By Panos Siozos, Co-founder & CEO, LearnWorlds
AI is no longer a distant promise in learning, it’s here, and it’s reshaping how knowledge is created, delivered, and applied on a vast scale. Across industries, we’re watching a dramatic shift. Training that once took months can now be built in days, tailored for each learner, and distributed globally with ease.
For forward-thinking companies, this is more than an efficiency or money-saving opportunity. It’s a chance to transform learning from a cost centre into a true growth engine that drives innovation, accelerates productivity, and fuels measurable business results.
Harnessing AI Without Losing the Human Touch
I’ve spent more than 25 years in e-learning, from my PhD research to helping to build LearnWorlds and working with over 11,000 organisations worldwide, who have collectively generated more than $1 billion in course sales. I have never seen a faster-moving moment in learning than right now and people will need more education and knowledge than ever before, something we’re exploring in detail at our Worlds of Learning Summit this September 23rd – 24th, where we bring together experts from across the industry, such as Karl Kapp, who will dig into how instructional design can evolve in the age of AI; Dr. Destini Copp, who will share her AI Student Success System and the power of custom GPTs; and Sehaam Cyrene, whose work reminds us that leadership, empathy, and human connection must anchor everything we do.
AI is a powerful accelerant. We see teams generate full onboarding programs in days rather than months, or personalise training for thousands of employees with minimal time spent. But speed is only a superpower if you use it wisely. AI can create content, but it can’t tell you whether that content is meaningful or whether it will actually help someone do their job better. It also can’t tell you whether knowledge has been actually assimilated and retained by a student.
Learning teams still need to define clear objectives, ensure relevance, and build opportunities for practice and feedback. AI should amplify human expertise, not replace it. Our goal at LearnWorlds is to make AI a co-pilot for course creators, taking away the mundane work of content repurposing, localisation, and formatting, so they can focus on what they do best, which is teaching, mentoring and inspiring learners.
AI as the Growth Lever Most Businesses Overlook
Most organisations still underuse learning as a driver of growth, for both their people and their customers.
Internally, talent is lost because employees don’t see a future for themselves within an organisation, and productivity drops because knowledge is trapped in silos. Externally, customers don’t usually go elsewhere because the learning product is bad; they leave because they never learned how to get the results they were promised. If onboarding is weak, training is scattered, or support is hard to access, customers fail to see value quickly enough and move on to an alternative.
When learning is done well, the results speak for themselves. Employees ramp up faster, perform better, and stay engaged. Retention improves because people can see a clear growth path for themselves. And on the customer side, education drives revenue — trained customers use more of the product, upgrade more often, churn less, and become vocal advocates.
And here’s the key. Even in the era of AI, people still need authority, community, and human connection. This is especially important as AI drives the commoditisation of content. Content alone won’t suffice; learners need validation, feedback, and a sense of belonging. Community, certification, and peer connection will matter more, not less . I’ll say it again: learning isn’t a cost centre — it’s a growth engine.
Building AI-Enabled Learning Infrastructure
To achieve these results, learning needs to be embedded into the flow of work. That means making it a cross-functional effort, with sales, product, marketing, and other teams all playing a role in creating and sharing knowledge. It means sharing what works in real time rather than waiting for distant deadlines like capturing insights today and putting them into practice tomorrow. And it means measuring the true business impact of learning by looking at outcomes like sales growth, retention, and customer satisfaction, not just course completions.
Imagine a system that monitors support tickets after a product release and automatically recommends updates to training content. Or one that identifies emerging skills gaps in an organization and delivers micro-lessons before they affect work performance. These kinds of capabilities are already starting to emerge and will soon be standard.
But the real opportunity goes beyond automation. AI can act as a co-pilot for learning teams, helping them apply instructional design best practices even if they don’t have an expert on staff. It can suggest clearer learning objectives, repackage content for different learner levels, and even adapt a course for different cultural contexts or accessibility needs. Far from replacing instructors, this technology gives them additional firepower, allowing them to spend less time on boilerplate content and allowing them to focus on designing richer learning experiences, guiding their learners within a real learning community, and sparking the curiosity that drives real growth. This is yet another reason why we created the Worlds of Learning Summit, to give our customers and partners a forum to share these practices and see how others are using AI to embed learning into the flow of work.
And just as critical as the technology, is its validation layer. Even with self-directed or AI-assisted learning, society and employers will still require meaningful benchmarks, certification, and proof of competence. Community and peer learning also remain central, as I have found both within our customers’ own schools and within the networks we foster as a company to share business models, new approaches, and best practices across thousands of organisations.
Navigating AI’s Toughest Questions
Of course, AI in learning comes with serious challenges that leaders must address head-on. Data privacy is critical. Training data needs to be anonymised, securely stored, and compliant with regulations like GDPR and the EU AI Act. Bias is another risk. If AI models learn from biased data, they’ll produce biased outputs, so regular audits and transparency are essential.
And finally, there’s the risk of dehumanisation. AI should be used to free learning professionals from repetitive tasks so they can spend more time coaching, mentoring, and engaging on a person to person level with learners, not to strip away human connection.
Handled well, AI doesn’t take the human out of learning, it creates more space for the most human parts, which are discussion, reflection, collaboration. As I often tell our customers: You won’t be replaced by AI, but you might be replaced by someone who is using AI.
A Call to Action for Leaders
If you lead a business today, here’s my challenge. Stop treating learning as something HR does on the side, built just to tick compliance boxes and keep HR managers happy. The old model of learning management systems was designed to produce attendance records, not results, and that mindset is holding businesses back.
Treat learning as a strategic growth lever, just as you would sales or product. Build a culture where knowledge flows across teams, not just down from HR, and where learning feeds into performance, retention, and customer success. And while we’re at it, let’s bust one of the biggest myths of online learning — that you can simply absorb expertise by consuming content. Learning is like training a muscle; merely showing up to a training session isn’t enough. It takes effort, practice, and human feedback to create lasting strength in that muscle known as a brain.
Give your teams the tools and the mandate to share knowledge quickly. Use AI to strip away friction, but keep humans in the loop to make sure learning has purpose and impact and verifiable results.
Start with one initiative, prove its impact, and scale from there. In a market that’s moving this fast, the companies that build learning into their operations don’t just keep up, they set the pace. If you want to dive deeper with me into how leading businesses are doing this, the virtual Worlds of Learning Summit on September 23rd & 24th will bring together course creators, customer education teams, and corporate L&D leaders to share practical examples and strategies for building AI-enabled learning cultures.
