For HR and L&D, the most interesting question is no longer what AI can do. It is what the profession wants to be when technology can do far more of the work around it.
That question ran through a recent Speexx Exchange pre-webinar with David James, Chief Learning Officer at 360Learning and host of The Learning & Development Podcast; Laura Overton, founder of Learning Changemakers; and Speexx Founder Armin Hopp. The discussion moved beyond tools and productivity into questions of identity, influence, organizational politics, and human capability.
Armin described the moment as potentially a “golden age for HR and L&D.” That is an optimistic proposition, but also a demanding one. A golden age only begins if the profession is prepared to rethink where it fits and what distinctive value it brings.
1. Relevance begins with capabilities, not job descriptions
Armin’s argument started with the way work itself is becoming less neatly divided. AI increasingly performs activities that once sat within clearly defined professional boundaries, while employees can move across tasks that previously required specialist production skills.
That does not make people irrelevant. It makes capabilities more important than the assumption that a particular job will continue to contain the same collection of tasks.
Traditional development models often begin with roles. When those roles become more fluid, the harder questions for L&D are about what people need to be capable of doing: where judgment sits, how responsibility works, which expertise must be retained, and how people contribute when technology can perform more of the execution.
Armin put the human task plainly: “Our job is to help our people find their place in this transformation.”
That is a wider mandate than filling skills gaps. It asks L&D to understand how human capability creates value as the division of work between people and machines keeps moving.
2. L&D influence is political as well as professional
David James brought a different kind of pressure into the conversation: the fact that L&D professionals can care deeply about helping the organization and still place themselves in a weak position if they wait to be invited into important conversations, what he termed “martyrs”.
His contrast between L&D “martyrs” and “winners” – those who are able to advance both their own and the organization’s goals at the same time – was deliberately uncomfortable. In the webinar chat, David responded to the suggestion that everyone in L&D might be a martyr with: “No, not all of us. I have the great pleasure to speak with L&D leaders who are winners.”
The difference is fundamentally political. Influence depends partly on expertise, but also on where the function places itself inside the organization, which relationships it builds, and whether stakeholders see L&D as a participant in solving business problems or as a service brought in after the problem has already been defined.
This requires a different conception of relevance. L&D cannot rely on good intentions, professional expertise, or the inherent value of learning to secure influence. It has to understand where decisions are made, whose objectives are at stake, and how its own work connects to organizational performance.
3. Getting closer to the business changes what L&D can see
David offered a deceptively simple example from his own experience. A mentor encouraged him to ask colleagues in elevators, before meetings, or over coffee: “How’s business?”
The question worked because it did not begin with learning. People talked about what they were trying to achieve, what was going wrong, and what occupied their attention. That gave L&D access to problems before they were translated into requests for courses or programs.
The webinar audience recognized the gap. One participant described learning journeys that take so long to create that the requirement can be outdated before the program is finished.
Staying relevant therefore means shortening the distance between L&D and the work. Understanding the business is not background knowledge for designing better learning. It determines whether the function sees the real problem early enough to contribute.
4. Small experiments can change both practice and influence
Laura Overton shifted the discussion from reflection to experimentation. Her invitation to the audience was to think about the “tiny experiments” they could try to shift their influence and relevance.
She described these interventions through the idea of Trojan Mice: small tests that allow L&D to learn without turning every emerging problem into a major initiative.
The webinar chat supplied plenty of territory for that approach. Participants described employees accepting inaccurate AI-generated information without verification, concerns about expertise eroding through over-reliance on AI, and organizations struggling to reconcile experimentation with security and compliance.
None of those problems requires L&D to wait until somebody has designed a complete answer. A team can observe one behavior, test an intervention, see what changes, and use the result to inform the next move.
Small experiments also have a political effect within the organization. Useful action builds credibility. It demonstrates that L&D can engage with ambiguous problems while they are still developing rather than waiting until the organization has packaged them neatly into a training brief.
5. A golden age starts with better questions
When we all have access to increasingly similar technology, it is people themselves who become the greatest differentiator. Judgment, context, responsibility, relationships, and the ability to decide what deserves attention do not disappear because tools become more capable.
“When the technology is the same for everyone, people make the difference,” said Armin.
That brings the discussion back to Laura’s emphasis on reflection and experimentation. Perhaps the useful task for L&D is not to arrive too quickly at a new definition of itself. It is to ask better questions about the role it wants to occupy.
Where do we create value that the organization would notice if it disappeared? Which capabilities will people need when familiar roles no longer provide a reliable map? Where are we waiting for permission when we could be building influence? What can we test now, on a small scale, that would teach us something about where the profession needs to go?
The active discussion throughout the webinar suggested that nobody has a finished answer, including the people leading the conversation. That may be exactly the point of an exchange. The next version of L&D will be shaped by a profession willing to ask what it is for, experiment with the answers, and work out together where humans still make the difference.
David, Laura and Armin continue their conversation, alongside other well-known L&D industry experts at Speexx Exchange 2026 on December 2. Join in person in Berlin or online to be part of the most exciting exchange of ideas in the L&D world.
