Ricci Masero argues L&D has more warning than taxi drivers before Uber changed the travel landscape. With AI-funded edtech accelerating, professionals can choose to adapt, humanise, specialise, diversify or even compete. The message is blunt: stop defending yesterday’s methods, learn the tools, and move while options remain for your career.

In 2010, if you were a taxi driver, nobody came to warn you that your industry was about to transform. Uber was being built. Venture capital was flowing. By the time the app hit the streets, it was too late to plan. Cabbies were either swept up in the disruption or left behind.

The difference between that moment and now is this: We’ve been warned! Massive investment is pouring into edtech right now. Companies are building AI-driven tools designed to handle tasks faster and at scale. Venture capital doesn’t fund experiments for fun. It funds solutions that solve real problems.

The advantage belongs to those who see what’s coming and adapt

The L&D profession isn’t going to disappear, but the terrain is shifting. The advantage belongs to those who see what’s coming and adapt before the ground moves entirely.

If you work in L&D, this is your moment to choose.

• Will you ignore the signals and hope everything stays the same?
  
  
• Or learn the technology and become fluent in it?
  
  
• Or use this time to position yourself differently?

The taxi drivers didn’t have these choices. You do.

The pattern of change I’ve lived through

I’ve spent over twenty years pivoting between different fields and skill sets. I started in horticulture, moved to catering and hospitality, then corporate entertainment, network cabling and business telecoms, web design, stringed instrument making, digital marketing, and now EdTech.

Each shift felt disorienting at first. And each one taught me something crucial: disruption isn’t the enemy, resistance to disruption is.

When the 2008 financial crisis hit, freelance work in business Information and Communications Technology dried up almost overnight. I could have fought it. Instead, I moved in-house for stability and learned a completely different way of working. That wasn’t a loss. It was an education.

When I trained as a stringed instrument maker years later, I wasn’t running away. I was running toward something that felt meaningful. It taught me about craftsmanship, customer relationships, and the reality of making something people actually want.

The pattern I learned isn’t unique. When you stop seeing change as a threat and start seeing it as knowledge, everything shifts. Change tells you where the market is moving. It shows you what skills are becoming valuable. It reveals gaps between what technology can do and what people actually need.

Why is AI different to other L&D disruptions?

Technology has been changing L&D for decades. We’ve moved from classroom to blended learning to virtual and time-of-need. Each shift felt threatening until the industry adapted.

So why does AI feel different? Because it’s bigger in scope. Previous technologies made L&D professionals more efficient at specific tasks, whereas AI touches the entire workflow. It can generate content, personalise learning paths, assess performance, and adapt in real time. That’s not a tool enhancement; it’s a fundamental shift in what’s possible.

But here’s the important part: that shift creates opportunities as much as it creates challenges. When AI handles the routine work of creating and delivering generic training, it frees you to do the work that actually matters. It creates space for strategy. It creates demand for people who can think about learning differently.

In many ways, AI is an opportunity to think about what L&D could be if you weren’t spending half your time on content creation and delivery. I learned this every time I pivoted. When the work I was doing became routine or saturated, that wasn’t a dead end. It was a signal to adapt or move into a more interesting area.

Five smart moves for L&D in the AI era

The corporate entertainment industry slowed down. Business telecoms that were booming in the early noughties have now become virtually redundant. Each time I moved, the constraint pushed me to something different.

Understanding the shift is step one. Positioning yourself to thrive is step two:

1. Learn and adapt – become the expert operator

The first move is to master the tools before they become mainstream. If AI-driven learning platforms are becoming central to L&D, you need to understand them. Not as a user, as someone who gets how they work, where they excel, where they have blind spots, and how to integrate them into real workflows.

This positions you as the person who can deploy these systems effectively. Organisations can’t just plug in AI and walk away. They need people who understand the tech well enough to know when it’s working and when it’s missing something. They need people who can manage the human side of AI and to customise and optimise these tools for their specific culture, industry, and challenges.

2. Humanise – make human touch the differentiator

AI is exceptional at scale and personalisation. It’s irreplaceable at handling volume. But it can’t mentor. It can’t have the difficult conversation about why someone’s struggling. It can’t build culture or inspire someone to take a risk on themselves.

The second smart move is to use AI to handle what it handles well, then pour your energy into what only humans can do. Coaching. Mentorship. Designing learning experiences connected to real challenges. Building relationships that drive change.

When I was making stringed instruments, I couldn’t compete on volume and price. Instead, I competed on relationships. Every customer got attention. I understood what they wanted out of their instrument, not just what they ordered. That was the only thing that kept me in the game in a commoditised market. When I shifted to digital marketing, I learned that the same principle applied. The consultants who thrived weren’t the ones doing generic work. They were the ones who understood their clients deeply.

3. Specialise – build expertise that stays ahead

The third move is to build specialised expertise that’s hard for tech to replicate. This might be industry-specific knowledge, or it might be deep expertise in organisational change or psychology. It might be the ability to design learning for complex problems where the answer isn’t obvious.

Whatever your specialisation, the principle is the same: go deep enough that you become genuinely difficult to replace. Generic L&D gets automated faster. Expert-level work that requires real judgment and context stays valuable.

Every pivot I made pushed me toward more specificity. I didn’t stay a generalist network cabler, I developed expertise in specific systems. I didn’t do generic digital marketing, I focused on B2B. That’s what gave me options later. It’s what made me valuable when I shifted roles.

4. Diversify – build multiple revenue streams

The fourth move is to stop relying entirely on one employer or one way of working. This doesn’t necessarily mean leaving your job. It means building alternatives. Teaching. Consulting. Building content or tools. Speaking. Writing. Creating intellectual property you own.

I learned this through necessity more than strategy. When one income stream dried up, I always had others. When I was making instruments, the digital marketing side kept me afloat. When I moved in-house recently, it was partly for the stability, but also because I’d built enough reputation that I know consulting opportunities will exist if I need them.

If you’re good at what you do, you can build a consulting practice. You can teach others. You can create content or tools that generate income independently. You can build reach and reputation that gives you options.

5. Compete – roll your own solution

The fifth move, and the riskiest, is to compete directly. If you understand L&D and you understand AI, you might see opportunities to build something. Not necessarily a product to sell, but a service or solution that fills a gap the standard tools can’t quite reach yet.

This is the hardest path, and it requires real capital and real risk. But it’s also where the biggest opportunities lie. The people who thrived when major market shifts happened weren’t always the ones who adapted within existing structures. Some of them created entirely new structures.

The mindset that matters most for L&D professionals

The taxi drivers who suffered weren’t the ones who lacked opportunity. They were the ones who spent their energy arguing that regulations would protect them, or that Uber couldn’t possibly work at scale.

The L&D professionals who will thrive aren’t the ones arguing that AI can’t do parts of what they do. It can. The ones who will thrive are the ones who ask:

• What becomes valuable now?
  
  
• What can I do that AI handles poorly?
  
  
• How do I position myself to lead this change?

That’s not pessimism. That’s clarity. I’ve made seven major career moves. The ones that went smoothest weren’t the ones where I fought the market. They were the ones where I moved toward what was emerging instead of trying to preserve what was fading.

Why this time is a huge opportunity for L&D professionals

You have something the taxi drivers didn’t: advance warning! You can see what’s coming. You have time to learn the tools, build new expertise, develop relationships, create alternatives, or position yourself in a completely different way. The question isn’t whether the terrain is shifting: it is. The question is what you’re going to do about it while you still have time to choose.

Pick one of these five moves and start now. Or start with multiple. But start. Because the moment the market fully shifts is the moment your choices get smaller, not larger. The advantage belongs to those who move first. And unlike the taxi drivers, you know exactly what’s coming.

Key takeaways:

• The expertise you build now becomes your insulation against obsolescence. You’re not competing with AI tools. You’re the person who knows how to use them strategically
  
  
• AI in L&D can’t be the human element. Generic content and delivery get automated. The relationships and deep understanding become more valuable, not less
  
  
• Invest in your own learning. Build a reputation in a specific domain. Become the person everyone calls when the problem is too hard for tech to solve
  
  
• Diversification isn’t about having a backup plan. It’s about building resilience through variety
  
  
• All five moves share something in common. They require you to stop defending how things used to work and start building how things could work

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Ricci Masero is Marketing Manager at Intellek