A Climate of Collaboration

“What is your current weather inside and outside?” Antionette Carroll, founder/ CEO of Creative Reaction Lab, asked attendees at last month’s 2025 Learning Leaders Summit in New Orleans.

The weather question was particularly appropriate on a sunny day punctuated by periodic downpours in a city known for extreme climate conditions. Attendee answers ranged from stormy/ turbulent/chaos inside but sunny/positive/upbeat outside to drought outside due to training budget cuts but inwardly still seeing a great opportunity to bring sunshine to those dark areas.

Featuring Learning and Development (L&D) professionals from diverse industries who are actively engaged in transforming organizational training and learning through new applications of existing and emerging technologies, the summit was sponsored by GP Strategies and Class and hosted by Café Reconcile, both an eatery and nonprofit workforce training program for young adults in The Big Easy.

Attendees agreed Carroll’s weather check icebreaker is a smart way to start learning sessions. As Carroll noted during the discussion on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), “It’s important to understand that people are showing up differently, and it acknowledges emotional diversity.”

Learning experience designer Danielle Watkins kicked off the summit with an exercise to help attendees “connect to purpose,” asking, “Why are you here today? Why is it important for your team, organization, community, perhaps for the whole world?”

Responses included:

• “Educating and learning is like water—you need it to live and grow.”
• “Trainers are helpers—we often focus on everyone else, not our personal growth.”
• “We need to lift our heads out of the work and get our creative juices flowing again.”
• Learning experience designer Danielle Watkins helps attendees “connect to purpose.” PHOTOGRAPHY BY @NOLAEVENTPHOTOGRAPHY

PARTNERING WITH AI

Generative AI and extended reality (XR) strategist at Accenture Yulia Barnakova pointed to artificial intelligence (AI) as a way to help boost those creative juices. She recommended attendees download the ChatGPT multimodal app and use the voice feature to see how far it has come. “It’s super-personalized and contextualized,” she explained.

Other tips she offered:

• Turn AI knowledge assistants into learning tutors. “Partner with AI,” Barnakova urged. “In fact, you can build an internal knowledge assistant yourself with Copilot Studio.”
• Tap into in-flow platforms already in use.
• Consider if it’s worth the time and investment to clean up your current data and make it “bot ready.” This includes tagging on courses, consolidating libraries, and turning programs into learning experiences. Barnakova noted it is possible to take a picture of your data/content and have AI do the work to make it bot-ready.
• Think about how content needs to be developed going forward to be effectively utilized by AI.

Two of the biggest takeaways Barnakova stressed are that critical thinking is still needed and L&D professionals must be prepared (and prepare their learners) for things to look different than they do now.

ADAPTIVE LEARNING & AI

Kristine Obritsch, Global Audit & Assurance Learning Modernization leader, and Anne Coudrette, Global Audit & Assurance Learning Research and Innovation lead, detailed Deloitte’s adaptive learning journey, which incorporated AI. The end result was a genAI adaptive course that allows participants to choose which part of the course they want speakers to talk about (it uses a QR code for voting). Adaptive learning has helped drive improved outcomes, efficiency, immediate feedback, data-driven insights, increased engagement, and support for diverse learning preferences at Deloitte.

THE HUMAN SIDE OF AI

Six-time Chief Learning/Talent Officer Karie Willyerd urged attendees to consider thinking about what the human side is going to be in an AI future. She suggested checking out Harvard Business School’s working paper, “Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier.” The premise is that AI has an uneven frontier of what it can do. “It may not be able to do something a 6-year-old can do,” Willyerd said. “But it can read an X-ray and tell the gender and race of the patient—which we can’t do and we don’t know how AI does.”

Willyerd posited that training with AI might include teaching people to learn how to build community as she believes AI is a “digital sociopath” that can emulate human emotions but doesn’t feel them. As many have said: “AI won’t take your job; it will be part of your job.”

Concluding that we’ve over-rotated on skills, Willyerd led attendees in an exercise where they defined skills such as common sense, intuition, community building, imagination, and emotion and discussed how to use them with AI.

SLOW DOWN TO ACCELERATE

In a world that seems to be moving at the speed of light, sometimes we have to slow down to accelerate. Leah Carrubba, senior director, VAS Sales Training, Visa, related how the product team contacted L&D to create a 40-minute training for a 10-person pilot program. “It didn’t make sense,” she noted. “There was no intake process when I got here, so we created a Microsoft Teams form for business unit teams to fill out. This slows the process down so we can figure out if training is really needed.”

Carrubba admitted it’s not easy to convince people to change but pointed to four tips that can make a big difference:

• Build trust.
• Get champions to help bring people on board.
• Get tough.
• Ask for input.