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AI pervades every area of workplace technology, but it’s having the biggest effect in corporate training. Human resources and learning thought leader Josh Bersin recently warned that “everything is about to change” and that we are entering an AI-driven “transformative era” that will affect both learning and development teams and vendors in multiple ways.
Of course, learning technology providers are already frenetically integrating generative AI into their product and future roadmap. This was evident at the Learning Technologies 2025 conference in London in April, Europe’s largest workplace learning event and a staple of the learning tech industry. AI was everywhere.
It’s an event where the marketing machine is in full swing. Vendors lay on everything from DJs to magicians to baristas, and this year AI capabilities were at the heart of most of the messaging.
Table of Contents
- More Practical Uses of AI Within LMS
- Carefully Adding AI Features to LMS
- Using AI for More Than Content Generation
- How AI Helps With Hyper-Personalization
- Using AI to Help LMS Administrators
- Integration to Support Agentic AI
- Is the LMS Market Ready for AI?
More Practical Uses of AI Within LMS
The industry tends to focus on the next shiny thing, said Simon Thompson, a consultant who works across the learning and digital workplace space.
“There has always been an element of trying to find the next thing to hook on to,” Thompson said. “We’ve had social. We had an LXP phase. We’ve previously had a lot of talk about AI which had rather faded, but in the past few years we’ve seen a resurgence due to generative AI.”
Within the learning systems market, it is “hard to see beyond the wall of noise about AI,” stated HR research analyst house Fosway Group. Vendors and attendees agreed, but felt there has been some significant evolution over the past year.
Vendors are under more pressure to demonstrate the practical value of AI within their product, Thompson said.
“For the past couple of years, the message has been ‘we’ve got AI, here it is,’” Thompson said. “This year, it’s not enough to make promises about AI. You actually have to demonstrate it being useful in some way.”
“Last year at Learning Tech, everyone was talking about AI, but in most cases their solutions were not fully formed,” agreed Catriona Razic, chief revenue officer and co-founder of LMS vendor and content provider Skillcast. “We heard from lots of attendees at Learning Technologies 2025 that this year, there were some really viable solutions now ready.”
Carefully Adding AI Features to LMS
Making sure AI capabilities resonate with customers means that LMS vendors need to get customer input on which features are the most important. For example, Skillcast, which tends to focus on compliance, has spoken to compliance professionals to “carefully consider” what they do with AI, Razic said.
Other learning providers also emphasized a more considered approach to introducing AI features to help reassure customers about AI.
“We’ve actually had an AI core to the product for quite a long time,” said Kate Graham, global director, competitive intelligence at Cornerstone. “Obviously with the generative AI piece, everybody’s had to rush to try to do something. But the big thing for us is we have 7,000 organizations using our solutions worldwide, so the governance piece and the trust piece have been more important than speed.”
Other vendors make sure AI delivers tangible value.
“We focus on the purposeful use of AI,” said Andrew Roberts, chief product officer at learning and employee engagement platform Zensai. “Every AI feature we introduce has to either make people’s lives easier or make you more effective. We’re making sure we’re not just putting AI in there for the sake of it.”
Using AI for More Than Content Generation
One obvious way to exploit the value of generative AI is to help content creators generate learning content, but some LMS vendors don’t believe that is where generative AI ultimately delivers the most value, because a lack of content isn’t usually an issue.
“We made a conscious decision not to follow the gold rush to content creation,” said Darren Wallace, chief innovation officer at LMS provider Thinqi. “Large language models are very good at producing large amounts of compellingly browsable content, but that was already a solved problem. Instead, we’ve focused on features that bring value and bake our experience of 25 years in the learning industry into the platform.”
While generating content is an early win, AI will soon go much further, Graham agreed. “We’re seeing significant interest in leveraging generative AI for faster and efficient content creation,” she said. “But in our experience, a lack of content generally isn’t a problem. It’s great to create knowledge-based materials faster, but it’s only scratching the surface of where we will go with AI.”
However, AI-powered content generation can have particular value for particular groups, such as when it lowers the barriers to entry to administrators and course creators who might sit outside the L&D function.
“When you're building training for customers or partners, it's often not your typical L&D team behind it, which means stuff like learning objectives or proving the training worked can get a little fuzzy,” said Dave Ibis, vice president of solution consulting and sales enablement from LMS provider Intellum. “One thing we hear over and over is that people spend hours just trying to come up with the right questions to know if the content’s landing. That’s where AI comes in — it’s not just saving time, it’s taking the guesswork out of what makes training stick.”
How AI Helps With Hyper-Personalization
One way learning management systems are using AI beyond content creation is to deliver hyper-personalized experiences at scale that not only support learning at the point of need, but also act as an assistant or coach that can answer questions in context, make suggestions proactively or reinforce learning at the right time.
This could help more traditional LMS platforms better support truly “adaptive” learning, a goal that’s arguably remained elusive up to now.
“The worst thing you can ever do is give people irrelevant learning,” Razic said. “AI can help to focus precisely what is important to the individual.”
Within Skillcast’s offering, for example, this has led to more of a knowledge solution where users ask questions about compliance-related matters and get more precise, contextual responses.
Beyond this, generative AI is providing a range of additional capabilities that LMS systems hadn’t been able to do before.
“What I find really exciting is that there's a whole class of problems that previously have been very difficult for us to solve using deterministic coding practices,” Wallace said. “The LLMs have given us an opportunity to tackle new challenges.”
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These include understanding and exploiting qualitative feedback and providing localization at scale, Wallace said
Of course, for generative AI to work well, it needs the right data and content to deliver the hyper-personalized learning to the right people at the right time, as well as the intelligent and actionable insights for L&D teams. Several vendors alluded to the concept of “garbage in, garbage out.”
“When it comes to AI, you have to feed the beast,” Graham said, describing how SkyHive, Cornerstone’s newly acquired platform, pulls in external labor market data at scale to support skills intelligence.
Using AI to Help LMS Administrators
To date, there’s been more focus on the value that AI brings to learners, but the administrator experience is also important, where there are multiple opportunities to help them as well.
Part of this is because AI can do the heavy lifting around many of the manual learning administration tasks. That means a small team can scale learning. Others see it as a way to reduce the learning curve that can be associated with particularly complex learning platforms.
“Not enough people are talking about how AI can transform the admin experience,” Ibis said. "LMS admins are often stuck wrestling with clunky, complicated systems, spending more time figuring out how to manage the tool than actually running their programs. AI can flip that. By simplifying tasks and guiding admins through the hard stuff, it frees them up to actually focus on the strategy behind the initiative."
For example, some providers let administrators build analytics with natural language to reduce the need to navigate complex screens.
However, there are still gaps in how AI supports L&D teams, particularly relating to analytics, Thompson said
“AI’s got to be more applied,” Thompson said. “It needs to demonstrate what it actually does. It's got to have to be able to produce numbers in terms of effectiveness, which means you've got to be able to better measure it. We may still be some way from achieving that.”
Integration to Support Agentic AI
So far, the actual race to embed AI features into learning platforms is happening in different ways, including niche acquisitions. In 2024, Cornerstone acquired SkyHive, an AI skills intelligence platform, and also acquired Tailspin, an immersive learning platform that is already using AI to focus on areas such as mixed reality.
Other providers are developing partnerships. Zensai integrates with Microsoft 365, meaning that there are more opportunities to integrate with Microsoft Copilot. Intellum has partnered with Yoodli to integrate AI-driven role-playing assessments into the platform.
Integrating with other systems through connectors and APIs is another way to bring AI into the LMS. Many LXPs are heading in this direction to make learning more available across the digital workplace.
“It is imperative to offer people learning at the point that they need it, rather than an annual piece of content,” Razic said. “Making sure that everything is interwoven and talking to each other is very important for the future.”
The growing use of out-of-the-box connectors and APIs also means teams can plug their AI-powered product-of-choice into an LMS or LXP.
“There’s been a shift in Cornerstone over the past few years to support the open ecosystem and integrate with other solutions,” Graham said. “For example, if one of our customers wants to integrate some innovative features from an AI startup, we want to ensure that they’re able to connect to our platform. That's really part of our overall mission to enable workforce agility.”
Getting different learning technologies to work together is also a factor in the upcoming wave of agentic AI evolution. New standards like the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for tool use are a game-changer for interoperability, Wallace said
“Integrations used to be very onerous and brittle, as they fail when one of the parties changes the data model,” said Wallace, whose company is moving toward supporting agentic AI. “But now that agents will be able to explain their interfaces to each other, adapt and agree on the fly, Integrations will be easier and faster.”
“The big difference between a chatbot and an agent is tool use,” Wallace added. “It's the ability for these APIs to call tools. Now we're training agents which can use all the tools in our platform. And that's where our roadmap is really going.”
Is the LMS Market Ready for AI?
But are learning and development leaders ready to implement AI features?
Adoption is patchy, with a lot of AI promise still in the pipeline, according to Fosway Group analysts. Customers have not yet turned on many live features, they said.
It remains to be seen how the market will respond to the latest set of AI features that are new to LMSs and LXPs. Compliance and privacy issues could also delay organizations, as well as the resources required to support and launch new features.
Nonetheless, most vendors were excited about the future prospects. Roberts said more than a third of Zensai’s customers are already using AI features to generate content, despite them being available only recently.
“I think the tide is turning. The only real barrier within our product for using AI is if a customer is comfortable using it,” said Roberts.
With more AI-features focused on value, adoption seems likely to follow.
Watch for part 2 to hear from niche vendors in the learning space who are also incorporating AI.
Editor's Note: Read about more trends in L&D:
- 2025 Predictions for AI in Work Tech — HR leaders need to understand how AI can unlock new possibilities. Here we explore some of the most promising applications.
- Here's Why Choosing Learning Tech Is So Hard, and What You Can Do — There are three big causes behind the noise and confusion learning leaders go through when choosing a learning management system.
- How Microsoft's People Skills Makes Skills Management Dynamic — Microsoft's People Skills will start rolling out during the company's Build conference. Here's where talent experts see it helping business leaders.
