Why L&D teams are mission critical to AI adoption

Most leaders get it: genAI is this generation’s new general purpose technology, and if they don’t engage with it, their organization is liable to get left behind. So they run experiments. Invest in new talent, and new functional groups, or lines of business. Buy enterprise licenses for ChatGPT. This applies whether this new form of cognitive automation is existential to their strategy — requiring a deep rethink and dramatic reallocation of precious resources — or merely a potential change in the way they pursue known goals. 

Most workers get it, too. According to Microsoft’s Annual Work Trend report for 2024, 75% of employees use genAI on work tasks. Never mind the significant pressure not to use the technology: many organizations ban it and many work cultures — organizational, office, occupational — frown on it. Workers are handling that problem by simply keeping their use private. Oh, you say my productivity’s up? Interesting, must be this new espresso roast.

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And yet: without bold, immediate help from Learning and Development (aka L&D) professionals, all this “getting it” will hobble organizations. Why? Both parties are trying to handle genAI on their own. 

Without guidance, some employees will see success, but their collective sprint will be incoherent and uneven. Some will run in circles. Some will cause harm, or slow others down. Some will make stupendously valuable discoveries. And it will all be obscured in the welter of everyday operations: sales, customer service, perhaps even R&D might improve… a bit. 

This is exactly what happened in my field study of robotic surgical training across 18 of the top teaching hospitals in the U.S. Prior training methods got in the way. A rare few residents found rule-bending ways to build skill anyway, and they raced ahead. But their expanded skill came at the expense of others in their cohort. Referring to the average new robotic surgeon, one Chief of Urology put it plain: “They suck now.”

This variability includes managers, too: even if they got perfect, shared information on the potential upsides and downsides of implementing intelligent technologies (fat chance), they’d take different approaches to redesigning jobs and reskilling workers to suit an amended strategy. The research on disruptive innovation and resource allocation makes it clear: some will implement bold, focused skill development experiments. Most will do a little something. Others will ignore the reskilling and the work redesign challenge entirely.

Things will be dramatically intensified here with genAI, because unlike a thousand-pound, four-armed surgical robot, you can quickly use genAI for a wide variety of tasks, in a wide variety of ways, and it’s very easy to conceal your use. It’s also easy for leaders to implement the technology quickly: external training is readily available, genAI is digital, and getting integrated with familiar applications. Workers and managers are scattering to the four winds with this stuff.

Without top-notch L&D, introducing genAI into work is a bit like yelling fire in a crowded theater: it will tear organizations, teams, and careers apart from the inside. And I shouldn’t say will, actually. This isn’t future tense. It’s happening.

The L&D function curates the human ability that backs up their organizations’ promises to the world. Each of us owns our skills journey, of course, but L&D professionals are experts at what it takes to build relevant, valuable expertise in their context. Accounting, Marketing, Finance, Maintenance, Sales, Recruiting, R&D — all these functions keep an organization running. L&D is special in that it helps all the other functions stay relevant in changing times. A poor L&D function means all other functions get dull through use. A good one helps all those saws keep the edge they need to handle the next challenge.

If you’ve been through a training, read an FAQ or a job aid, been through a job rotation, been a formal mentor or mentee, or had a performance review, you’ve relied on the infrastructure these experts put in place. When they do their work well, your skills journey is clearer, more motivating, more valuable to those you serve, and helps your organization adapt more effectively. I should know: I spent over a decade in this industry before I went back for my PhD at MIT, working at this problem from the outside as a consultant and from the inside as a manager. Professionals in this function are fascinated with how people learn, and can make learning mean business.

So when I started to write The Skill Code about three years ago, I believed L&D professionals were key to their organizations’ adaptation to intelligent machines.

I just didn’t realize they would become mission critical. Like most of us, I didn’t anticipate the genAI tsunami. Yes, I believed intelligent technologies would play a rapidly expanding role in the world of work. My wife and I bet my career on that belief in 2009. But very few of us had the luck or foresight to anticipate the sudden arrival of a general-purpose technology that could perform a wide array of cognitive tasks very quickly, for free, and that interacted via an instantly familiar chat-based interface, available to hundreds of millions on day one. 

Many of us — and our organizations — will adapt to accommodate this new cognitive prosthesis. The now well-known “GPTs are GPTs” paper suggests that 80% of us could use genAI to improve our productivity on 10% of our tasks. Many will go for it — staying put will often be like choosing to send faxes after email hit the scene. That’s an appreciable chunk of reskilling for 2.6 billion working adults, and widespread strategic shifts for their organizations. 

L&D is the only function in organizations that has the incentive or skills to see these skills and learning gaps clearly, and the only group that knows the research-backed tactics that can help leaders and employees learn from each other, quickly. This will be hard: L&D professionals came up the ranks in a relatively stable world. Many executives therefore treat them as a (lower status) cost center, and L&D is not in the habit of asserting its expertise for strategic change. But — right now — executives think they know what to do, yet are blind to the bidirectional learning that’s necessary to get the real answer and to equip employees to execute on it in a focused way. L&D knows.

There’s a dangerous twist, though: the L&D playbook is out of date — follow it and you may well destroy more skill than you build.

Over the last 13 years I’ve done research that shows the skill development game itself has been subtly disrupted from within — via the very intelligent technologies that are at the heart of the opportunity. The short story? These technologies allow us to self-serve far more than before. So we get productivity from them at the expense of collaborative interaction — most notably between experts and novices. The vast bulk of skill development occurs informally, right in the flow of work, so this is a profound threat, right when we need new skill the most. To add insult to injury, traditional L&D investment is overwhelmingly in formal solutions (e.g., training, job aids, mentorship) set apart from actual work performance. These need revision and professional attention, of course, but given the disruption to natural collaborative patterns, this emphasis is now officially backwards. My 2019 Harvard Business Review article sums up the argument, and I believe has stood the test of time.

All of this means that CEOs need to quadruple down on L&D as their new, #1 most critical business partner, and hold them to a higher standard than ever.