Psychologist Pauline Boss coined the term “ambiguous loss” to describe a grief with no clear boundaries, like that experienced by families whose loved ones were missing in action and who could neither grieve nor move on. Since ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, I’ve seen a version of it every day in my work with people across companies. Nothing has been taken from us, and yet something has disappeared. Expertise works like territory. Being the person who can do a particular thing marks out our place, and who we are at work depends on holding on to it. So when AI produces the same output we do, it can feel like it’s crossing an invisible line and chipping away at that identity.
Those of us who work in corporate learning, or learning and development (L&D), have long been identified with content production: through training sessions and e-learning courses, we were responsible for gathering information and sharing it throughout the company. Whether any of it changed how people worked was hardly ever how we measured success. But now AI tools can bottle knowledge and deliver it at the right moment, in the form people need it, freeing L&D teams to do something else. What that something else should be is rarely discussed, and this silence is what makes the loss so ambiguous.
For years, L&D has identified with what it does: with the training and workshops it provides, but fewer have been able to see its purpose in what it delivers: more effective people and organizations. I think this is what has caused a lot of the dread in our profession. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 puts systems thinking among the skills that are likely to be in greatest demand through 2030. Systems thinking is the ability to see how the parts of an organization connect and influence each other. For L&D people, this means looking beyond the request for a course to the conditions that prevent performance. It is the difference between treating a symptom and getting to the root cause.
A few years ago, the CEO of a global technology company asked the People & Culture leaders of his organization to teach employees and managers about the concept of accountability. Teams kept making commitments they didn’t keep, so he wanted everyone to be reminded of what accountability means. The team could have built the workshop and rolled it out globally. Yet, they had a hunch there was more to the story. So, instead, they spent a few weeks interviewing leaders across R&D, operations, finance, legal, and commercial, asking where the gaps actually were and what would genuinely help.
What they learned was that some functions already had strong accountability, built on clear revenue targets and weekly rituals around shared dashboards. Even so, gaps did exist and they looked different in each place. In one function, responsibilities had not been defined clearly after a reorganization, so people were uncertain of what they were responsible for. In a third, the handovers between departments had no standard procedures, so when a piece of work fell apart, there was no one to turn to. The leaders hardly ever said that the problem lay in people not understanding what accountability meant. What they wanted was clarity on what was expected of them, and help with managing people who were failing to do their jobs properly. When asked if they needed training for their managers, most said they did not.
The team went back to the CEO with a plan that looked nothing like the one he’d asked for: goal-setting built into the performance cycle, clearer OKRs at senior level, shared metrics for cross-functional teams, recognition tied to results, and an explicit conversation with the leadership team about role modeling. Learning was one piece of that plan, but accountability would only increase if several conditions were in place at once.
What this L&D team did was simple, but not easy. Instead of delivering the training as requested, they stepped back and asked, “What is driving this problem?” That takes courage. It goes against what most stakeholders expect from L&D, and the answer often points to solutions that sit far outside a learning team’s usual scope.
Looking at a problem systemically might reveal a need for clearer expectations, more timely feedback, or stronger processes and measures. It might also reveal that people need a space to meet, disagree, and align.
Used well, systemic thinking turns L&D into a source of clarity for the whole organization, helping leaders and teams ask deeper questions and frame their problems better. The solutions that follow, however, rarely require content design. For many L&D teams, this is where the uncertainty starts. They can see the problem more clearly than ever, but they’re not sure what their part in solving it should be.
The answers I see most often are small departures from what L&D has always done, seeds of what the field could become. Some teams are using facilitation to help leaders align and make decisions. Others use experience design to make learning memorable, and behavioral science to help people turn what they learn into long-term habits. Each one shifts L&D’s role from producing content toward changing how people and organizations work.
In the end, perhaps, the future of corporate learning is not about learning at all, at least not in the way we know it. What we’re losing is a way of doing our work which no longer serves a purpose. What we are gaining is the part that AI can’t do, the chance to help people and organizations change, not just learn.
This article is a book excerpt from L&D Rewired, How L&D Professionals Are Breaking Their Own Rules To Stay Relevant, by Lavinia Mehedintu. The book is about the identity challenge L&D professionals are currently going through. Each chapter explores a discipline (systems thinking, experience design, behavioral science, facilitation, and AI) through theory, research, tools, and real-world examples. You can purchase the book here.
This article Inside the quiet reinvention of corporate learning is featured on Big Think.