How Can AI Help Scale Learning Support and Facilitate Behaviour Change?

For organizations with limited learning resources, where can AI help scale learning support without overwhelming the team?

One way AI can support learning at scale is by making it easier to manage your learning management system (LMS) or broader technology ecosystem. 

It’s rare to find someone who truly loves their learning ecosystem. Most organizations face challenges with their platforms and tools, which is why they often decide to make a change. But even with a new system, the challenges do not disappear; they just become different challenges.

It’s empowering for a non-technical learning person to learn how to use their LMS or assessment platforms most effectively. For example, if your boss asks for efficacy data or ROI on learning and you don’t know how to do that, you can get some good advice from a well-trained chat, especially one that might be knowledgeable about your business and your ecosystem.

As learning professionals, we often need to report up to leadership and demonstrate the value of the learning function. That means speaking their language: generating meaningful reports, analyzing data, and connecting learning outcomes to business priorities. AI tools can be very effective in helping us do that.

But the work doesn’t stop at reporting. We also need to think about how we support coaching, mentoring, and the human side of leadership development. Not every leader is trained in coaching or feels comfortable mentoring others, which means learning teams have an important role to play in supporting them. With the right tools and technology, we can make that support more practical and scalable.

How can AI help with behaviour change?

There was a period of time from the mid-2000s to around 2020 where everybody was making eLearning from their live training, for a number of good reasons: it's infinitely scalable, it can be evergreen, you can collect data and analytics, and there is a LMS on every corner.

It was an important step in online learning, but the reality of the situation was that it wasn't that engaging. It wasn't that effective.

Just before the Covid pandemic hit, Enable was redeveloping some of this eLearning that had been built and transforming it into blended learning. We took the eLearning piece and blended it with the right amount of human connection, including coaching, mentorship, and live training, alongside asynchronous learning delivered through an LMS.

Then the pandemic hit, and everyone went home. Learning moved to Zoom and Teams, and in many cases, the wheels fell off. Because, let’s face it, training, teaching, and public speaking are hard. In many organizations, training is delivered by subject matter experts who know the content deeply, rather than by trainers who know how to teach or facilitators who have experience guiding a learning experience.

A lot of the time, we rely on those subject matter experts to be the face of the training and bring the content to life. And that can work in person. In a live room, people can give feedback in subtle ways: with their coffee cup, by getting up and moving, or through their eye contact.

But when you move that same experience online, everything changes. People are at home, on camera, scared, disengaged, and sometimes, sick. All these things combined to make it really obvious that that kind of training was not sufficient.

But there is a good solution: the right blend of asynchronous learning, live learning, and coaching and mentoring.

People are already turning to tools like Gemini or ChatGPT for help with everyday tasks. In the next few years, we’ll see more training created and delivered with this kind of support. Customization will become easier, along with small moments of testing, feedback, and opportunities for learners to ask chatbots questions along the way. 

But that still won’t be enough. Just as we saw before COVID, when many organizations tried to move everything to asynchronous learning, self-paced content alone has limits. People still need human support. They still need connection, coaching, and opportunities to learn with and from others.

This creates an incredible opportunity for leaders to provide the connection and support that learners need through training, mentorship, and coaching. But in reality, they are doing much more than that. They are forming relationships, building trust, and modelling a human-centred approach to learning.

As L&D teams become more efficient by using AI tools, they will have more time and capacity to focus on this human side of learning. And let’s face it, that is often the hardest part to do well. One of the things that AI can't do yet and probably won't be able to do,  is pick up human emotion in the moment.