How to use AI for learning and development (without blowing your budget)

If you’re an L&D professional who has never been asked to ‘do more with less’, congratulations! You’re a very rare breed!

L&D budgets are notoriously squeezed, which can make emerging technologies like AI feel out of reach. But the lack of budget is exactly why overstretched L&D teams need to create, deliver and measure learning more efficiently – and AI is often perfect for that.

In this post, we’ll walk you through some of the most cost-effective ways L&D teams are using AI today. We’re talking voiceovers, thumbnails, elearning content creation and more, so read on to discover how to use AI for L&D!

How L&D is using AI today

According to the AI in L&D: Intention and Reality report by Donald H Taylor and Eglė Vinauskaitė, 2024 has seen a significant uplift in the number of L&D teams using AI for content and user research and learning analysis. In 2023, the vast majority of AI activity for L&D focused on learning design and content development. 

This shows that in just one year, L&D teams have expanded beyond their initial AI experimentation and are now seeing what else they can do with this exciting technology. Based on this, perhaps we can expect to see even more innovative uses of AI for learning and development as we move into 2025 and beyond.

Learning content creation 

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the majority of L&D teams experimenting with AI have been using it for learning content creation. This includes tasks such as brainstorming learning activities, creating course outlines, writing assessment questions, crafting course descriptions and coming up with scenarios to aid deeper understanding of learning content.

AI is great for sparking the initial ideas to solve the blank page problem, but it's important not to rely 100% on the output of generative AI tools for your learning content. You can also use AI to 'tidy up' the learning content you're creating, whether that's adapting the tone of voice or tailoring the content to your specific audience for better outcomes.

AI as a research tool

On a similar note, AI is also a great research companion for many L&D professionals. While Google will always be a popular starting point for researching learning topics, generative AI tools like ChatGPT allow us to ask more questions, even when we don’t know the specific terminology for a standard search engine.

You can also get smart with your ChatGPT to conduct research that resonates with your specific learner audience. For example:

“I work for an electronics retailer, and I’m training my team of salespeople to improve their active listening skills. Can you recommend some recent tips and techniques to help them upskill, and provide sources?”

This would never be possible with Google, so it allows you to get straight to the heart of what you’re researching without having to trawl through pages upon pages of search results.

AI is a brilliant tool for information gathering, content ideation (such as coming up with an outline or a content plan) or filling in the gaps when a suitable SME isn’t available – just don’t forget to cross-reference the information you get, as generative AI tools can occasionally produce ‘hallucinations’ (incorrect or nonsensical information).

Creating multimedia content

We L&D professionals may be a smart bunch, but we can’t all be pros at graphic design, voiceover artistry, video editing, speaking multiple languages, animation…

AI tools are perfect for creating L&D content. Examples of how to use AI for learning and development content include:

• Generating images (such as thumbnails for your LMS or custom images to use within elearning courses)
• Editing images (such as removing backgrounds, changing colour schemes or removing elements)
• Creating voiceovers (such as for elearning courses, training videos or for animated scenarios)
• Translating content (either written or spoken, making content available to a wider audience in their own language)
• Generating background music (such as for ‘talking head’ videos or promotional learning footage)
• Editing videos (such as automatically choosing the highlights from a video interview)

This is useful for avoiding stale stock content (how many ‘woman using laptop’ free stock images can you really use?) and generating content that much more closely matches your brand and tone of voice.

Generating resources for instructor-led training

For many companies, instructor-led training (ILT) still plays an important role in their learning programmes. But we know that ILT is often not as effective as it could be – after all, we can all think of times when we’ve been cooped up in stuffy training rooms for hours on end, listening to an instructor droning on in front of a tedious PowerPoint presentation.

If you’re struggling to hit the mark with your ILT sessions, AI could be your secret weapon for all sorts of reasons. Just some of the ways you can use AI to help breathe new life into your face-to-face training include:

• Creating a training workshop structure based on your learning objectives
• Generating ideas for ice-breakers, role-play scenarios and team-building exercises
• Crafting scripts or talking points for instructors and hosts
• Taking notes from group discussions and producing a summary
• Building slide decks and speaker notes for more engaging presentations

These ideas work well for both in-person and virtual ILT, so can be used no matter how you deliver your live training sessions.

AI-driven performance support

Performance support covers a wide array of resources and activities, but it generally refers to just-in-time content that is delivered at the exact point of need. They’re usually short, sharp, mobile-friendly assets which are easily accessible and searchable in the LMS, and AI can help in two main ways:

1. AI for performance support content creation
   Performance support resources are often extracted from longer pieces of learning content – for instance, it might be a short clip from a long video, or a standalone checklist from an elearning course. AI can help pull out these resources from your existing material, or can help build them from scratch using generative AI, whether that’s AI-based role-play, performance coaching or suggesting useful tips before a tricky or unfamiliar task.
2. AI for finding performance support resources
   It’s not always easy to find the exact performance support resources you need, so AI agents are extremely useful when it comes to matching learners with the right content. A learner can tell the AI agent what task they’re about to do (such as “I’m about to give my first sales pitch”) and the agent can suggest the best resources to help boost performance.
   
   

Learning data analysis

Many L&D professionals wouldn’t consider themselves ‘number people’. That can make the idea of learning data analysis very daunting. If the prospect of number crunching feels a little too GCSE Maths for your liking, the good news is that AI is here to help…

The AI in L&D report found that AI is used for data analysis at three different levels:

1. Learner feedback on a course, such as sentiment analysis and suggesting improvements to learning programmes
2. Learning system usage, such as tracking user progress, usage patterns and assessing the effectiveness of the L&D efforts
3. Company-level data, such as demographics and skills, to better understand the learner audience

AI for learning data analysis is still in its relatively early stages, but we’re expecting to see much, much more in this area in the coming years, as AI is used to dig deeper into the data we’re all collecting and make genuinely insightful recommendations.