You were determined to prove to the board that you are streamlining your organization for AI. You looked at your teams, and you saw this role: Learning and Development. Trainers and curriculum developers building decks and talking to them. Your first instinct (being someone who doesn't understand the role at all) is that AI can completely replace this team.
You lay them off and tell everyone to use Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini for their training.
Now, you are looking to build your AI business, and you need folks on the front lines who can analyze job roles, design solutions, and enable your customers on the intricacies of your platform solutions. You need three roles:
- AI Solutions Architect: The big-picture person who walks into an organization, identifies what solutions can and should be put in place based on the roles being done, understands the deployment intricacies, and sells the customer on the solution.
- AI Enablement Lead: You've built the solution; your customers need to know how to use it. They need someone who can walk them through the new workflows, understand how the products work, communicate the depth of those technical skills to customers, and maintain the enablement content.
- AI Forward Deployed Engineer: The “big guns” sent out to build and implement a solution for a customer, from planning out the deployment to enabling the customers after the fact.
The Learning & Development Misunderstanding
Ask a curriculum developer or e-learning specialist what they do, and they will tell you they create a learning experience. They understand what that means, but to the average person who has attended a training, they just see slides. This is the disconnect that impacts training significantly.
Training Is a Psychological Construct
When you learn something, you are relying on several different experiences to create neurons and neural connections that transfer knowledge from long-term to short-term memory. Knowledge transfer can be approached in a number of different ways, and everyone has their own particular methods they have developed over their lives:
- Behavioral Modification: Often called Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), this is the method used to reach those who are not verbal.
- Constructivist Learning: Connects previous knowledge and experience to new knowledge and experiences. It's called “Constructivist” because the learner is constructing new knowledge onto older knowledge foundations.
- Cognitive Load: The brain requires time to process a limited amount of information. The more background “noise” that you process, the less learning you can absorb.
The Rosy Outlook
Often the first team to be axed in a layoff scenario, Learning and Development professionals, with some specific additional skills in AI and Machine Learning, with some coding background or potential, can fit the newly evolving need that every AI company desperately needs. You just aren't looking at the right skill sets.