Over the past few months, we've noticed an interesting trend. More organizations are beginning to shift portions of their learning portfolios back to virtual delivery. Unlike during COVID, this isn't being driven by health concerns. It’s most likely being driven by economics.

Travel costs continue to rise. Airfare, hotels, meals, and meeting expenses have all increased significantly over the past few years. Add in continued global economic uncertainty, and many organizations are tightening travel budgets or asking learning leaders to accomplish more with fewer resources.

I don't believe we're headed back to an all-virtual world. Face-to-face learning still has tremendous value, especially for strategic planning, leadership development, and team building. What I do believe is that organizations will become much more selective about when they bring people together. That creates an opportunity to rethink how virtual learning is designed and delivered.

Every year, organizations invest hundreds of thousands, and often millions of dollars, bringing people together for leadership summits, national sales meetings, annual kickoffs, functional conferences, and customer events. They reserve hotels, book flights, bring in keynote speakers, and spend months planning every detail.

Those meetings are designed to communicate strategy, launch new initiatives, celebrate success, and align the organization around what's next. Those objectives are important, but I believe many companies are overlooking one of the greatest opportunities these events provide.

If you're investing in bringing people together, don't miss the opportunity to develop them while they're there.

Most corporate meetings are built around presentations. Executives share the vision, business leaders provide updates, and subject matter experts introduce new products, initiatives, or processes. While those sessions are necessary, they're often passive experiences for the audience.

Imagine replacing just one presentation with an interactive business simulation.

Instead of listening to someone describe a business challenge, participants experience it. They analyze information, debate alternatives, make decisions as a team, and immediately see the impact of those decisions. The conversation becomes richer because participants have applied the concepts instead of simply hearing about them.

At ATD 2026, the annual Association of Talent Development conference, we invited attendees to step into the role of the executive leadership team inside a live business simulation challenge. No slides. No passive learning. No theoretical case study.

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.

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.