Every article from the newsletter. Practical writing on L&D leadership, AI tools, and content operations. No vendor hype.
☕ 24-minute read Google rolled out their I/O 2026 keynote, and I had the same reaction a lot of us probably had. Half excitement, half low-grade dread about another model cycle we have to absorb while we’re already up to our eyes in roadmaps, content debt, and...
☕ 12-minute read Six months ago, Claude Opus 4.5 shipped, and a lot of us in L&D treated it the way we treat most model releases. We noted it, maybe poked at it for an afternoon, and went back to whatever we were already doing. Then 4.6 landed. Then 4.7. And a...
☕ 11-minute read Google had a quiet April by announcement standards. No single headline dominated. But three releases landed that will change how L&D teams work -- not in theory, not eventually, but right now if you know where to look. Video generation is buil...
☕ 12-minute read OpenAI didn’t release one model upgrade in April. They released two on the same day. GPT-5.5 Thinking and ChatGPT Images 2.0 both landed on April 23, 2026. In most months, a model update touches only one layer. This one touched two simultaneou...
☕ 15-minute read In April, Microsoft shipped more Copilot updates than usual. Word Agent, Excel Agent, and PowerPoint Agent went generally available. Copilot Notebooks got study tools, flashcards, and mind maps built from your own source content. Claude Opus 4...
☕ 14-minute read In April, Anthropic shipped more in 30 days than in most quarters. Claude Opus 4.7, a standalone design product, Cowork general availability with real enterprise governance, and nine MCP connectors for professional creative software. The Anthr...
It wouldn’t be a month in 2026 without a model release. OpenAI released two model upgrades on the same day. GPT-5.5 Thinking and ChatGPT Images 2.0 both landed on April 23, 2026. That’s not routine. Most updates touch one layer. This one touched two simultaneo...
☕ 8-minute read We measured the wrong thing for forty years, and AI just made it obvious. That sentence will land poorly with many L&D leaders, and I want to sit with it before I make the argument. Most of us didn’t choose completion because we thought it was...
14-Minute Read There’s an assumption baked into most L&D budget conversations that nobody stops to question. It goes something like this. Learning content is a production problem. The answer to a production problem is volume. Volume at the lowest possible unit...
☕ 10-minute read There’s a number I can’t stop thinking about that goes through my mind on almost a daily basis. 96% of executives say they want L&D to connect learning to business results. Only 8% of them say they’re getting that data. This gap isn’t a method...
☕ 11-minute read Microsoft shipped more than a dozen updates to Microsoft 365 Copilot across February and March 2026. Some of them are useful for L&D teams right now. Most of the coverage you’ll find online is written for IT admins or general knowledge workers...
☕ 7-minute read Think about the last time you started a new training project. How much time did you spend re-researching things you already knew? Tracking down that article about spaced repetition you read six months ago? Rebuilding the same context for your A...
☕ 11-minute read Most of us have had that moment. A new technology shows up, or an org restructure gets announced, or we read something about what AI is doing now, and something quietly shifts. It’s not exactly panic. More like a background question that start...
☕ 9-minute read There’s a version of this L&D-and-AI conversation that has been repeating for two years now. You know this version. The version where AI is going to 10x our output, free us from production work, and let instructional designers focus on “higher-...
☕ 8-minute read For Instructional Designers, Facilitators, and Learning Managers OpenAI had a noticeably quieter March than both Google and Anthropic. No platform-wide announcement, no new product category. What shipped was more focused: a meaningful model upg...
☕ 11-minute read Google shipped a lot in March. Gemini 3.1 arrived with new model tiers. Workspace got a deep AI upgrade across Docs, Sheets, and Slides. NotebookLM shipped a feature that I think might be the most underated release of the month for L&D specifi...
☕ 9-minute read Fourteen releases in one month. That’s what Anthropic shipped in March 2026, and if you blinked through the notifications, you’d be forgiven for missing most of it. We’re in a window right now where the tools we’re building our workflows around...
☕ 25-minute read We’ve all been there. We open Claude or Gemini, type something like “write me a learning objective for a compliance course,” and get back something so generic it could apply to any company, any audience, any decade. Then we spend 40 minutes re...
☕ 24-minute read Right now, about 40% of my daily AI work happens in one place: Claude Cowork. I didn’t expect that. I thought it would be a supplementary tool I’d check occasionally when it was released. That it would be something I’d use when I wasn’t doing...
☕ 12-minute read Let me start with the uncomfortable version of something I’ve been thinking about since the drop of Anthropic’s 4.6 models. Most of us who work with AI tools regularly have developed prompting habits that made sense with the models we were usi...
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