Next week, thousands of learning and talent development professionals will gather at the ATD 2026
International Conference & EXPO in Los Angeles, the premier event in the talent development space. And if I had to make one overarching prediction about this year’s conference, it’s simple: AI will dominate nearly every discussion.  In fact, my five predictions for ATD this year are:

1. AI
2. AI
3. AI
4. AI
5. AI

The real challenge at ATD may not be finding AI. It may be finding something that doesn’t mention AI. AI has rapidly become the centerpiece for learning, leadership development, coaching, simulations, content creation, role-play practice, performance support, workforce transformation, and more across our industry.

But what I think is most interesting is how much the conversation has evolved over the past year. The early wave of AI adoption focused heavily on efficiency: creating content faster, reducing manual work, accelerating development cycles, and automating repetitive tasks.

Now the conversation is becoming much bigger. Organizations are increasingly looking beyond AI as simply a productivity shortcut and starting to ask how AI can actually help develop people, improve performance, accelerate readiness, strengthen decision-making, and build capability at scale.

In other words, the conversation is shifting from: “How can AI help us work faster?” to:
“How can AI help people perform better?” That is a fundamentally different discussion. So beneath the obvious “everything is AI” narrative, here are the five themes I actually expect to see and hear across the conference.

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This blog wasn’t on our radar. But all of a sudden, over the last few weeks, as our clients, leaders of global businesses, started to move from, “Oh yeah, the thought of using AI is cool,” to “Oh damn, this is great, but it’s not what I thought,” we’ve been hearing urgent requests for business acumen and business leadership training on a very basic but very important new skill:

How do you coach your AI partner?

Not use it. Not prompt it. Not play with it.

Coach it.

Because that is the shift.

AI is not a search engine. It is not a magic vending machine where you type in a sentence, pull the lever, and out comes brilliance. It is also not some mysterious super-brain that automatically understands your company, your culture, your strategy, your customers, your politics, your priorities, or what your boss actually meant in the email that made everyone nervous.

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During COVID, virtual learning was not a choice. It was the only option to deliver the critical skills employees needed to do their jobs. And as quickly as everything went virtual, things shifted back to in-person because “people missed being around people.” At Advantexe, we are now seeing about 50 percent of our programs delivered face-to-face again.

But the environment is changing yet again! Rising travel costs, tighter budgets, and ongoing instability in parts of Europe and the Middle East are starting to introduce friction. It is not enough on its own to force a shift, but it is enough to make organizations rethink when and how they bring people together for training.

As we start to see more virtual delivery, the question becomes how to create the same level of engagement, alignment, and learning regardless of format. That is where many virtual programs struggled in the past. Too passive. Too easy to disengage and multitask. Too far removed from real work.

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I was sitting in our client’s headquarters, waiting for my next interview with a subject-matter expert. Beautiful, panoramic views, collaboration rooms, world-class coffee.

And quiet. Stone cold silence.

Even though there were people around, they weren’t talking. Individuals were doing individual work, and the only thing I heard over the course of an hour was one person asking another if they were done with the huddle room. I really don’t think there was another word spoken as the person in the huddle room quietly packed up their stuff and left with their head down and no other acknowledgment.

This isn’t the first time I have noticed the change. Having been in office environments starting in the 1980s and experiencing the energy and buzz of people working together, it is still startling.

And it raises a very real question:

Have people stopped learning how to work with people?

Because here’s what I think is happening.

In the post-pandemic world we have created, we didn’t eliminate collaboration. We just made it optional.

Between hybrid work, endless digital tools, Slack messages, Teams messages, dashboards, and AI-generated summaries, people can now function without ever really engaging with another human being.

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As I have shared, one of the most intriguing parts of my job is interviewing leaders to gain their insights into the key issues they are embracing and wrestling with in their real-world environments so that I can build them award-winning business simulations that enable organizations to learn by doing.

For example, I recently interviewed 30 leaders from around the world across a range of functions to gather their insights into better, more practical coaching best practices so I can build a portfolio of Praction AI role-playing exercises.

As I reviewed the customized summary of my interviews and an analysis of what I heard with our clients, one of them asked me a provocative question, “Did you get any insights or the sense that our message of creating and coaching to a much more aggressive, proactive, breakthrough innovation culture is getting through?”

I answered transparently that I did not, and shared that maybe I wasn’t asking the right questions, to which they assured me I was, since they had helped me write the questions and approved them.

We then had a deep discussion about the takeaway learnings from the interviews, which were all very traditional, like “I need to spend more time preparing for coaching conversations.”

I was then given the directive to make the simulation experience compel leaders to coach differently. “Now is the time for bold leaders to move fast and break things,” was the mantra, and my job is to build a simulation that creates the environment and coaching environment to do that. And obviously, AI is the catalyst behind this.

However, this is a content area that seems relatively new because of the AI aspect that is simply changing everything and integrating it into the approach. I decided to come up with a list of the five things leaders must do to coach toward a culture of move fast and break things:

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