World of Learning (#WOL25) is a learning and development conference in London.
AI is great at being a machine/software, doing all the great things machines and software can do. People are great at being people. Although we can mimic each other, we’re not built to outperform each other. So rather than anthropomorphising AI e.g., turning it into a human, it’s better to focus its power on what it’s good at i.e., big data in, insights out. The mistake I think L&D and humans in general are making everywhere, is to get excited about using AI to replace human interaction, rather than looking at the strengths of AI in relation to productivity, decision-making and automation. There is enough noise in society about scary things that AI can do to look and sound like people, and that’s not going away, but the real scary innovations won't be on the front page of The Times, until it's changed everything.
In one of the panel discussions, I had a flashback to 15 years ago when I was a young buffoon in a room of leaders at BP – the internal ‘Future of Learning’ conference. We were discussing communities and connection then, and the panellists were discussing communities and connection now. I’ve said for some years that Community Management is a core role of a modern L&D organisation and leaders should be hiring full-time community managers to support communities around AI, Sustainability and so on. The power of the hive mind is there to be harnessed but for some reason people haven’t figured out that Community Management is a value proposition for L&D, yet.
In the first keynote ‘The future is human: The power of human skills in the future of work’, John Amaechi OBE, explained that one of the first steps to engaging senior leaders in EQ, is not to call it Emotional Intelligence but Emotional Literacy. His point was that people have a fixed idea of the word intelligence, but literacy is something you learn. Loved that point, and the reframing makes sense in all sorts of contexts at work.
It wasn’t all about AI, but here is another point about AI. This was a reflection from a talk by Aki Friedrich, Director of Learning Experience at Superside. He had designed a programme to support his company in adopting AI. Given that most of the team are creatives: Designers, animators and so on, it was an interesting perspective. The short-story is that clients can expect more, faster, from creatives if they are able to apply effective prompting to tools such as Midjourney: “Efficiency of around 80%”, Aki explained. But at another level, what clients can expect from companies that rely on AI to do creative jobs is platitudes and stereotypes. That’s why "authenticity" is my word of 2025, and why all most posts and blogs hence forth will be written without the crutch of Chat GPT and Grammarly. Afterall, if you care about what another human thinks, AI can't tell you.
Finally, my highlight was Lucy Davies’s ‘Barbie Leadership’ speech. At the ‘Effective Leaders: How to avoid mistakes in leadership development’, Lucy and Abbi Anand shared a rant about the challenges of being a leader. It struck a chord with me personally as I’ve had to find my way over the recent years, and it’s a challenging balance where you always feel like you’re doing it wrong.
So, that's the gist. What do you think about the use of AI to recreate humans for conversational practice? Would you hire a community manager in your organisation? Are you training employees on AI adoption?
Let's connect and chat: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charliekneen/
Here are the profiles of the people I mentioned above:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/akifriedrich/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lhjdavies/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ekta-abbi-anand-6b08a626/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/amaechi/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vinauskaite/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ksenia-zheltoukhova-ab70a517/
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