drive better business performance.

 The rising tech infusion has also made people apprehensive of losing their jobs, while experts believe that technology or generative artificial intelligence (AI) has actually democratised L&D initiatives and made it accessible to everyone, irrespective of their geography. Everyone should leverage technology to close the skill gap and stay competitive in the volatile market.

“In a fast-changing world where work culture has completely revolutionised, the basic problem with Learning and Development (L&D) is information searching, discovering and collecting the information and putting them into a forum,” says Global HR industry analyst Josh Bersin in a conversation with CoRise's Julia Stiglitz and Sourabh Bajaj. Besides, L&D leaders are also needed to focus on individuals’ requirements for learning and development.

“Instructional designers and teachers need to identify the needs of the people and create the course as per requirement,” says Bersin.

Tech intervention in L&D

The advent of new-age technology such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) has disrupted the whole process of learning and development and made learning materials much more available to everyone, from video, audio, transcriptions, and recordings. But L&D leaders shouldn’t worry that AI will displace them.

“Despite impacting many parts of HR in a big way, AI is not going to put you out of business,” affirms Bersin, adding that in fact fast-changing generative AI will boost L&D professionals’ ability to develop and execute more sophisticated strategies.

According to him, L&D has the greatest impact on career progression, performance management, and hiring. Overall, it is an integral part of the career and hiring. Learning and development have become a tool to bridge the skill gap, save people from job cuts, and elevate the organisation to the next level. And combined with AI, it is even more effective.

The big AI-powered opportunities

“There's building content from massive amounts of data creating a course outline, creating a quiz, finding information relevant to the domain inside the company, perhaps going through the documentation, process information,” says Bersin, comparing the ease of these tasks today with how he struggled when he did instructional design early in his work in L&D.

Technological evolution has made data accessible very fast and offered new learning experiences and ways to consume content.

“We can teach courses, put together quizzes, can have videos and assessments, but the learner is going to have questions and they are going to ask somebody those questions, and sure enough, if they can ask the system and the system is smart enough to either answer the question or correct the content, or give them a tip on this coding exercise. The technology is going to make the user's life way better,” explains Bersin.

AI-related tools are also helpful in looking at your activities and giving feedback which is an integral part of learning.

According to Bersin, technology has given humans an opportunity to do something better with their lives.

“A little bit of education and technical skills make you more employable and offer better opportunities to lead life,” believes Bersin.

Sharing his perspective on how AI will impact L&D, HR, and the learning space, Saurabh adds that this will lead to the next level of personalisation. “AI will help generate content as per people’s requirements whether it is video or text or podcast. Creating a personalised content used to be a costly affair,” adds Saurabh. According to him, AI will also help people get feedback on what and how they are learning. The transformation has come with opportunity.

AI and its impact on the job, skill landscape

On how AI is going to change the skills and job landscape, Bersin highlights that automation is not going to impact everyone. “Technology is actually our helper. People will continue to play the main role and technology will be the co-pilot. Technology actually amps up the way we have been working. Overall, AI is set to transform the skills landscape as well as how we do our jobs as L&D practitioners,” adds Bersin.