At the recent San Diego ASU+GSV Summit, one unmistakable message echoed through the sessions and discussions: the AI gold rush has ended.

Just two years ago, it was enough to say you were "an AI company" to get noticed or even funded. Those days are behind us. For learning and development (L&D) leaders, that's a very positive thing.

CEOs, executives, board members, and investors are all asking two critical questions about AI:

• How is AI driving internal operational efficiency?
  
  
• How is AI solving real, tangible business problems – not just adding complexity?

This shift is not just an investment trend. It is a blueprint on how forward-thinking L&D, skills development, and HR leaders should evaluate AI products and investments going forward.

The new AI imperative for L&D

Gone are the days where employees learn by only consuming material. They need interactive, practice-based learning environments that develop their skills and link to business goals.

Here’s what to look for when it comes to AI embedding into your learning strategy:

Faster content creation: AI should help businesses churn out simulations, scenarios, courses, and skills testing that get results in a fraction of the time. What used to take months and an expensive production team can be cut in half with well-thought-out synthetic media and AI scripting.

Deeper skills verification and measurement: Companies need to prioritize the actual measurement of skills, rather than putting employees through courses and training programs without an outcome. AI will make this easier to achieve, because it can help with personalized learner journeys.

Greater capital efficiency: Every investment in learning technology should return measurable improvements in employee readiness, risk mitigation, or business performance. The only way to truly verify this ROI is by collecting skills data and linking that data to business impact.

Any L&D investment that doesn’t provide those outcomes means you’re only deploying "AI for AI’s sake” – not driving real change in your organization.

With a colleague at the San Diego ASU+GSV Summit

How AI is transforming simulation-based learning

At ETU, we’re taking these lessons seriously.

Later this year, we will launch ETUCreate, an AI-powered function in our platform that allows you to create impactful simulations much faster.

ETUCreate will greatly simplify the measurement, verification and development of skills across an entire organization, without the burdensome process L&D leaders usually have to fight through.

This “democratization” of high-efficacy learning will impact functions across your organization:

• Compliance training: Create realistic compliance scenarios to help employees comply with global regulations.
  
  
• Onboarding: Develop custom, role-based onboarding simulations to get employees job-ready sooner, and verify their skill development in real time.
  
  
• Leadership development: Construct realistic leadership simulations around team coaching, and high-impact decision-making.
  
  
• Sales enablement: Have your sales team go through skill-building scenarios around unique objection-handling, negotiation, and deal-closing skills at scale.
  

AI will be a force-multiplier for businesses who apply it correctly, and ETUCreate will make that possible across multiple teams in various departments. More to come on ETUCreate later, though.

From AI hype to measurable business impact

The future belongs to organizations that are able to:

• Scale experiential learning without scaling budget
  
  
• Personalize skill development paths at the individual level
  
  
• Collect skills data that correlates back to business results

At ETU, we're excited to help companies move beyond the hype and toward a future in which interactive, skills-verified learning is faster, smarter, and more efficient than ever before.

The AI hype cycle is over. And the AI impact cycle is beginning.