Hot take that's going to annoy people here: the LMS is the next thing to go.
The authoring tools are already on the way out. A Claude account and an experimental mindset gets you better eLearning output in a fraction of the time and cost of the traditional tools. The vendors know it too — their response has been half measures. Articulate code block (el oh el).
But that's the boring take. Here's the one nobody wants to say out loud.
The LMS is next.
The whole model was built around one use case: proving to a compliance auditor that Dave finished his induction. SCORM in, completion data out, tick the box. We built a multi-billion dollar industry on Dave's certificate. And most L&D teams have been quietly drowning in the overhead ever since.
Learners are already voting with their feet. They'll abandon an LMS portal the moment they have to reset a password to access a 10-minute module. You already know this. The completion rates tell you everything.
And here's the thing — everything an LMS does is now buildable without a vendor in the loop. Tracking, compliance records, engagement data, assignment workflows, sign-offs, API connections. What used to justify a five-figure annual licence is a few weeks of project work now.
The LMS was never a product. It was a capability gap.
But here's the part that matters most for anyone actually working in training right now.
AI is changing who enters the workforce and what they already know. The junior foundational skills we used to spend the first year teaching are being handled by AI before people walk through the door. That means training needs to get more specific, more niche, and faster to produce. When something shifts — a new process, a regulation change, a restructure — you want a module ready next week, not next year.
We're going to need more training, not less. Just nothing the traditional stack was ever built to deliver.
Tell me I'm wrong?