Donald H Taylor shares insight from his 2026 L&D Global Sentiment Survey, which shows a profession leaving familiar patterns behind. AI is foundational but no longer the only story, as budgets tighten and value demands intensify. Yet practitioners are acting: embedding AI, using data, redesigning learning, and redefining L&D’s role.
The 2026 L&D Global Sentiment Survey (GSS) may prove to be the most significant in its thirteen-year history – not because it signals a single dominant trend, but because it suggests that the old certainties of the profession are breaking down.
We are now in unmapped territory
For years, the survey has tracked steady patterns in what L&D professionals consider ‘hot’. Ideas would rise, peak, and gradually settle. They either became business-as-usual (as with mobile learning) or faded away and were forgotten (as with wearables and the Metaverse). In 2026, that rhythm has fractured. We are now in unmapped territory.
Artificial intelligence remains the dominant topic for the third consecutive year. Now, however, its share of the vote has stalled. This does not mean AI is fading. On the contrary, it has become foundational. The fever may have peaked, but the transformation is only beginning. AI is no longer a novelty; it is part of the landscape.
The survey describes three phases of AI’s impact. First came the ‘AI shock’ following the launch of ChatGPT. Then a brief ‘AI recovery’ period, when it seemed the profession might return to familiar patterns. Now we are in the third phase: the ‘New World’. In this phase, long-standing voting behaviours across countries have become erratic. Previously predictable national preferences have shifted.
Established norms no longer hold
Beyond the headline results, the free-text responses reveal the emotional undercurrent of this shift. Respondents wrote more than 40,000 words describing their biggest challenges – the equivalent length of the novel Heart of Darkness, a fitting metaphor for a journey into uncertain territory.
Five challenges dominate:
- AI adoption and integration
- Demonstrating value and impact
- Budget and resource constraints
- Learning engagement and application
- Change, uncertainty and L&D’s new role
AI is both opportunity and threat. Practitioners speak of ‘AI noise’, governance gaps, hallucinations, and pressure from leadership to deploy tools without clear strategy. At the same time, budgets are tightening. The phrase ‘doing more with less’ recurs frequently. L&D is being asked to upskill organisations for an AI-enabled future while absorbing funding cuts and staff reductions.
Underpinning all this is a long-running tension: proving value. ‘Moving beyond completion rates’ towards demonstrable performance impact remains elusive. Leaders demand evidence of productivity gains and return on investment. Yet much of what matters in learning is hard to measure.
And then there is pressure. Not just organisational pressure, but personal pressure. The incidence of the word ‘pressure’ in responses to the challenges question fell as we came out of Covid, but has risen sharply since 2024.
The word ‘human’ is appearing more often too, typically framed as concern about ensuring AI does not erode the human element of learning. But beneath that operational concern, is there something more profound, perhaps, an anxiety about professional identity? Certainly, the tone of the comments echoes much of what we heard in the early 2000s, with the dawn of e-learning.
Yet this is not a story of paralysis.
For the first time, the 2026 survey asked what practitioners are doing now that they were not doing 12 months ago. The responses, almost as voluminous as the challenges, reveal a profession in motion.
AI has moved from experimentation to everyday practice. Practitioners report using it for content creation, coaching support, analysis, workflow integration and simulations. Data and analytics are being used more deliberately to guide decisions. Content design is shifting away from long courses towards shorter, more embedded formats. And in some cases, L&D is expanding into coaching, culture and broader capability systems.
From challenge to action
This is all self-reported, and there is no way to gauge the extent and impact of these claims, but it is still heartening to read, because, crucially, the actions mirror the challenges. The areas generating the most strain are also those seeing the most innovation. Progress and pressure are unfolding simultaneously.
This duality defines 2026. L&D is not standing still. It is adapting rapidly – but without a clear map.
We are entering a transformative period similar to other technological revolutions. Just as the web reshaped workplace learning over a decade, AI will reshape it more profoundly and more quickly.
What might emerge? In time, there may be two forms of L&D. One will resemble traditional training, albeit augmented by AI. The other will be more strategic: focused on capability, performance and alignment with organisational goals. It may not even be called L&D anymore.
There are two pieces of good news. First, while we have no map, we do have a direction. This remains the unchanged role of L&D: enabling individual performance in pursuit of organisational goals.
Second, practitioners are already drawing the map we need. The energy evident in the action responses shows people confronting uncertainty directly, experimenting, learning, adjusting. The New World is not being imposed from outside; it is being shaped from within.
If 2025 was a false dawn, 2026 is a reckoning. The profession stands in a transformative moment. The future is unclear. But the direction is visible. That, combined with action, is enough for now.
Donald H Taylor is Founder and lead researcher of the L&D Survey Series
