Learning professionals have a packed agenda in 2025, as business leaders ask them to support future skills, equip employees to use artificial intelligence, and all the while ensure they’re up to date with the learning staff need to do their current role.
Fosway’s Digital Learning Realities report for last year found that AI continues to have a high impact on the L&D function, with 48% of respondents saying it would influence the function either “a lot” or “a great deal”. That said, expectations have moderated about the role of AI since 2023, and scepticism about what it can achieve has grown.
Personnel Today spoke to analysts at Fosway about what organisations can really expect in 2025 in terms of L&D focus and investment – and whether AI will really live up to the hype.
Business readiness tops the agenda
“We’re seeing L&D teams focusing on business readiness rather than compliance this year. They’re thinking about career development and wider trends such as the lack of availability of talent,” explains David Perring, chief insights officer. “If we can harness the people we have, we can retain them by giving them opportunities to grow. But they’re also being asked to do more with less.”
Learning predictions
Focus on soft skills, leadership and GenAI expected for 2025
This means L&D teams are more involved in discussions about strategic workforce planning, meaning they are building stronger relationships with HR and other business leaders.
Driving efficiency
Myles Runham, lead analyst for digital learning, says economic pressures are forcing organisations to focus on efficiency as the key benefit of AI. “They’re looking at automation of content creation and tasks because lots of budgets are tight and headcounts have been reduced.”
He warns that AI will not be the panacea for these issues, however – there will also be scrutiny on impact and effectiveness versus making savings at any cost. “In 2021, Covid gave a boost to digital learning, and had generative AI come on the scene then we might have seen more focus on pure innovation – now it’s more about proof of concept and demonstrating impact,” he adds.
Pragmatic use of AI
According to Fosway’s digital realities report, 64% of respondents plan to adopt AI to enhance the speed of learning, and 63% to improve learning effectiveness. In the workplace, this translates to use cases such as practice and reversal, where for example a salesperson might role-play a scenario opposite a virtual client.
AI can also improve user-generated content (UGC), making it easier (and cheaper) for experts to share knowledge and include it in learning libraries. “A few years ago there was a big buzz about UGC but it was all quite chaotic,” says Perring. “AI can augment this content now, become an assistant so you can create better materials. This may be appropriate where budgets are limited and there’s a high-priority project, for example.”
Reducing costs
AI can enable organisations to create content that previously might have broken the budget, however. Alongside obvious use cases such as translation and transcription that are built into many of employees’ everyday tools, more and more teams are using generative AI tools to help author content. Fosway’s research showed that 51% would increase spend on content authoring. “It can be used as a learning design buddy, proposing objectives or improvements for example,” says Runham, “but it can also supercharge the development of solutions such as games or scenario experiences that have historically been expensive.”
Perring points to examples such as consulting firm PwC using AI so employees can enter virtual worlds and scenarios that build their diversity and inclusion awareness. AI can democratise this type of learning for organisations that might feel they can’t afford it. “These tools can be three times more effective in terms of response,” he says. “For small companies, AI can accelerate those scenarios and support skills growth.”
Learning in a hybrid world
“We’ve been focused on content for such a long time that it’s now become a baseline factor,” adds Runham. “Now teams are looking at how it can sit alongside experiences such as on-the-job learning, and how we spend time learning together.” As many companies mature into a hybrid model where employees are not in the office full-time, learning together can become an engaging experience.
“Digital learning is often a solitary experience, but there’s a real opportunity to use time together for peer feedback, mentoring and the like, and think about how we build learning into cohort experiences,” he says. “For leaders, we’re looking at how to boost networking and how they can get the best out of spending time with other people to access expertise, rather than spending money on four days in a hotel on a leadership course.”
Understanding AI’s limitations
Crucially, learning teams are realistic about where AI should fit into their agenda alongside in-person and human learning. And while they realise that employees will use tools such as ChatGPT to support their work, they’re keen to point out that these systems “don’t know your workflow, what you sell, your clients’ aims”, says Perring.
“Employees can use bots to ask how to handle a situation, many of them are free. But specific things like how your business lives its values won’t come through a large language model. ChatGPT can’t do new starter orientation or understand new products,” he adds.
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