The Learning Hack returns with a focus on AI enablement and capability
Season 16 of the top-5% podcast opens on Monday 14 September, seven years to the month after its first episode. The first three guests — Erica Farmer, Robin Hoyle and Ross Stevenson — each argue, from very different directions, that L&D's AI problem is not the technology.
The Learning Hack, John Helmer's fortnightly podcast for L&D and HR professionals, returns on Monday 14 September for its sixteenth season — six episodes running through to 23 November.
The season opens on the thorny technology issue that continues to be top-of-mind for L&D and HR. Two-thirds of HR professionals name AI as their top development priority; a third of organisations offer any AI training; fewer than one in five believe their leaders are equipped to lead in an AI-enabled environment. Access to the tools is close to universal. Capability is not. Each of the first three guests has a different account of why.
LH131 — AI for People People, with Erica Farmer (14 September). Farmer is co-founder of Quantum Rise Talent Group, host of the AI for the Average Joe podcast and author of AI for People Professionals (Kogan Page, 2026). She argues that organisations are rolling AI out the way they rolled out every HR system before it: as a technology deployment aimed at tech users, rather than at people who need a reason to change how they work. She also has a challenge for L&D, which she thinks is waiting for HR to tell it what to do.
LH132 — Your People Are Fine: It's the System That's Broken, with Robin Hoyle (28 September). Hoyle is Head of Learning Innovation at Huthwaite International and has chaired the World of Learning Conference for some fifteen years. He makes the case for transfer rather than completion, argues that making a manager's job doable beats any leadership programme, and calls the LMS "one of the biggest crimes in learning and development that we've ever invented". On AI he is blunt about what happens when the machine does the thinking: "AI agents need agency" — and agency requires knowing what good looks like. The episode lands a week before he opens and closes the World of Learning Conference at the NEC Birmingham on 6–7 October, where his keynote is "AI, Adoption and Agency".
LH133 — The Great AI Steal, with Ross Stevenson (12 October). Stevenson writes the Steal These Thoughts! newsletter, read by more than 5,000 subscribers, and trains L&D teams on AI. His distinction is between adoption — licences distributed, logins recorded — and enablement, which he defines as equipping people with the knowledge, skills and frameworks to use AI well. "Having access is not the same as delivering value." He has spent two decades on the other side of that argument, in HR at Xerox and L&D at Tesco and Trainline, before going independent.
Three further guests will be announced. Episodes are released fortnightly on Mondays, with the season closing on 23 November.
John Helmer said: "Seven years in, the questions learning professionals have to deal with have got harder rather than easier. Almost everyone in the profession now has access to AI; far fewer have a clear idea of what good AI usage might look like, or whose job it is to teach them. Erica, Robin and Ross, the first three guests in the season, all have a view on that gap, but they come at it from completely different directions."
Season 16 is sponsored by iVentiv, with World of Learning also taking slots across the network this autumn. Spaces are still available for this season, and the new season that opens in January.
Helmer will be at OEB Global in Berlin (2–4 December), where he and Donald Clark will record an episode of Great Minds on Learning live in front of an audience — on dogs and learning, released on 14 December — and where he will record four interviews for a Learning Hack show special going out in the New Year.
The Learning Hack is available on all major podcast platforms and on YouTube. Episodes and the writing that follows them are published on the Learning Hack Substack: https://substack.com/@learninghack.
Notes to editors
The Learning Hack has published in-depth interviews with L&D and HR professionals since September 2019. Host John Helmer is a freelance podcaster and consultant in the corporate learning sector.
The network. The Learning Hack sits alongside Great Minds on Learning, co-hosted with Donald Clark, and The Tech Imaginarium, co-hosted with Ezri Carlebach. Great Minds on Learning closes its eighth season on 14 December with the OEB special on dogs and learning, recorded live in Berlin. The Tech Imaginarium's first season, on how science fiction shaped the modern world, launched in May 2026 and is available in full. OEB Global 2026 runs 2–4 December at the InterContinental Berlin.
Reach. More than 190,000 lifetime listens and views across the network; audiences in more than 140 countries; ranked in the top 5% of podcasts globally for listens by Listen Notes. Audience split: UK 29%, US 25%, rest of Europe 22%, rest of world 24%.
Contact John Helmer — [email protected] — learninghackpodcast.com