Currently, there’s a trend on Instagram where people post images of themselves from ten years ago and invite comment.

I looked back at what I was posting in early 2016 and found a post that asked:

If people are capable and willing to do that for themselves in non-work situations, why is workplace Learning and Development spending so much time and money trying to create internal processes which copy it?

Back then, people were already building their own learning. They had tools for searching, filtering, saving, sharing, and coaching. Mostly outside work and mostly without L&D. Ten years on, the question hits differently.

In 2016, L&D could at least pretend curated content libraries added value. They couldn’t compete with Google or YouTube, but they could claim relevance or context. Now?

We have ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.

AI assistants don’t just match what L&D content curation did. They make it irrelevant. Why click through a clunky LMS when you can ask a tool that understands context and answers instantly? That exposes something uncomfortable.

If L&D’s core activity was something people could already do better for themselves, then it was never legitimate L&D work in the first place. It was displacement activity: work that looked useful but avoided harder questions.

Ten years later, how much of the profession is still doing it?

What people might actually need is someone who can diagnose which capabilities the organisation genuinely requires and create the conditions where those capabilities develop through work. That’s the strategic work.

What’s the hardest question this raises for you?