The highest-impact guides from Learning, Upgraded. Start here.
These guides cover the core of what this newsletter is about: building learning systems that actually change behavior, using AI without the hype, and leading L&D teams through complexity. If you read nothing else, read these.
☕ 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...
☕ 9-minute read I don’t want to oversell this. I’ve been in L&D long enough to know that “game-changing” gets thrown around every time a new AI feature drops, and most of the time the reality is more like “mildly useful update, check back in six months.” So, I...
☕ 14-minute read We’ve covered NotebookLM in Part 1, pricing in Part 2, and video capabilities in Part 3. But here’s what keeps coming up in my testing: the real power isn’t in any single tool. It’s in connecting these capabilities to the workflows we already...