The Great Accountability Test
Why 2025 Forced Corporate Learning to Get Real
Welcome to another edition of The Learning Stack, this week sponsored by Sana.
I thought I would spend some time in this weeks newsletter reflecting on 2025. Here are some of my thoughts:
Corporate Learning has coasted on potential for a decade. We had the tools. We had the hype. We had the “digital transformation” slide decks.
But 2025 wasn’t about potential. It was about receipts.
A brutal collision defined the last twelve months: raw technological capability slammed headfirst into unforgiving financial accountability. As budgets tightened and executive scrutiny sharpened, L&D was forced to choose: cling to the comfortable illusion of compliance, or do the hard work of proving business impact.
In short, 2025 was the year the learning industry finally grew up.
AI: From Defense to Offense
AI is no longer a futuristic parlour trick. It’s paying rent. With nearly 90% of companies now regularly using these tools, the question shifted from “Should we?” to “What are we actually getting out of this?”
We stopped playing defense (managing risk) and started playing offense (generating outcomes).
Stop churning, start solving: We moved beyond using AI to flood the LMS with generic content. The new priority is just-in-time knowledge. Whether it’s an employee closing a deal or a customer configuring a product, the goal is answering the question now, not assigning a course for later.
The Knowledge Anchor: Chatbots evolved into enterprise engines. They stopped hallucinating (mostly) and started synthesising. By anchoring AI to internal knowledge bases, we blurred the line between individual productivity and the central company brain.
The tech connected. Now, the outcomes have to follow.
The ROI Reckoning
This is where reality hit. When budgets bled out, the “feel-good” metrics died with them.
Vanity is out: “Course completion rates” are dead as a success metric. They remain useful diagnostic data for designers, but they are no longer proof of value. In fact, they have the potential to be toxic to your business case. If you can’t tie your initiative to a KPI (time-to-productivity, customer retention, sales velocity, ticket deflection) you don’t have a budget.
The Skills Mandate: The priority shifted from career development to business survival. However, let’s be real: most organizations are drowning in a “Skills Swamp” of messy data. The winners stopped trying to map everything and focused ruthlessly on the critical few skills that drive immediate survival.
If the intervention didn’t move the needle on the P&L, it was on the chopping block.
The Execution Gap
Here’s the ugly truth: despite the capital and the code, 2025 saw colossal failures in execution.
The data is clear: 75% of digital transformation projects failed to meet their objectives. The root cause was the same old, tired story:
The Culture Drag: You can’t code your way out of a culture problem. The primary point of failure wasn’t the software; it was organizational inertia. In fact, companies that invested in shifting behavior saw success rates 5.3 times higher than those who just bought the tech.
The Value Gap: Market confidence is high, but realized value is low. Recent studies from MIT and FICO reveal that only about 5% of companies are currently realizing significant, measurable business value from their AI investments.
The gap between 90% adoption and 5% ROI is the most damning stat in our industry. It proves we are largely still playing with toys while claiming to build tools.
The Pivot to Proficiency
As the year closed, a split emerged in the market. While the mass market continued to buy cheap content libraries, the market leaders built Labs.
They realized passive e-learning doesn’t build active skills. Instead, their money moved to real-world simulations, immersive scenarios, safe-fail environments, and AI-powered Tutors or coaches. The goal is no longer “did they know it?” but “can they do it?”
For executives scrutinizing every dollar, performance-based proficiency is the only defensible justification for 2026 spend.
Looking Ahead: The Year of Execution
The foundation is set. The stack is built.
The challenge for 2026 is no longer technological; it is operational. This means firing the “content churners” and hiring performance consultants. It means running smaller, ruthless pilots that die quickly if they don’t perform.
The winners won’t be the ones with the newest tools, but the ones who can draw a straight, undeniable line from learning investment to business outcome.
A receipt isn’t a certificate of completion; it’s a sales rep closing a deal 20% faster.
Stop building the stack. Start proving its worth.
So, here’s where we landed: if you can’t tie your initiative to a P&L-relevant KPI, you don’t have a budget.
Sana Learn is designed for that conversation. It consolidates your learning stack into one AI-native platform, but more importantly, it shifts the focus from content delivery to performance outcomes. AI generates personalised learning from your existing materials, answers questions just-in-time from across your knowledge base, and surfaces real-time analytics on business impact - not just course completions.
Proving worth in 2026 means measuring what actually moves the needle. Learn more here.
AND FINALLY, THE CURATION STACK
Here are a couple of other things that caught my eye this week:
Ashley Hinchcliffe posted some great tips on her post about marketing mistakes in Learning
Eric Mistry is doing great work curating the top content in the Customer Education space every 2 weeks. He has even included this newsletter a couple of times so thanks Eric!