AI agents as L&D project managers

Nelson Sivalingam at HowNow explains why AI agents are shaking up the world of skills

 

For all the articles praising the transformative effect of AI in HR, it’s understandable that some businesses haven’t yet got the memo.

 

All technology has an adoption curve and, while some have been incorporating chatbots and predictive analytics into their work for years, others are tentatively picking at the edges and others still are blithely hoping that the whole thing goes away or, better yet, that someone else takes responsibility for it. 

 

After all, AI is a helpful buddy, but you may not be quite sure whether it’s a trusted partner. It can do a good job on specific tasks, as long as you take the time to develop some expertise on how to instruct it. It does the laborious stuff well, with a little human oversight, and it frees us up to think a little more strategically. It takes the place of a part of your brain that you probably don’t particularly enjoy using, and liberates the higher functions to focus on the good stuff. 

 

 

From copilot to project manager

For L&D, as a subset of HR, the AI revolution has meant scale and depth: breadth of content and rapid curation; perhaps time to speak directly to people managers, and to understand which skills their employees need to develop and to what level.

 

Perhaps you’ve used an AI-enabled tool to plot your company’s skills gap analysis. Perhaps you’ve used it to create a skills taxonomy, quickly scanning recruitment adverts online and your own data to develop a workable map for naming skills and running the metrics associated with them.

 

It seems a little dismissive to call it “nuts and bolts” stuff, because it would have taken a couple of individuals weeks of work to do themselves, but it’s still about creating the parameters rather than thinking through the fine details. 

 

AI agents go far beyond nuts and bolts - think toolbox, drafting table and possibly engineer as well. Where a standard AI can comfortably do a specific task in the same time that you’d take to articulate the query, the right AI agent can take on the entire project. 

 

Imagine a job which requires fine detail and careful thought - creating learning pathways, for example. In an ideal world, you’d create granular learning pathways for every individual in the business, to be discussed and fine-tuned with their line manager in order to nurture specific skills which have been agreed on as vital to an overall business plan.

 

That involves, among others things: looking at the company’s learning ecosystem and having a clear view of all the learning content available to it; ascribing value, in terms of skills growth, to all of those pieces of content; picking out the right mix of content for each individual and then using instructional design principles to create a pathway which is meaningful and impactful.

 

The idea of doing this at scale, for every individual in the business, is daunting. And if you put that much care and attention into creating the pathways and enabling users to get to the right content, what time do you have left over to run the analyses, look at trends or - most importantly - tie the skills growth into actual business performance? 

 

 

Taking centre stage

But the right suite of AI agents can do all of this and more. They’re capable of completing the individual tasks that make up your project, compiling and curating the output and doing all this in fine granular detail, at scale.

 

Think of an AI agent-powered L&D partner working alongside every people manager in your organisation, able to look at the specific skills gaps in that team and fine tune a learning pathway for each individual. This is something that most L&D departments could never normally achieve because they simply don’t have the resources.

 

And yes, the individual tasks involve a lot of data and analysis - the laborious stuff that we know AI does well - but it’s guided by a clear ambition: to boost employees’ skills in a way that makes a measurable difference to how the business performs. That’s a step up from the aspiration of freeing ourselves from a bit of admin. Personalisation at real scale. Individual insights. Vital skills, being developed to fit an overarching plan of skills growth, itself supporting a clear vision of where the company needs to be.

 

L&D can be something of a team within a team: part of the HR soundscape but all too often playing its own worthy tune. Tight budgets and resource restraints may mean they’re playing this tune solo, or as part of a string quartet, but AI support of this kind gives them a whole orchestra. And the point is that they can conduct, not just play: look at growth, not content. 

 

This is about where L&D sees itself. There’s a lot to be said for the string quartet: you make a noticeable difference to people’s working lives by going into that fine detail and getting involved in the process of learning.

 

The question is whether that can ever be done in enough detail, given the demands of catering for, say, 1,000 or 5,000 or 50,000 people. And while there will naturally be concerns about leaving the process of curation and delivery to an AI agent, it’s worth remembering that human oversight is still an important link in this chain. 

 

But the alternative is to think far more holistically about the value of L&D to your employer. And that’s nothing to do with rate of course completion or self-reported engagement with learning. Rather, it’s a considered programme of proving how skills move the needle on business results, supported by tools which can do so much more than simple admin.

 

Learning for learning’s sake is always a laudable aim. But proving why learning has a very real monetary value to your CEO - surely that’s priceless.

 

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Nelson Sivalingam is Co-Founder and CEO at HowNow

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and XH4D