The Work We Are Really In

● A note from Unboxed President:  Dave Romero

Hi Friend,

It's been quite some time since I've written about our industry and my thoughts about the change we're all experiencing. I think of myself as an Apocoloptimist and do my best to see the good and bad of AI. And still, I have moments where I lack the words to explain how I feel about the disruption we all feel. When I came across a poem recently called Please Use AI by Jo Atkins-Potts, I felt like I had finally found the words I had been missing. Take a moment to read the poem and let it soak in.

“Why struggle for the right words when a machine can give you beautiful ones?”

I keep coming back to that question because I think it captures something many of us are trying to figure out right now, both personally and professionally. AI can make an extraordinary number of things easier. It can draft the bullets, organize our thoughts, create the punch list, summarize the meeting, and sometimes find the words we’ve been struggling to find ourselves. I want us to embrace all of that. We should be using these tools, experimenting with them, and figuring out how they can make us better at what we do.

There’s something in that poem that gets to me because it reminds me that the words themselves aren’t always the point. Sometimes it’s the struggle to find the words that matters. It’s knowing how someone takes their tea or which floorboard squeaks when you’re trying not to wake them. Those things matter because they come from paying attention, from knowing another person, and from having actually lived the experience.

Learning has a lot in common with that.

If we’re not careful, we can use AI to make training incredibly precise while simultaneously obliterating all of its meaning. We can get the narrative exactly right, with the perfect words, the perfect bullets, and the perfect notes, and still miss something important about the person who is supposed to learn from it.

Human development and growth are hard and some of that is by design. Who among us hasn’t struggled to find the right words, wrestled with a concept until it gave us a headache, stuttered through a presentation, tried something new and gotten it wrong, or realized halfway through doing something that we didn’t understand it nearly as well as we thought we did?

That process of trying, missing, adjusting, and trying again is often where the learning actually happens. It’s the thing that creates that sense of “I did something hard and I’m proud.” I love that feeling and crave more of it.

There’s another idea I’ve been thinking about lately, which is that sometimes, to participate fully in life, you have to “lick the honey from the thorn.” There are things in life that just require some struggle to get there. I don’t think our job is to sand down every sharp edge of learning. I think our job is to understand which edges are unnecessary friction and which ones are actually part of the experience that helps someone grow.

That distinction feels increasingly important to me.

By now, many of you have probably seen the recent announcement from Articulate about Frontline. The promise is compelling. You don’t need an instructional design background, or even an instructional design team, to create effective training. Learning science is built into the product, AI can help create the experience, and the technology makes the whole process easier and more accessible.

Badaboom, badabing, training delivered à la Doordash.

In all seriousness, I think there’s real utility in this. We use Articulate products at Unboxed, and there are plenty of situations where these tools are exactly what an organization needs. Sometimes you need to communicate accurate information quickly. Sometimes you need people to understand a new policy or process. Sometimes the objective really is compliance, awareness, completion, or simply making sure everyone knows something they need to know. AI is making the process of creating those experiences dramatically easier, and that’s a good thing.

But after spending years immersed in learning and development, I don’t believe every learning problem is that problem.

This thought led me to a piece by Trina Rimmer about the Frontline announcement that helped crystallize something for me. One of the questions underneath her argument is whether we’re becoming exceptionally good at removing friction from the production of training without spending enough time determining whether producing training is actually the problem we need to solve.

That question should matter a lot to us at Unboxed.

When a client comes to us and says they need a training solution, our most important contribution isn’t opening an authoring tool or Claude Code and beginning to build. It’s understanding what they’re actually trying to change.

That’s where I believe our craft lives.

AI can generate a scenario, but understanding which scenario will matter to a particular learner inside a particular business requires context. AI can create feedback, but someone has to understand what behavior we’re actually trying to change. AI can create an assessment, but we still have to decide whether answering five questions correctly or completing courses in an LMS tells us anything meaningful about whether someone can actually perform.

That’s why I don’t look at what’s happening with AI and conclude that instructional design is becoming less important. I think the opposite may be true. Sure, the production part of our craft is becoming easier, which means the thinking behind it becomes even more important.

For a long time, producing high quality learning was difficult and expensive enough that production itself carried a lot of value. Now we’re in a period where we can produce an unlimited amount of content. More courses, more videos, more scenarios, more assessments, more job aids, more communication. We can create all of it faster than we ever could before.

I don’t want that to be our future.

At Unboxed, I want our craft to be understanding your world well enough to create something that actually belongs there. I want us to understand your business, your people, your customers, the behaviors you're trying to change, and what good performance actually looks like for you. Then I want us to use every tool available to us, including AI, to create experiences that help you get there.

That’s very different from simply producing more content.

Here’s a way to think of it: I keep thinking about the difference between a text message and a handwritten card. They can contain exactly the same words. In fact, the text is objectively more efficient. It gets there instantly, it’s perfectly legible, and if I’m struggling with what to say, AI can probably help me write it beautifully.

But it’s not the same as receiving a handwritten card from someone who knows you. Someone who loves seeing your penmanship, no matter how poor it might be. Someone who knows you took the time to go out of your way to make them feel special.

The promise of AI has often been framed around saving time, but I don't think that’s what most of us are experiencing. Individual tasks absolutely take less time. But I don’t see many people suddenly working 30 hour weeks because AI gave them ten hours back. Instead, we fill that new capacity. We create more meetings, send more Teams/Slack/Email messages, and take on more. Our amount of work expands into the space the technology creates. And if we’re not purposeful, we’ll fill it with less meaningful work.

So maybe the opportunity isn’t simply to do the same work faster. Maybe it’s to be more intentional about where we put our attention and where our craft matters most.

Sometimes that means removing friction. And, sometimes it means intentionally leaving a little friction because the struggle itself helps someone learn. Knowing the difference requires judgment, curiosity, empathy, and a real understanding of the people we’re designing for.

That's the craftsmanship we weave into everything we do at Unboxed.

You have invested in us and shaped our story over the years because you trust us with something that I think is much more important than producing training. You trust us to help your people grow skills and build capabilities for your business at the pace of change. And, whether that work involves AI or not, it's a responsibility we've taken seriously for nearly 18 years and we don't take that trust for granted.

Thanks for reading, and drop a note below if you got the feels ✌️

With gratitude,

Dave Romero

President, Unboxed Training & Technology