Augmented Workforce, Learning at the Frontline and the Destiny of L&D.

For a long stretch, you could skip Learning Technologies for a year and miss almost nothing. Not this year. AI has stopped being something L&D is piloting and started being something the field is rebuilding around — and the conversation at LT26 had a sharper edge for it. In this season finale, John brings back five voices from the show floor and the studio to map what's actually changing: the augmented workforce, the 80% of workers L&D has long ignored, the readiness question nobody wants a straight answer to, the maturing of content into context, and the generational lens of a 30 Under 30. The destiny of L&D, in other words — sketched from five different angles, while the ground is still moving.

• Giovanni Giamminola — AI advisor and author of The Augmented Manager; opening keynote speaker at LT26. The augmented workforce thesis: humans plus AI plus AI agents, and the cognitive shift that demands of management.
• JD Dillon — Founder of LearnGeek; former CLO at Axonify; author of The Frontline Enablement Playbook (out the week the episode airs). On the 80% of the workforce L&D conferences forget about.
• Alicia Sanchez — Chief AI Officer at MPF Federal LLC; LT26 panellist on future-proofing L&D. On AI readiness — organisational and workforce — and the failure modes at both extremes.
• Cheryl Clemons — CEO and co-founder of StoryTagger. On the show's themes from a vendor's chair: content to context, evidencing impact, and whether storytelling has had its day as a learning modality.
• Matt Caldwell — People Experience and DEI at Axon; LT26 30 Under 30 cohort. The generational lens: privacy, data, bias, and what younger workers actually feel about giving themselves to AI tools.

• The augmented workforce — humans, AI, and AI agents working together, and what that means for management itself
• Why 80% of the global workforce is frontline or deskless, and almost no L&D budget reflects it
• The two-track AI readiness question — organisational and workforce — and the trap of "we're getting ready" as a permanent excuse
• Content to context: AI maturing the L&D conversation at both ends of the learning programme
• A generational read on AI, privacy and bias from inside the workforce that grew up with the technology
• The destiny of L&D, sketched from five angles while the ground is still moving

• Giovanni Giamminola — The Augmented Manager: How AI Makes Management More Effective, Creative and Strategic (2025)
• JD Dillon — The Frontline Enablement Playbook (2026); LearnGeek; the enabled newsletter
• Alicia Sanchez — Why Readiness Is Shaping the Future of Work (Learning Guild)
• Cheryl Clemons — StoryTagger
• Matt Caldwell — Axon; LT26 30 Under 30 cohort (Nigel Paine)

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The Learning Hack returns for a new season in September. But the feed isn't going quiet over the summer — John launches a brand-new podcast on Tuesday 26 May 2026: The Tech Imaginarium — How Science Fiction Made the Modern World, co-hosted with writer and consultant Ezri Carlebach. Six episodes, weekly, into this same feed. More at learninghackpodcast.com/tech-imaginarium.

Your organisation has probably spent years building a learning library. Courses, videos, SCORM files, PDFs — hundreds of them, living in the LMS or scattered across SharePoint. You can enrol in them. You can sit through them. What you can't do is ask them a question and get an answer in seconds, at the moment you actually need one. The knowledge is there. It just isn't retrievable. That's the problem Mike Alcock, founder of Talvi, has set out to solve.

In this episode, Mike takes John through how Talvi works. They also cover Mike's own unlikely route into learntech: a Civil Engineering degree at Sheffield, a detour through an insulation factory in Newcastle, and three successive software businesses each arriving ahead of the market. And they have a searching conversation about what tools like Talvi mean for the LMS and for the instructional designer — neither of whom emerges entirely unscathed.

Is the technology now genuinely good enough to make learning in the flow of work a practical reality, rather than a conference agenda perennial?.

00:00 - Start

02:14 - Intro

04:15 - What is Talvi for?

16:20 - What's the journey for a learning leader adopting Talvi?

20:47 - Mike's story: from civil engineering to learntech

30:19 - What will tools like Talvi do to the LMS?

39:50 - Explanation of terms: RAG, vector databases…

49:01 - End

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What does it take to change how an industry works — and what happens when it doesn't change fast enough? Lars Hyland has been asking that question for thirty years, from the early days of interactive multimedia through nearly a decade leading EMEA for Totara Learning, and now at Enlytning, an AI-powered platform helping small businesses close the gap between policy and practice. In this conversation, John and Lars go back to the beginning — to the Epic days, when the e-learning model that now dominates the industry was taking shape around them — and trace a career-long argument about the one thing L&D keeps getting wrong.

They cover the founding of Retenda in 2010 — a learning reinforcement platform built on spaced repetition, a decade before the category existed — and why good timing isn't enough if the market isn't ready. They get into the Totara years, open source as a power relationship, and the honest tension in spending nearly a decade championing infrastructure you know is being misused. And they dig into AI: not the conference version, but the harder question of whether the industry is using it to fix a broken model or just to run the broken model faster. Lars's phrase for the latter — faster garbage in, garbage out — is both a provocation and a diagnosis.

Lars has a view on what he thinks good actually looks like. The question is whether the industry is willing to build it.

TIMESTAMPS

02:12 - Intro

05:05 - The formative years of elearning

17:59 - Why did he found Retenda?

21:35 - The Totara years

25:53 - What happens to open source tech when it goes commercial?

30:21 - Enlytning

40:26 - Compliance & HR

52:17 - Does the SaaS model still have a future?

57:51 - A way to cut down duplication in course catalogues?

01:08:51 - End

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