I have been in the leadership development and business acumen training business for a long time.
Long enough to remember when “web-based training” was going to change everything.
Then came eLearning. Cloud-based learning. Mobile learning. Virtual classrooms. Hybrid learning. Microlearning.
Every few years, something new would revolutionize corporate training. And most of the time, it didn't. It changed how we delivered the training, but it didn't fundamentally change what happened during the training.
The classroom became a browser. The workbook became a PDF. The instructor became a video. The breakout room became a virtual breakout room.
But the underlying model remained remarkably similar: give people content, teach them a framework, let them practice it, discuss what they learned, and hope they remember enough to use it six months later.
AI is different, and I think it is going to fundamentally break that model.
The Modern Learner Has Changed
We can blame TikTok, smartphones, remote work, overloaded calendars, or whatever else we want.
It doesn't really matter.
The reality is that the person sitting in a leadership development program in 2026 is very different from the person sitting in one 15 years ago.
Their attention span for traditional training is shorter. Their available time is dramatically less. Their tolerance for content they don't immediately perceive as relevant is almost nonexistent.
And something else has changed that I don't think the learning industry has fully confronted yet:
People don't want to spend 45 minutes discovering an answer they can get from AI in 30 seconds.
That doesn't mean discovery learning is dead.
It means artificial discovery learning may be dying.
If I need to understand the five characteristics of an effective coaching conversation, I can ask an AI agent. If I need a definition of EBITDA, I can ask an AI agent. If I want to understand the difference between strategy and tactics, I can ask an AI agent.
I don't need a three-hour class for that anymore.
But knowing the answer and being able to use the answer when the situation gets difficult are two very different things.
And that is where I think the future of leadership development gets very interesting.
Stop Training People on Answers
For most of my career, I have lived a little differently from the traditional training model.
We design and deliver business and leadership simulations. Instead of telling people what good leadership looks like, we put them into situations where they have to lead.
Make the investment. Allocate the resources. Coach the difficult employee. Respond to the unhappy customer. Choose between short-term earnings and long-term growth.
Make a decision with incomplete information.
Then live with the consequences.
AI makes this type of learning exponentially more powerful.
Imagine a leadership program where you don't spend an hour teaching people how to handle difficult conversations.
Instead, you spend five minutes introducing a concept and then put the learner into an AI-enabled conversation with a simulated employee who is defensive, frustrated, politically savvy, and not particularly interested in hearing the feedback.
Now we have something worth learning.
Or imagine teaching business acumen not through 60 PowerPoint slides about financial statements, but by giving a team a struggling business, an AI financial analyst, a set of competing priorities, and 45 minutes to figure out what to do.
They can ask AI anything they want.
But AI can't make the decision for them.
That distinction may become one of the most important principles in learning design.
AI Should Make Training Harder, Not Easier
This may sound counterintuitive. If AI can give learners answers instantly, shouldn't learning become easier?
I think the opposite.
AI should allow us to eliminate much of the content transmission that has consumed corporate training for decades and spend far more time on the things that are actually difficult to include:
Those are not PowerPoint skills.
And they aren't things you master by asking Claude for the five best practices.
You develop them through experience.
The enormous opportunity for learning professionals is to use AI to create those experiences faster, cheaper, and with far greater personalization than we ever could before.
The Economics of Training Are Changing Too
This isn't just about learner preferences. AI is changing the economics of the training business.
Today, I can use AI to help build simulations faster, develop scenarios faster, test decision logic more rigorously, create realistic characters, generate alternative storylines, analyze participant decisions, and provide individualized coaching and feedback.
Things that once took weeks can sometimes take days.
Things that were too expensive to customize can now be customized.
And experiences that once required an instructor can increasingly include AI coaches, AI customers, AI employees, AI board members, and AI business analysts.
That doesn't eliminate the facilitator. It changes the facilitator's value.
The facilitator is no longer valuable because they possess information the learner doesn't have.
Information is becoming almost free.
The facilitator becomes valuable because they can create context, challenge thinking, facilitate debate, connect concepts, observe behavior, and help people make sense of what just happened. That is a much higher-value role.
Training Can't Feel Like Punishment
There is another uncomfortable reality.
For many employees, being invited to a training program no longer feels like a reward.
It feels like another meeting. Another thing on the calendar. Another four hours away from the work piling up while they are gone.
We can complain about that, or we can design around it. The future isn't eight hours of content compressed into six.
It is probably much less content and much more experience. Shorter episodes that includes:
And then get people back to work.
The Training Department of the Future
I don't think leadership development is going away.
I think the opposite.
Leadership, judgment, business acumen, communication, and decision-making may become even more important as AI takes over more analytical and administrative work.
But traditional leadership training is in trouble.
The organizations that continue to build programs around content delivery, static case studies, generic frameworks, and scheduled knowledge transfer will struggle.
Because AI has made information ubiquitous.
The opportunity now is to build something AI cannot provide with a simple prompt:
Experience.
That's not traditional training
That's practice. And I think practice is where the future of leadership development is headed.