Let me start with what I am not saying.
I am not against AI in corporate learning. AI now drafts courses in hours, builds personalized pathways, and answers questions in the flow of work. Industry analysts like Josh Bersin describe an augmented workforce, where people use AI to work at a higher level. I find that vision credible.
Here is the part that gets skipped.
On-camera presence is not a knowledge gap. It is a behavior. A course can tell your team where to look. It cannot notice that one person's ceiling light throws their face into shadow, or that another's window turns them into a silhouette every afternoon. Lighting and background are the two hardest on-camera problems I coach, and they resist company-wide fixes because every desk is different.
One of my clients tried AI evaluation of on-camera skills. Here is where it failed.
An AI can only evaluate against the references inside its language model, patterns gathered from what other people have written about presenting. It has read about audiences. It has not stood in front of one.
My references were built differently. Thousands of live and video events. TV studios. Arenas with twenty thousand people who paid to be in the seats. Courtrooms, political stages, classrooms, telemedicine visits. When I watch a person on a webcam, I am comparing them against what I have seen hold a real audience, not against a description of one.
You could say I run on my own LLM. Mine took over twenty five years to train.
And behavior changes through watching, not reading. A person sits in a session with a skilled presenter on their own screen, sees the difference between how the coach shows up and how they show up, and chooses their own corrections. Those tend to stick. Bersin makes a version of this point himself: AI can generate content and measure outcomes, but human coaching and connection are what change behavior.
One more thought. As AI takes over more of the writing, the analysis, and the preparation, the moments when your people appear live on screen become a larger share of what only they can do. The webcam is where your workforce is still unmistakably human.
I have coached presenters for over twenty five years. The webcam changed everything about the job, and the training has not caught up.
So before the next learning platform renewal, one question worth sitting with.
If AI is handling more of the work, what have you invested in the part of your team that still has to show up in person, on screen?
Ray Franklin is a presentation coach for teams that work on camera. His book, The Modern Engagement Standard, is written for the L&D professional.
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