It's Time For Agentic L&D

Forbes

6 days ago

Getty
If there's room for Agentic AI in the headlines, there is room for something else these days: Agentic Learning and Development or Agentic L&D for short.
Over the years, organizations have allowed the Learning and Development function to become too polite. L&D is overly eager to serve at the edge of business instead of operating at the center. This situation is no longer acceptable in an era dominated by AI.
The L&D function doesn't have to get rude, but it should get ready to start swinging.
Agentic L&D is a necessary new term for an essential new way of thinking, one that positions Learning and Development not as content delivery, but as a capability sherpa. It sits inside the work, not around it. It influences business outcomes, not just training metrics. It behaves as though it's part of the business strategy, not simply trying to keep up with it.
If you've seen the recent job description for Microsoft's Director of AI-Era Skilling Transformation, you've already seen what is coming. The job doesn't mention instructional design. Not at all. It talks about embedding learning into the systems, sprints, and day-to-day moments that define real work.
"This role exists to deliver transformative skilling experiences that intrinsically motivate individuals and teams to skill through exploration, demonstration, and real-world experiences," states the posting.
In other words, it's calling for Agentic L&D, whether the company uses the term or not.
EY's GenAI Academy is already doing it: contextual learning embedded into role-based journeys. Not bolted on nor tucked away in an LMS. It's lived, applied, and then measured.
If organizations are serious about preparing teams and people for what's next—and for what's already arrived—then the days of learning as an accessory are over.
It's time to stop reporting on completions, taking orders, or just offering content. It's time for L&D to move from passive support to active influence.
It's time for Agentic L&D.
From Around the Work to Inside It
L&D has trained an entire profession to operate like instructional caterers. Stakeholders place the order, L&D delivers a menu of options, and everyone gets their post-course certificate. Meanwhile, the real work—the problems, the decisions, the friction—keeps happening elsewhere.
Agentic L&D doesn't hover at the margins. It embeds and operates at the source, at the point of the work. As author Harold Jarche wrote back in 2013, "Work is learning and learning is the work." Agentic L&D takes that idea seriously and operationalizes it at scale.
EY's GenAI Talent Academy, as mentioned earlier, pushes in this direction. Their role-based pathways don't require sign-up. They shadow actual workflows, adapting to projects in motion. L&D stops being an interruption (or outpost) and becomes an enabler inside the work.
From Content to Context
People do not necessarily need more learning content. It's available at the fingertips of your next AI prompt.
The digital shelves are now full of content, let alone what already exists in the various learning and content portals. What's missing is context; learning that lands where the friction actually lives.
Agentic L&D begins with a different brief. Not "build a course," but "find the pain."
Where are employees struggling to act? Where are decisions being delayed or reversed? Where are teams improvising because the current system no longer fits? Where are the skills or role gaps?
Microsoft's recently released AI-Era Skilling job brief is clear. Don't upload content; instead, embed and then align to capability. Change how work is accomplished, not just how it's taught. "Champion the shift from episodic learning to continuous, AI-augmented skilling embedded directly into the flow of work through business aligned co creation," also states the job brief.
This change means there will be a need to rewrite default behaviors and expectations for L&D practitioners. More in-line decision trees. Fewer generic case studies. More job-embedded prompts and "what do you think" open-ended questions in the flow of work.
And yes, that potentially also means fewer formal courses and more short-form AI nudges that help to change and calibrate behavior. Both AI and human L&D performance coaches are going to crush it.
Agentic L&D does not try to keep up with the business; instead, it walks beside it, listening, adapting, and building learning directly into the flow of work. While content may be present—and it should—it also starts with context. What is the business context of the performance gap?
From Input to Outcome
If the L&D function is still reporting on attendance and satisfaction, they have missed the point. It's not about participation; it's more about assisting in human potential transformation, which involves a better understanding not only of what goes into the learning (and the team member) but also of the outcome.
Agentic L&D measures capability velocity, which is the time it takes to move from friction to fluency or from confusion to competence. At a minimum, it is about shifting from an in-role skill or task to the next level.
According to Continu, organizations using data-driven L&D see retention increase by 46%, productivity by 37%, onboarding acceleration by 34%, and per-employee revenue jump by 29%. These are business outcomes!
Ultimately, Agentic L&D ought to be tracking retention uplift, error reduction, skill uptake, competence gap analysis, and even career or role mobility optionality.
LinkedIn's 2024 Workplace Learning Report suggests organizations that link learning to talent movement don't just keep people; they grow them.
Isn't this the actual point of L&D?
What Comes Next
The thinking around Agentic L&D is not about a rebrand; it's a full-scale L&D reset. (And I don't have it all figured out yet. I'm still noodling.)
Learning isn't solely a calendar of events or content on a platform. It isn't simply a set of course completions with colorful dashboards. It is an embedded 'guide on the side' agent who is woven into the culture, decisions, rituals, systems, and workflows of the organization. It is part AI and part human, but led by the humans.
Agentic L&D consults, curates, and activates. It doesn't just take orders. It is the fulcrum of performance change across the organization.
If AI has earned the adjective agentic, so should the L&D function. But the function itself needs to be reset—and led—accordingly.
Because if L&D does not become 'agents in the business' (or Agentic L&D), the work will move on without it.
And this time, it won't come back.