Empowering Growth with GenAI
As we approach mid-year, it's that time where we have been talking about our process of Individual Development Plans (IDP) at work. This is where we each create a plan for key areas of learning focus. I've been having conversations with many of my direct reports about their professional development and it has caused me to think of how this process can evolve given the wide range of GenAI tools that we have now.
What’s surfaced for me in these conversations is something I first learned years ago while working in private education. Being part of a learning organization, surrounded daily by professional educators, gave me a front-row seat to the complexity of adult learning. I wasn’t just going through a corporate process. I was observing how skilled practitioners approached their own learning, how they reflected, adapted, hesitated, and stretched. It was never linear. It was rarely uniform. And it made one thing very clear: meaningful professional growth must be personalized.
Teachers, even the most experienced ones, learn in different ways. Some go deep into subject expertise, while others experiment with new classroom strategies. Some seek mentorship and dialogue. Others prefer self-guided exploration. The strongest growth I witnessed always came when the learning plan was designed around the individual, not handed down as a generic framework. That insight continues to shape how I think about professional development in the corporate setting.
Personalization at Scale with GenAI
As I reflect on our current context at Project X Ltd., it's clear that the future of IDPs isn't a better form template. It's a different mindset altogether, one where each employee becomes the architect of their development, supported by tools that can finally deliver the personalization we’ve always known was needed.
This is where GenAI becomes a pivotal ally. Not in a buzzword sense, but in a practical, daily-use sense. We’re now able to go beyond what managers or HR teams alone can deliver. Employees can use GenAI to map skills, break down stretch goals into structured plans, simulate decision-making environments, and receive tailored feedback, all on demand and tuned to their needs.
I’ve seen members of our own team use GenAI to script out stakeholder discussions, learn new coding techniques, or deepen their understanding of industry verticals with curated reading lists. I was working wiht someone the other day and after creating a really rich learning roadmap, we used GenAI to help structure what that learning path might look like if mapped out a little bit at a time each day to fit the way this person needed to balance learning with client delivery. What these tools unlock is not just access to content, but a dynamic, evolving coaching capability. The result is that learning becomes ambient, responsive, and, importantly, owned by the learner.
The New Architecture of Development
To be clear, this doesn’t diminish the importance of human mentoring, leadership guidance, or intentional career planning. In fact, it makes those interactions more meaningful. When someone comes to a check-in having already articulated where they want to go, what they’re working on, and what they need help with, because a GenAI tool helped them prepare, the conversation becomes strategic, not surface-level.
We’re now in a position to reframe the architecture of development. The role of the organization is to provide clarity of direction, opportunity, and access. The role of the individual is to engage with the process in an empowered way. GenAI acts as the connective tissue, enabling that engagement at scale and with depth.
For leaders, this also requires a mindset shift. Rather than simply evaluating IDP completion rates or ticking off training hours, we need to start asking better questions. Are our people becoming more capable? Are they discovering and leveraging their strengths? Are they energized by the direction their careers are taking? And perhaps most importantly, do they feel they are the ones driving it?
The intersection of professional development and AI is not a passing trend. It’s also not some shortcut to get through a mechnical compliance process. It's a fundamental shift in how people truly learn and grow inside organizations. My own path through education and now into executive leadership has shown me that the most powerful development journeys are the ones that feel deeply personal and genuinely supported.
We now have the tools to make that real. And more importantly, we have the responsibility to build the environments where that kind of growth is expected and encouraged.
