Earlier this year, I had an opportunity to chat with William Rothwell about the future of leadership development and how AI is going to disrupt the industry. Bill is the author of nearly 180 books (not sure if he sleeps) and has spent decades studying learning and development.
Here is a summary of our discussion.
Five Uncomfortable Truths About the Future of Learning & Development, a discussion with
William J. Rothwell
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Question 1: Has learning & development become too focused on content rather than capability?
Definitely. Most Learning departments today are publishing operations as opposed to performance functions.
Leadership loves to boast how many hours were spent in training, how many badges were earned and how many compliance videos were viewed. None of those metrics relate to the questions that really matter… Can employees do something today that they could not do yesterday? Are employees positioned to excel at the skill requirements of the future? Are employees equipped to perform today AND tomorrow?
Learning is too often regarded as content consumption instead of performance improvement. We’ve mistaken information for transformation. Instead, we need learning agility (i.e., the ability to learn how to learn or what some call learning competence). We’ve focused too much attention on what competencies trainers need and not enough on what learners need to know.
Learning & Development shouldn’t produce courses. It should produce organizational capability. If it doesn’t measurably improved innovation, customer engagement, productivity or decision-making quality, it’s entertainment being sold as education. That’s edutainment.
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Question 2: Why do traditional leadership development programs continue to miss the mark?
Simply because they’re built on the fairy tale that leadership can be taught. Conventionally-run organizations continue to send their high potentials to two-day seminars where they learn about trust, EI and communication and are then sent back to organizations that reward playing it safe and going along with the crowd. No wonder executives shake their heads and wonder why nothing changes. One key ingredient too often missing in corporate leadership development is transfer of learning— the fancy term for the ability to apply what was learned on the job. You’ve heard the statistic that only 10 percent of what is learned in training transfers back to the job in changed behavior. Transfer rates need to be higher, and there are many ways to improve it. One way to ensure transfer of learning is to embed learning experiences into the work on the job. Leadership develops when people are grappling with solving real problems that have real consequences.
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Question 3: How will AI change the learning & development space?
AI will put an end to much of what L&D does today and make the profession more strategic.
AI will write instructional content, create simulations, produce videos, design personalized learning journeys, evaluate performance, provide coaching, and instantly respond to questions—all within the next few years. If you’re an instructional designer or learning experience designer, AI will disrupt you the way spreadsheets did accountants.
Paradoxically, AI will humanize learning. Employees will no longer have to sit through irrelevant courses. Instead they’ll get personalized coaching when they’re doing their actual jobs. The biggest challenge will be enabling people to learn, on-the-job, to solve work challenges. But our schools haven’t taught people how to learn how to learn. Employees will have to learn that skillset on their own. (I did a study on that issue years ago, and the results were published in a book entitled The workplace learner [2002]). The L&D professionals that win will transition from being content creators and technology mavens to mastering how to facilitate making it easier for people to learn how to learn.
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Question 4: What should learning and development look like in 2035?
By 2035, the smartest organizations will not have training departments. They will have capability ecosystems.
Employees will not search catalogs for courses. AI will continuously identify capability gaps and create personalized developmental experiences in real time. Performance support, coaching, mentoring, simulations, and collaborative problem-solving will be embedded into everyday work. Workers will master social learning, meaning they will learn how to watch experts perform and find ways to imitate their behavior.
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Question 5: If there is one belief about learning and development that organizations need to challenge over the next decade, what would it be?
The faulty assumption: Every employee needs to know more. Why? Knowledge is plentiful. Search engines powered by AI can pull facts from the web, summarize academic papers, create explanations, and deliver just-in-time guidance in seconds. Remembering information won’t be a differentiator when machines remember everything instantly.
What will be a differentiator? The answer: deeply human skills like judgment, moral awareness, curiosity, relationship-building, creativity, grit, systems thinking, and the ability to ask better questions. The most controversial statement in this thread is this: The future of L&D is helping people learn how to learn more effectively. Success will no longer be defined by how many courses are completed; rather, it will be defined by whether organizations and people can learn faster than their competitors and innovate from what they have learned.
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Conclusion
Learning & development is at a crossroads. We can continue creating ever increasing libraries of content. Or we can become strategic architects who design experiences to accelerate capability and judgment, enabling organizations to learn and adapt faster than their competitors.
The uncomfortable truth? Artificial intelligence isn’t the biggest threat to Learning & Development. Complacency is.
By embracing this disruption and allowing artificial intelligence to automate the routine instructional work we do, Learning & Development professionals can play a much more important role in organizations as architects of organizational capability. Our impact will be measured by how well we improve decision quality, accelerate adaptation, strengthen relationships, drive innovation, and effect improved business performance.
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About the Author
William J. Rothwell, Ph.D., DBA, SPHR, SHRM-SCP, RODC, FLMI, CPTD Fellow is Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Academy Professor at Penn State University, University Park. He is also President of Rothwell & Associates, Inc., Rothwell & Associates, LLC, Rothwell & Associates Korea, and Rothwell & Associates International (based in the United Arab Emirates). He has published 179 books and delivered 1,700 professional talks in 15 nations over a period of 32 years. His most recent publications are Beyond traditional performance management (2026), Winning the talent wars through neurodivergence (2026), and Practicing organization development, 5th ed. (2026).