Wed 17 Dec 2025
By Tom Brown
As I sit here ruminating about how to sum up the past year, one of my first thoughts is whether I should get CoPilot or ChatGPT to quickly knock up a first draft. This is a mainstreamed thought now and not that revolutionary from 12 months ago. But the shift from creating AI agents in a purely personal/shadow capacity (using AI for work but without your organisation being fully aware) to a corporate-personal one (officially and through organisational licenses) does appear to have accelerated in 2025. We have noted that formalisation via a sharp increase in demand for AI skills training – particularly across government departments.
But despite growing demand in areas including AI skills, more than 70% of our learning interventions in 2025 helped people improve their communications and policy-making skills. And it’s been a very busy year, delivering:
- 1000 workshops
- to more than 13,000 learners
- across 57 different organisations
That included delivery for every major HMG department and 11 different international institutions and governments.
What do these numbers tell us? Even in a year dominated by AI headlines, the fundamentals of government learning needs haven’t changed. Technology accelerates access to knowledge, but it doesn’t replace the need for judgment, collaboration, and empathy - the very skills that underpin effective policy and public service. The challenge for 2026 isn’t just adopting new tools; it’s ensuring that innovation strengthens, rather than sidelines, the human side of learning
There is not enough space here for me to make 1000 predictions and then show off about the one I got right in December 2026. So I will pick a safe one: asynchronous (non-facilitated) learning will look very different this time next year. As Dods Training, we’ve already seen the start of that shift. But that’s also why we think human experience and empathy with how people learn (and don’t) is still so important in learning. If we only needed to know how to do stuff we would just read a book or post and know how to do it – wouldn’t we..?
Wishing you a very happy holiday break.
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