Over a year ago, I wrote a blog when artificial intelligence (AI) was just starting to be discussed as a potential accelerator for the talent development world. As they say, what a difference a year, or two, makes. Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you have undoubtedly heard all about AI and its potential serious impact on everything we know, say, and do. Certainly, the topic has obtained serious traction in just this short amount of time. What we might have thought was science fiction even a couple years ago appears now to be real with yet-to-be-discovered potential impact.

The question for you is how the advent of AI will impact the future of your training supplier business, whether you are a pure consulting shop or product / program provider. What’s difficult to portend, however, is what exactly this impact will be as the technology matures and even explodes. It appears there are at least two main arenas where the supplier business will be largely impacted: content development and market development. Let’s look at each of these.

Content Development

There is little question that AI, in general, and clearly for the L&D industry, will have its greatest influence on how content is generated. Today, one can use ChatGPT to literally create leader guides, participant workbooks, video and audio scripts, and the like by just asking it to do so. Try it and you will be amazed, perhaps even bewildered, and maybe even scared. Its power even in its early development stages is almost beyond comprehension.

How will this affect you? At the most basic level, why does a company’s L&D department need you to create or buy your programs when it can do so itself in a tenth of the time and cost? Of course, the good news is the same applies to you. That is, you can create your programming with the same speed and reduced cost that it would normally take. If you are a custom development house, the benefit is immediate with those savings passed on to the customer. If you are a product-based firm, you can quickly and cost-effectively add relevant customer case studies, video scripts, and other tailored elements to your off-the-shelf programs. What this means, however, is that in some ways, the competitive landscape could now change, wherein your potential customers become your major competitors. To combat this possibility, you will need to take a close and careful look into the exact value you are adding to your client engagements if it isn’t your content, per se.

AI can also generate content “in vivo”; that is, as you go. For instance, I was facilitating a three-year strategic planning session a couple weeks ago for a client, using my decades-old “tried and true” methodology for scores of training consulting businesses. We began the process by generating several “strategic imperatives” the firm felt would help it achieve its growth goals. The next step was to generate what initiatives and actions needed to be taken to implement these imperatives. As I started that process, just for fun, one of the participants in the room secretly asked ChatGPT to tell him what initiatives could best be put in place for the very same imperatives with some parameters defined, most notably for a training consulting business. After at least several hours generating these initiatives in a highly dynamic and interesting exchange with the participants, he showed us his results. Suffice it to say that, short of some wordsmithing, ChatGPT’s output wasn’t that much different from what we put together. And, it produced it very quickly.

Of course, my first question was, “why did they need me at all?” I’m not sure I have a good answer to that question, other than I will need to reexamine my process if I want to be competitive. Perhaps, in the future, I will start with a ChatGPT’s outline and fine-tune it, taking a lot less time with less cost. As you can imagine, I spent the next couple days exploring just what value I could add to similar future engagements if the content of the session could be generated so easily in such a short amount of time.

Market Distribution

As we all know, it’s one thing to have a program or service offer, and quite another to reach the market most interested in buying it. AI tools can facilitate this market penetration and exposure similar to the content development example noted above. With a few keyword inputs, it can print out target segments, industry and company size, and even tell you what challenges and needs your offer is most likely to address in specific ways. And, more importantly, it can readily alter any courses of action by simply inputting new information. It is a living and breathing process simply waiting for more and different input.

Think of how useful this type of quickly obtained information can be to a salesforce—yours or your clients. An example is from another firm with whom I have worked that uses AI tools to help it focus on its most likely customer base given certain parameters like its location, size, content expertise, and more. AI tools can even name organizations fitting any profile you input. This information immediately assisted them in refreshing their value proposition so that it met the identified needs of its targeted client base.

The value of AI in both these cases is in its ability to quickly and cost-effectively generate a narrative that you can tailor, as appropriate, to your own specific business needs. Let’s be clear—many L&D professionals are already using and touting the benefits of AI in providing feedback to learners, creating new written training materials, onboarding new hires, and training workers to use generative AI on the job. (See the infograph“AI Helps to Scale Development Opportunities,” TD, November 2023, p. 9.) So, the cat is clearly out of the bag and with reported successes. (See Freifeld, L., “AI’s Real Role in L&D,” Training Magazine, September 2023, p. 19–23.)

As a learning provider, the topic of AI has at least two challenges for you. First, you will want to think about the application of AI for your own business in how it can help shape your offer and improve its results. Second, and equally important as a learning consultant to your clients, it is incumbent upon you to have a strong and informed point of view to help guide them through their organization’s adaptation. So, to really understand the impact of AI on your business, you will need to fully grasp how you fit into its use with your clients’ individual learners, their L&D function, the overall organization’s performance, and ultimately their overall business strategy. To do this, you must be willing to experiment with a variety of tools as they come to market, then adapt your business processes and offer accordingly. Reading about it alone won’t make the difference you need. Instead, adapting by immersing yourself in this technology is paramount to effectively managing the future of your business.

As you ponder these ideas, ask yourself how you can prepare for some of these projections to be borne out in your lifetime? How can AI be used to accelerate your business value proposition? What do you need to do to effectively compete moving forward into an entire new world of learning that really isn’t too far away?