AI is decentralising corporate training

The e-learning market is forecast to more than triple in size this decade as employers face growing pressure to continuously reskill their workforces — but the surge in demand is also exposing a fundamental problem: organisations need to create and update training content faster than traditional learning and development (L&D) models can often accommodate.

The global corporate e-learning market was valued at $104,3-billion (approximately R1,66-trillion) in 2024 and is forecast to reach $335-billion (R5,34-trillion) by 2030, representing annual compound growth of 21,7%, according to Grand View Research. Digital transformation and the increasing need for workforce upskilling are among the primary drivers.

South Africa is experiencing the same shift. The country’s corporate education and skills development market was worth an estimated $2,055-billion (approximately R32,8-billion) in 2025 and is forecast to reach $3,374-billion (R53,8-billion) by 2031, while self-paced digital learning is expected to record the strongest growth in learner volumes.

Official figures underline the scale of investment already flowing into skills development. South Africa collected R24,1-billion through the Skills Development Levy in 2024/25, up 7,8% in a single year and 138,8% since 2011/12. Some R19,3-billion of the latest annual total was allocated to SETAs.

Yet as the volume and frequency of workplace learning increases, the traditional model of creating it is coming under pressure.

“Companies have traditionally relied on their L&D and instructional design teams to turn subject expertise into structured learning,” says Mduduzi Sibisi, product head at New Leaf Technologies. “But the people who possess that knowledge are distributed throughout the organisation. They could be engineers, sales managers, compliance specialists, operations teams or someone with 30 years of institutional knowledge who is about to retire.”

The result can be a bottleneck: subject-matter experts supply the knowledge, while specialist L&D teams must translate it into training, a process that can take days or weeks.

That model is now beginning to change.

Global learning technology company Articulate has launched Frontline, a new AI-powered platform designed to enable employees and subject-matter experts outside traditional training roles to create high-quality learning content themselves. New Leaf Technologies, one of three Articulate distributors in Africa and its only certified training partner on the continent, is introducing and supporting the platform across African markets.

Rather than starting from scratch, employees can give Frontline material they already have, including documents, presentations, conversations and videos, and describe what employees need to learn. AI then helps determine the learning objectives and recommends appropriate training assets.

From the same source material, Frontline can generate a coordinated training kit, which could include short courses, training decks, scenarios, quizzes and other learning resources. Users can refine the material for specific requirements, including the amount of time available for training, before distributing it to employees.

Crucially, Sibisi says, decentralising content creation does not mean eliminating L&D departments.

“This isn’t about replacing L&D professionals with AI. It is about expanding their reach,” he says. “If people closest to the knowledge can deal with more immediate and straightforward training requirements themselves, specialist L&D teams can concentrate their expertise on the more complex, strategic learning challenges where they add the greatest value.”

The technology also tackles another growing organisational concern: knowledge retention. Experienced employees can play a more direct role in converting their expertise into reusable training before that knowledge leaves the organisation.

Once distributed, organisations can track participation, completion, quiz and knowledge-check results and individual learner performance, bringing measurement to training that might previously have consisted of little more than a PowerPoint presentation, Word document or email attachment.

“For African businesses, where skills development is already a major investment, the opportunity is significant,” says Sibisi. “The next evolution of workplace learning isn’t simply putting more courses online. It’s making it possible for knowledge to become learning wherever that knowledge sits in the organisation, and doing it at the speed at which businesses now need to operate.”

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