(Virtual) Workshop: Strategic Learning Architect - Driving Performance in the Age of AI

Speaker Bio: 

Debbie Richards is an AI strategy consultant and the President of Creative Interactive Ideas. As a long-standing leader within the Association for Talent Development (ATD) community, she has served as the president emeritus for the ATD Houston chapter. She frequently leverages her deep expertise to support ATD chapters and members globally as an ATD facilitator, where she leads specialized workshops on applying AI in Learning & Development.

Debbie is the author of the TD at Work issue, "Become a Strategic Learning Architect With AI," and her work focuses on helping TD professionals move beyond tactical content creation to become strategic business partners. She is a regular speaker at international conferences, championing AI literacy and the "human-AI-human" framework to ensure technology acts as a powerful accelerator for performance and business results.

Session Description:

The ground is shifting for talent development. For decades, our value was often measured by the volume of content we could create. Today, AI can generate outlines, scripts, and assessments in seconds. This transition is not about replacement; it is the partner we need to finally move from being order-takers for training requests to becoming strategic leaders who drive measurable business results.

In this two-hour interactive virtual workshop, we will explore how to evolve from a content creator into a Strategic Learning Architect. You will learn to use your professional judgment as the ultimate filter, ensuring AI acts as an accelerator for quality rather than just a generator of generic content. By narrowing our focus to high-impact activities, we will practice moving away from tactical production toward solving real business problems.

Learning Objectives:

•  The Three Pillars of Modern TD: Learn to reorganize your work around Enablement, Curation, and Governance to move from pushing content to facilitating high-value learning experiences.
• Strategic Problem Diagnosis: Practice shifting conversations with leaders from training requests to identifying "strategic anchors” trying every initiative to a top-level company priority.
• The Human-AI-Human Framework: Master a non-negotiable process where human expertise provides the strategic direction and the final quality pass to ensure nuance and accuracy.
• Strategic Thinking in Prompting: Engage in hands-on activities to use prompting as a tool for organizational diagnosis and skills gap analysis rather than just generating text.

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This session Builds the following Capabilities and skills from the ATD Capability Model:

This session has been approved for recertification credits by the Association for Talent Development.