Hosted by Jackrabbit Learning Experience (JLX) in October 2025, the AI Forum for Learning Professionals is a series of webinars that brings together educators, instructional designers, technologists, and learning leaders to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the way we design, deliver, and imagine learning.
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Session 1: Our First Gathering: Why we convened?
October 23rd, 2025
This wasn’t a product demo or a tech showcase. It was a gathering of people, curious, candid, and creative, ready to have real conversations about what AI means for our field. We wanted to understand not just the tools, but the thinking behind them. The result was a day filled with inspiration, experimentation, and reflection, the kind that hopefully sparks genuine progress.
A snapshot of our incredible team and collaborators at the AI Forum, where curiosity met creativity in exploring how AI can enhance the way we design and deliver learning.
Before the Forum: Curiosity Meets Caution
In the weeks leading up to the event, we invited participants to share who they were, what organizations they represented, and what they hoped to gain from the forum. Their responses revealed both excitement and hesitation, a snapshot of where the learning community stands with AI today.
Our attendees came from across the L&D spectrum: corporate training teams, higher education institutions, nonprofits, and edtech startups. Some had already built AI tools into their workflows; others were attending their first AI-focused event. Despite their diverse contexts, a few consistent themes emerged.
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- Curiosity with intention: Attendees wanted to see how AI was being applied, not just hear about its potential.
- Ethical awareness: Many raised questions about responsible use, how to ensure AI supports, rather than replaces, human learning design.
- A hunger for community: Perhaps most striking was the desire to connect with peers on similar journeys, to learn together rather than in isolation.
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This pre-event insight set the tone for the day. It was clear that people weren’t afraid of AI itself; they were wary of missing their chance to shape it. They weren’t looking for hype; they were looking for understanding.
During the Forum: Real Stories, Real Struggles, Real Wins
When the day arrived, the energy was palpable, a blend of experimentation, humility, and hope. The session opened with “AI Wins,” a roundtable where participants shared their own success stories and experiments.
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- One attendee whose organization offers online courses described automating course feedback through a Zapier agent that collects and analyzes NPS data, saving her team from hours of manual reporting.
- Another participant from the same organization shared that one of her course graduates built an automation system that saved his company $15,000, proving that learning about AI can lead directly to a measurable impact.
- Another, from a water treatment company, showcased how AI-driven translation tools have evolved so rapidly that course content can now be localized almost instantly, allowing subject experts to review in their native languages.
- One person from an organization focused on training for clean energy careers demonstrated a clever use of ClaudeCode to automate course updates: transcripts become workflows that generate new content automatically.
- Another attendee brought a creative twist, using generative tools like HeyGen to rapidly iterate video learning content, and even to craft personalized bedtime stories for her kids.
- An attendee from the nonprofit sector spoke about using AI to authenticate member interactions at scale, ensuring safe, mission-driven engagement.
- And a person from the emergency medicine education field, offered an important counterpoint: the value of discernment. She uses a CustomGPT to synthesize massive amounts of guidance in minutes, but also knows when to step back,when human judgment must lead.
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Together, these stories captured the forum’s heartbeat: AI is not about automation alone; it’s about amplification.
The day continued with breakout rooms, where attendees tackled live challenges and exchanged design insights. Discussions revolved around prompts, personas, and the art of refining outputs.
One standout thread came from a participant, who shared her work on “synthetic personas”, AI-generated learner archetypes trained from faculty transcripts. The experiment sparked a debate about empathy in design: Can AI truly capture the nuance of learner voice? And how do we use these tools responsibly, without flattening human experience?
Throughout the conversations, a shared realization emerged: AI is not replacing the designer, it’s expanding what design can be. The best results came when humans stayed firmly in the loop, guiding, questioning, and curating.
After the Forum: Reflection and Renewal
After the event, we asked participants to share their impressions, what resonated, what could improve, and what they’d like to see next. Their feedback was as thoughtful as the discussions themselves.
Many described the forum as ‘eye-opening,’ ‘energizing,’ and ‘refreshingly real.’ They appreciated that the conversations were practical yet philosophical, celebrating success stories without losing sight of the big questions.
Several attendees noted that the event helped them realize they were already part of the AI conversation, even if they hadn’t recognized it before. Experimentation, they said, was its own form of progress.
Key themes emerged from the feedback:
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- Connection: People valued meeting others facing the same challenges and opportunities.
- Clarity through example: Real-world use cases made AI feel approachable and relevant.
- Desire for depth: Many asked for more, more workshops, more focused topics, more hands-on sessions on areas like data ethics, AI-assisted design, and prompt engineering.
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Perhaps the most powerful takeaway was the tone of the feedback itself,not fear, not hype, but resolve. Attendees left with the sense that AI wasn’t an abstract disruption to be managed; it was a creative force to be guided.
Looking Ahead: From Tools to Transformation
If the pre-event surveys reflected curiosity, and the forum itself embodied courage, then the post-event feedback represented commitment, a shared readiness to move from exploration to implementation.
The AI Forum reminded us that the story of learning design is, at its core, a human story. AI may accelerate our workflows and expand our reach, but it’s still our intention that gives learning meaning.
This gathering wasn’t about mastering AI; it was about making peace with its presence, learning how to think alongside it rather than about it. It was about asking better questions:
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- How do we use AI to deepen learning rather than just scale it?
- How do we preserve creativity in a world of automation?
- And how do we ensure that as AI grows smarter, our learning stays more human?
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We left the forum not with all the answers, but with something more valuable: momentum. A shared belief that we, as learning professionals, have the power and responsibility to shape the next chapter.
The next AI Forum for Learning Professionals will build on this foundation, diving deeper into practice, design, and purpose. Because the future of learning won’t be automated for us. It will be co-created by us, with curiosity, courage, and care.
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JLX has recently launched an exciting new podcast, The Learning Experience Ops Show, which is a series of real conversations with the people building and running the systems that make learning work- across higher education, K–12, healthcare, clean energy, corporate L&D, and beyond. We invite you to become a part of this conversation by subscribing to our podcast.