Our CEO Ryan Austin sat down with Hawley Kane, 360Learning’s Senior Director of Product Marketing, for a session built around something every L&D and Talent team is quietly dealing with: too much admin, not enough bandwidth, and a skills gap that isn’t slowing down to wait for either. I’ll admit I went in wondering how much new ground an hour on “agentic AI” could realistically cover — but by the end, our internal Slack was already quoting the two of them back at each other, which is usually a good sign.
The session split the problem in two. Ryan took the strategy side — how L&D and Talent teams can tie their work to what the business actually cares about, instead of reacting to whoever asked loudest that week. Hawley took the operations side — what it actually looks like when AI takes real admin work off a team’s plate, not just in a slide with a robot icon on it.
The “Alice” Problem
Hawley opened with a story that got a lot of knowing nods in the chat: every organization has an “Alice.” She’s the one person who knows every system inside and out, so every question — LMS access, “why isn’t this course showing up,” a report someone needed yesterday — eventually lands on her desk. Alice, by Hawley’s account, hasn’t had an uninterrupted lunch in about three years.
It’s a funny example, but it points to something real. When we polled the room live and asked what’s actually eating the biggest share of their team’s time, the answers weren’t surprising: pulling and analyzing learning data for stakeholders, and manually managing users, groups, and compliance tracking in the LMS. As Hawley put it, plainly: “the struggle holding L&D back isn’t a capacity problem — it’s an architecture problem.”
What “Agentic AI” Actually Means
If the phrase “agentic AI” has started to feel like background noise in your feed, you’re not alone — Hawley said as much herself. Her working definition: you tell the system what you need, and it figures out how to get there, without you clicking through menus to make it happen. Her test for whether it’s the real thing or just marketing: does it cut down the number of steps something takes? Does it turn a multi-hour task into minutes? If not, it’s just a more polished configuration screen.
Ryan added a piece that’s easy to overlook but matters in practice: agents don’t show up already knowing how your team works.
They need your standards, your governance rules, and a sense of how your organization actually makes decisions under pressure — the same way any new hire would. Skip that step, and agentic AI becomes one more thing someone has to manage, instead of the thing that saves them time.
The Research Behind the Reaction
Before the session, Cognota spent weeks interviewing CLOs and heads of Talent across L&D and HR. Ryan shared the headline finding, and it wasn’t budget or headcount — it was visibility. Most leaders can’t easily see what percentage of their team’s work is actually tied to business goals, or catch a bottleneck before it’s already slowing something down.
That tracks with the broader research Ryan referenced from Brandon Hall: only 40% of teams use a formal intake process, roughly 60% lack visibility into their own workload and capacity, and just 17% run anything resembling a dedicated LearnOps system. Most teams, in other words, are still managing all of this out of spreadsheets and instinct.
Where This Is Headed
For teams that hit a capacity wall while they’re fixing the architecture underneath it, Cognota’s Assist Marketplace (3,000+ vetted L&D and Talent specialists) is worth knowing about — it’s there for exactly those moments, without a long vendor search. And the more forward-looking part of the session: Hawley and Ryan gave a first look at where the Cognota x 360Learning integration is headed, including a feature that flags existing content when a new request comes in, so teams stop quietly rebuilding things that already exist somewhere else in the org.
We only scratched the surface of the ideas above. The full conversation goes further into how to actually measure L&D’s impact when the numbers are often the hardest part to defend, and how much of a real, AI-assisted view of your team’s capacity you can build without waiting on a big platform rollout.
If any of the reframes above landed for you, that’s where the recording pays off.
🎥 Watch the full recording here
📅 Book an intro call if you want to talk through what any of this looks like for your own team
