LH133 The Great AI Steal with Ross Stevenson

You know, some people might be astonished we've got this far into the interview before I really got into AI seriously and started asking you the questions that people ask you all the time now.

So you argue that L&D has to move from AI adoption to AI enablement.

You know, counting licenses and logins is measuring the wrong thing.

It's just kind of activity measures, not outcome.

But can you unpack that for us, the difference between adoption and enablement? What does an organization that's genuinely enabling look like as opposed to one that's just deployed AI?

I think the central thing with enablement are people that are actually treating it as part of the organizational culture.

So what we're not talking about here is these one-off things.

events where and we all see them right there's ai weeks or ai months and then we kind of never focus on this stuff again it's actually looking at saying how does this become part of a evergreen strategy that's embedded into the things that we do and a lot of that which is a popular term at the moment is evidently workflows and workflow mapping which is basically just saying How do you do what you do as an individual? How do you deconstruct that and then understand where may AI help within that process? And that's more focused around enabling, which is actually saying, thinking about how we work, how we deliver stuff and how these tools can become part of that.

And of course, it's always changing because the more these AI companies release new features, the more capabilities are available for you to then say, oh, okay, I couldn't do this six months ago, but this is possible now.

Yeah,

isn't that slightly, sorry to interrupt, isn't that slightly maddening? I mean, I found just this morning I was kind of going through my workflow.

Again, I thought this is about the third or fourth time I've done this this year.

Because every time you kind of, you know, you reorganize your file structure and then...

Suddenly, well, you don't need to do it on your machine.

You can do it in the cloud or whatever.

Or suddenly, you know, I can drive Claude from my mobile phone, which I've been waiting to happen for a while.

But things come up and a load of work that you've done previously to change your workflow suddenly gets junked because, you know, the things got smarter, the things moved on.

As you say, an event isn't good enough.

It has to be a constant activity.

Yeah.

A hundred percent.

And there's a great example that I've had with a lot of companies over the last six to 12 months where at one point it was a big deal where you could create custom AI assistants.

So Gemini had Gems, ChatGPT had GPTs.

At that point, it was kind of the frontier.

But now we've had the evolution of skills and markdown files, which have fundamentally been the evolution of that.