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.

AI is everywhere in learning right now. New tools are launching weekly, demos are impressive, production speeds are faster than ever, and new vendors are creating mass confusion as we are
inundated with unsolicited emails about the latest and greatest tools.  For many Learning & Development (L&D) teams, the core question has not changed: how does any of this actually improve learning, performance, and business results?

That question is what led us to develop our AI in Learning Framework™. The framework is a practical way to think about how AI supports learning end-to-end, not as a set of disconnected tools, but as a system that improves capability, decision-making, and performance.

What we are seeing today is a pattern that should feel familiar, as many L&D professionals lived through CBT, WBT, Cloud-based learning, and the COVID-induced virtual learning phenomena. As before, organizations are adopting AI in pockets. Content generation in one area, a chatbot in another, a dashboard somewhere else. Each initiative shows value on its own, but together they rarely add up to a cohesive whole. The result is more output and faster production, but not necessarily better decision-making or stronger performance.

This is where it becomes important to distinguish between efficiency and productivity.

Smarweys, one of the fictional companies Advantexe uses in our simulation-based learning experiences, reported adjusted EBITDA of $28.8 million in Q4 2025 (12.9% margin) and full-year adjusted EBITDA of $145.7 million with a margin of 16.1%.

On the surface, that reads like a standard earnings update. But we use examples like this intentionally in our “walk a mile in your customer’s shoes” business acumen sales training for a reason.

Do your sales teams actually understand what that means?

Because if they don’t, they are missing how their customers really think about decisions.

What EBITDA Actually Tells You

EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) is a measure of operating performance. It reflects how efficiently a company converts revenue operations. What’s even better is that it is a controllable metric and one that leaders can be held accountable for.