Content is only the first step
In Siddhartha, Herman Hesse tells us that “knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom”. Knowledge can be taught: it’s a quantifiable pile of stuff to be shared and disseminated. But wisdom comes from experience. It has to be found and lived through. This will sound familiar to anyone who has ever tried to share their accumulated wisdom with a teenager. You see their eyes glaze over as you impart your hard-won experience and realise that, inevitably, they’ll need to make the same mistakes you did in order to come to the same conclusion.
Some teachers manage to transcend this. They find the context that makes their subject come alive. But many can’t. We all had one: the geography or physics teacher who had a world of knowledge at their fingertips, but who was unable to help you find the context that would engage your enthusiasm. It’s not that these subjects aren’t fascinating; they are. But back then, it was just too difficult to see past the oxbow lakes and spring balances. All the content you could ever want, and no context to bring it to life.
Some might argue that learning in the workplace gives you a ready-made context. After all, this is (or should be) content designed to help you perform more effectively: the context is, at least partly, in how you do your job day-to-day. That’s fertile ground for a good teacher to work with. If they’re providing great content, designed to resonate with the learner in the context of that learner’s responsibilities and tasks, it’s easy for the learner to meet them halfway. This isn’t just learning – it’s learning geared towards your needs and objectives at work.
AI agents: great teaching can be scaled
The L&D world has had its fair share of technological evolutions over the past decade or two. But no matter how carefully or finely we chop up the content – eLearning, microlearning, role-based pathways – it’s been difficult to bridge that context gap. It implies a level of mentoring and oversight that, at any kind of scale, becomes expensive very quickly. There’s a reason we tend to reserve one-to-one coaching for senior people: it’s just not financially realistic to do it for everyone.
This is all changing, thanks to the power AI agents bring to the L&D mix. Complex AI can do exactly what we’ve been talking about: provide content in a context-aware way. We can now tailor AI agents to provide precisely the right content, while recognising both the learner’s skill level and their goals. What does this person know? What does the organization need them to know in order to hit their objectives? How can the content be delivered in a way that feeds into both individual and business objectives?
This is a genuine first. Everyone gets their own teacher: a teacher who understands what the organization needs from each learner, and therefore is always focused on context as well as content. The result is learning perfectly aligned to business outcomes: learning that does what you need it to do. Everything is geared toward developing and enhancing skills to support an organizational goal.
But there is a final piece to this puzzle. It’s something that, even in the world of education, not every great teacher has time for. It’s also the reason why Plato’s great works are his Dialogues. It’s not in the content, or even the context, that learning inspires abstract thought and growth. It’s in the conversation.
Find understanding in the details
People lucky enough to enjoy the services of a one-to-one coach will already know this. It’s in the discussion – the tangents, the deep dives – that we really squeeze the most from learning. Plato presented his thoughts not as treatises but as conversations: discussions with Socrates in which inquiry and debate open up new avenues and examine a proposition from multiple angles. Yes, the lectures in college are important. But surely it’s in the seminars, where we kick ideas around and develop the resilience to disagree and be disagreed with, that we turn learning into something practical.
And yes, AI can do this too. AI agents can act as context-sensitive, interactive teachers, prompting and discussing in a way that both brings the content to life and is aligned with the organization’s vision of skills growth. It’s now possible for everyone to have an always-on, untiring, endlessly patient coach who never forgets where you left off last time and who always has a rigorous eye on where you need to get to. A coach who knows exactly what content is needed and the context into which it fits. A coach, most importantly, who can spark ideas with conversation: discussing, querying, analyzing, and reviewing.
Great teachers and great coaches bring our knowledge to life through context. They give us a route from the page to the real world. They help us understand the applications of what we’re learning: what it can do for us. More than that, though, they challenge us to excel. We can sit through the lecture and take theinformation on board, but it’s the discussion which shows us the angles, the dissenting voices, the view we might never have considered.
Yes, they demand more from us. Writing notes is all very well, but what we’re really after are connections in our brains: debate and discussion creating pathways which transform learning into something practical, flexible, and genuinely useful. We need to be coaxed and challenged to bring the best out of ourselves. And all this is possible, scalable, and achievable right now. We don’t need to settle for reams of content and course completion rates anymore. Technology has caught up with the truly great teachers – and they have the time and capacity to teach as many of us as we need them to.
