Every responsible conversation about AI ends with the same advice: check the output. But being 'the human in the loop' is often hard, draining work, and it gets harder when everything AI produces looks like an end product.

In this week's episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast, guest host Julie Dirksen and Claire are joined by Dr Markus Bernhardt of Endeavor Intelligence to explore the human behaviors behind validating AI outputs, and what organizations need to do to support them.

We discuss:

• why being the human in the loop requires psychological stamina
• how the agentic 'hamster wheel' erode our ability to validate outputs
• triaging tasks by how close they sit to your core expertise and values

Julie's new book on skills development is Design for How People Build Skills.

For more from Markus, visit endeavorintel.com. For more from Julie, visit usablelearning.com.

In 'What I Learned this Week', Claire shared a new term from a scuba-diving friend: the 'incident pit'. It describes how one small problem, like a cracked mask, escalates into a bigger one.

Julie recommended The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game by C. Thi Nguyen. It looks at how scoring systems, from climbing grades to university rankings, can quietly change what we value.

For more from Mindtools Kineo, visit mindtools-kineo.com. There, you'll find out how we can help your organization build AI skills, and how our Skills Practice scenarios help build human skills.

Connect with our speakers

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

• Julie Dirksen
• Claire Gibson
• Dr Markus Bernhardt

AI can make a rough idea look finished in seconds. That's great for productivity, but it's a real problem for anyone whose job is to judge the work. If polish, speed and thoroughness can all be generated, how do we know who actually knows their stuff?

In this week's episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast, guest host Julie Dirksen and Cammy Bean are joined by Koreen Pagano, CEO of Talent Rewire and co-author of Rewiring Your Organization for AI, and Dr Alicia Sanchez, Chief AI Officer at MPF Federal, to explore how we evaluate people's work when AI is part of how it gets done.

We discuss:

• why the 'judgment layer' for AI output is missing in most organizations
• how 'polish' and speed change the way we review work
• what managers should, and shouldn't, evaluate when employees use AI.

Julie referenced a study from Atlassian's Teamwork Lab, which found that AI polish makes it harder to spot problems in a draft, and that a simple 'Early Draft' label largely fixes it.

Cammy mentioned an episode of The Curiosity Shop, in which Brené Brown and Adam Grant discuss building integrity in the age of normalized cheating, including when using AI counts as cheating.

Alicia discussed a lesson from Koreen's book, Rewiring Your Organization for AI, co-written with Kristi Broom: decisions about what to automate belong with middle managers, not only with frontline employees.

Julie's new book, Design for How People Build Skills, explores why skill-building comes down to feedback, and to helping people own their own development.

For the latest from Koreen and her team, visit Talent Rewire.

In 'What I Learned this Week', Julie shared how steel drums are made: old oil drums, pounded into shape and tuned. She also shared her first go at using AI as a travel planner for a trip to Rome. The verdict so far? She's still verifying most of it. For tips, Cammy recommended David Kelly's post on what a personal trip to London taught him about AI and learning.

For more from Mindtools Kineo, visit our new website mindtools-kineo.com. There, you'll find out how we can help your organization build AI skills, and how our Skills Practice scenarios help build human skills.

Connect with our speakers

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

• Julie Dirksen
• Cammy Bean
• Koreen Pagano
• Alicia Sanchez

At Learning Technologies this year, Nigel Paine said AI is turning us into idiots. It was a glib line, and he admits it. But if we hand our thinking over to a chatbot and accept whatever comes back, is he wrong?

In this week's episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast, Ross G is joined by Dr Nigel Paine, researcher, author, podcaster, broadcaster and consultant (he's a busy guy), to explore when AI makes us sharper, when it makes us duller, and what organizations should do about it.

We discuss:

• Why 'cognitive offloading' becomes a problem when we offload the thinking that matters
• Arguing with AI, and asking it to 'destroy' your conclusions rather than confirm them
• Why organizations need to rethink entry-level roles and recruit for critical thinking

Nigel draws on Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow to explain why our brains favor the easy answer.

To find out more about Nigel's work, visit nigelpaine.com or email hello@nigelpaine.com.

In 'What I Learned this Week', Nigel recommended Kevin Fong's new book Minute Six, about what teams do when their plan meets reality.

He also shared research suggesting the aging brain isn't declining, it's adapting, trading memory for specific details for big-picture knowledge.

Ross G recommended the Charles Dickens Museum in London, and its audio walking tour of the streets Dickens knew.

Rolling out enterprise AI licenses? Don't miss out on the benefits they promise. Find out how our AI Skills Academy builds AI skills, including critical thinking, at mindtools-kineo.com, or email Ross G at custom@mindtools.com.

Connect with our speakers

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

• Ross Garner
• Nigel Paine

Most advice on burnout focuses on workload, stress and work-life balance. But what if the real cause is the act we put on at work? And if it is, what does that mean for an industry built on improving performance?

In this week's episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast, Ross G and Gemma are joined by Rabih El Khodr, keynote speaker and author of The Way Out of Burnout, to explore where burnout really comes from and what L&D can realistically do about it.

We discuss:

• why 'performance' in the theatrical sense, not overwork, drives burnout
• how 'survival scripts' shape the beliefs that sit upstream of our behavior
• why resilience training for burnt-out people is like handing a drowning person a swimming manual, and what L&D can do instead

Rabih's book, The Way Out of Burnout, is available now.

Rabih explores survival scripts further in his TEDx talk, Burnout Begins with a Script.

For more on Rabih's work, visit rabihspeaks.com.

In 'What I Learned this Week', Gemma recommended an episode of The Rest Is Science, The Threshold of Human Sensation, which explores the smallest things our senses can detect. Her highlight was lugduname, an artificial sweetener hundreds of thousands of times sweeter than sugar.

Rabih shared what he learned from trying the other side of Riverside, the recording platform used by many podcasts, including this one, as he considers hosting a show of his own.

Ross G recommended a piece from Wired, Why Normal People Aren't Using AI Agents. It explains why agents are still a niche next to chatbots, and why organizations hoping to adopt agentic AI will need to be deliberate about how they support people.

For more from Mindtools Kineo, visit our new website mindtools-kineo.com. There, you'll find out how we can help your organization build AI skills, and how our Skills Practice scenarios help build human skills.

Connect with our speakers

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

• Ross Garner
• Gemma Towersey
• Rabih El Khodr

AI can build a course in minutes. That should be the best news our industry has had in years. Instead, a lot of teams are skipping what really matters: working out what the problem is, and checking whether anything changed.

In this week's episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast, Ross G and Cammy Bean are joined by Tim Slade, founder of The eLearning Designer's Academy, to explore how learning design is changing and what is left for the humans doing it.

We discuss:

• Why AI shifts the work from 'building' to 'diagnosing and evaluating'
• Why order takers are exposed and performance consultants are not
• Whether portfolios can still be trusted to demonstrate capability.

Tim's new book, The Instructional Design Handbook: A Practitioner's Guide to Designing Performance-Based Learning, is available now.

Cammy's book, The Accidental Instructional Designer: Learning Design for the Digital Age, is published by ATD Press.

Tim also shares his thinking on where the industry is heading on his YouTube channel.

During the conversation, Ross G referenced Julie Dirksen's work on performance gaps. Julie joined us recently to look back over ten years of L&D in episode 500.

In 'What I Learned this Week', Cammy shared her method for crispy tofu: press it, tear it rather than cut it, dust it with cornstarch through a fine mesh sieve, then bake it on the top shelf.

Tim learned, for the second time in his life, that selling a house is no fun.

And Ross G shared the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report on brands, which finds that trust now sits alongside quality and value for money in how people decide what to buy.

For more from Mindtools Kineo, visit our new website mindtools-kineo.com. There, you'll find out how we can help your organization build AI skills, and how our Skills Practice scenarios help build human skills.

Connect with our speakers

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

• Ross Garner
• Cammy Bean
• Tim Slade

Articulate's latest product release puts AI at the heart of it's strategy. What does this mean for learning designers?

In this week's episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast, Ross G flies solo to react to Articulate's Articuland announcement, unpacking what Frontline, Nova, and the platform's pivot toward operational teams means for learning design.

He discusses:

• What Articulate's new 'Frontline' and 'Nova' tools actually do, and why the launch has 'annoyed basically everyone'
• Whether the shift from 'training creator' to 'capability architect' holds up
• The seven things humans can still offer that AI can't automate, from 'embodied presence' to 'provenance'

During the episode, Ross discussed Articulate's own recap of the Articuland 2026 announcement, covering Frontline, Nova, and the new integrations in full.

He also discussed The AI Acceleration Gap, Monika Saha's thought-leadership piece arguing for a shift from training creator to capability architect.

See also Dr Philippa Hardman's LinkedIn post testing Frontline against a real fraud-reporting policy document.

And The AI Daily Brief's episode on the new jobs AI will create, the source for the seven things humans still offer.

For more from Mindtools Kineo, visit our new website mindtools-kineo.com. There, you'll find out how we can help your organization build AI skills, and how our Skills Practice scenarios help build human skills.

Connect with our speakers

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

• Ross Garner

What research papers did you read while lounging by the pool this summer?

In this week's episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast, Ross D is joined by Claire and Dr Anna to review three studies that have caught our attention over the last few months.

Anna's pick was Vestner and colleagues' 'A dyadic training to promote technology-related learning and development among age-diverse employees: the power of co-workers' enthusiasm', published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.

Claire brought Kestin and colleagues' 'AI tutoring outperforms in-class active learning: an RCT introducing a novel research-based design in an authentic educational setting', the Harvard study comparing an AI tutor with in-person active learning.

Ross referenced Will Thalheimer's LinkedIn article 'The Learning Styles Challenge After 20 Years', and Clinton-Lisell and Litzinger's 'Is It Really a Neuromyth? A Meta-Analysis of the Learning Styles Matching Hypothesis'.

For more from Mindtools Kineo, visit our website mindtools-kineo.com. There, you'll find out how we can help your organization build AI skills, and how our Skills Practice scenarios help build human skills.

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If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

• Ross Dickie
• Claire Gibson
• Anna Barnett

Training one person is hard. Training 750,000 people, in more than 80 countries, spread across frontline shifts, event security and executive teams, is a different problem entirely.

In this week's episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast, Ross G and Claire Gibson are joined by Brent O'Bryan, Senior Vice President of Global Training and Talent Development at Allied Universal, to explore what L&D looks like at genuinely massive scale.

We discuss:

• Why 750,000 employees are never one audience
• How to choose between the LMS, the classroom and virtual training
• The role of AI and automation in training frontline workers at scale.

Brent and Ross G first got talking about this after Brent shared The Josh Bersin Company's research on dynamic enablement. You can read the executive summary of The Definitive Guide to Corporate Learning: From Static Training to Dynamic Enablement on the Josh Bersin site.

In 'What I Learned this Week', Claire shared the world's smallest Fringe venue, a chicken coop in the Pear Tree garden in Edinburgh. Brent recommended The Surprising Power of Reflection, an episode of Trevor Ragan's The Learner Lab podcast, on why reflecting after learning can beat a second round of practice. Ross G shared Garner interference, a cognitive science effect named after Wendell Garner, in which irrelevant information slows people down.

For more from Mindtools Kineo, visit our new website mindtools-kineo.com. There, you'll find out how we can help your organization build AI skills, and how our Skills Practice scenarios help build human skills.

Connect with our spearkers

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

• Ross Garner
• Claire Gibson
• Brent O'Bryan