AI is making it easier than ever to create learning content. But as the ability to produce more, faster, continues to grow, a more important question emerges for L&D professionals: Are we building more training – or better training?

At Learning Conference, Christophe Jacobs, Chief Learning Officer at FLOWSPARKS, will explore this question in his session “Are you building more training, or better training?”.

For L&D professionals, AI is fundamentally changing what is possible. Content can be created faster and at a much greater scale. But according to Christophe, that speed also creates a risk: becoming so focused on producing the next piece of content that we stop asking why it is needed in the first place.

“If we let that happen, we end up with a lot of content that doesn’t actually help anyone – what people are starting to call content slop.”

The issue is not simply about creating unnecessary content. The stakes are much higher. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 identifies skills gaps as the leading barrier to business transformation for many employers. Getting learning right therefore has a direct impact on an organisation’s ability to adapt and develop.

What will you be speaking about at the Learning Conference, and why is this topic particularly relevant right now?
My session is called ”Are you building more training, or better training?” The role of an L&D professional, mine included, is shifting because of AI. It’s now genuinely easy to produce more content, faster. But that speed makes it tempting to stop asking why we’re building something and just keep producing what comes next. If we let that happen, we end up with a lot of content that doesn’t actually help anyone, what people are starting to call content slop. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs report shows skills gaps are now the number one barrier to business transformation for most employers, so getting this wrong has real stakes. That’s why I think our job right now is to stay in the driver’s seat: to be the guardrail that keeps asking why, instead of just producing more of what’s easy to produce.
What do you think most organizations still misunderstand when it comes to learning today?
Most organizations still measure L&D by output: how many modules got built, how fast, how polished they look, and how many people completed them. Completion feels like a real success metric, but it only tells you someone clicked through to the end, not that anything changed in how they work. That’s a ”what” question, not a ”why” question. There’s solid research on this too. Burke and Hutchins, in a widely cited review, estimated that somewhere between 10 and 40 percent of what’s taught in corporate training actually transfers into behavior on the job. So producing training and producing change are two different things, and most organizations are still optimizing for the first one, because it’s the one that’s easy to count.
 
What distinguishes organizations that truly succeed with learning from those that only talk about it?
Whether L&D still operates as a hub that produces whatever content gets requested, or whether it goes into a real conversation with the business first, to find out what the actual need behind the request is. That conversation might still lead to a training. It might lead to something else entirely, a process fix, a job aid, a different kind of intervention.
 
If you could give just one piece of advice for creating learning that drives real impact, what would it be?
Start from what you want people to actually do differently after the training, not from what they should know. Once that’s clear, three things follow. First, respect what people already know: don’t re-teach what’s already there, that’s wasted time and it disengages anyone with experience. Second, keep the actual training to the minimum someone needs before they can act, and give them a real chance to practice that action inside the training itself, tied to something close to their daily work, not a generic scenario. Third, make sure the rest of the information is available after the training, at the moment they actually need it: a job aid, a checklist, something findable in under thirty seconds. A course that only delivers information and never asks anyone to do anything with it isn’t really training. It’s a briefing.
 
What are you most looking forward to about being part of the Learning Conference?
Honestly, the conversations between sessions are what I’m looking forward to most. I get to talk to L&D professionals across a lot of industries in my day job, but usually one organization at a time, in a call or a workshop. Having that many of them in one room, comparing notes on what’s actually working in their own organizations, doesn’t happen often. I’m curious what patterns show up during conversations.