Think Outside Your SCORM
Log in to an LMS, browse through several catalogs, enroll to a learning path, then start a course and go through a dozen lessons just to get to a resource link out to some documentation page. We've built a matryoshka of digital learning and we're asking the customer to unpack it in the middle of their workday. Then we're surprised when half of them don't bother. I know, I know, I'm biting my own leg here. But hear me out.
We're three months into 2026, and still trying to fit everything into a SCORM, and expect the customer to treat this as some sort of stop-and-read ceremony in their workflow. Pause what they're doing, log in somewhere else, click through slides, get their badge. That's not how work happens anymore. In a digital workplace of AI agents, embedded workflows, and context switching that costs real money, asking a customer to leave their environment to "come learn" is asking them to lose momentum. And momentum, in a subscription economy, is everything.
And I know, the academy has always been a place we send people to. A branded subdomain, a catalog behind a login, a completion percentage on a dashboard. Build it well enough, and customers come. That was the deal. Except it's not working like that anymore.
If training isn't sitting on a digital shelf anymore, then where is it?
Barry Kelly described the headless LMS back in 2022—yes, 2022, so none of this is new—as an architecture where the learning platform becomes a backend engine while content is delivered via APIs to wherever the customer already is. Inside the product. Within the CRM. Through a community. Surfaced by an AI agent. The academy stops being a destination and starts being an intelligence layer that decides what to surface, where, to whom, and when.
Josh Bersin's research on corporate learning pushes the argument even further. He calls the new paradigm Dynamic Enablement: moving beyond education and credentialing into real-time performance support embedded in the flow of work. His verdict on the traditional LMS is blunt: if yours isn't moving to a dynamic, post-SCORM content model, you need to look around. Applied to customer education, the implication is clear: the academy as a standalone portal is becoming a legacy artefact.
This sounds great in theory. In practice, I've seen what happens without guardrails: the product team ships an in-app tooltip that contradicts the certification the academy team spent three months building. Nobody's wrong. There's just no shared source of truth. And that's a small example; scale it across AI agents, community forums, CS playbooks, and onboarding flows, and you get a customer experience that's educating people in six different directions at once.
So the question isn't just "where does learning live now?" It's: who owns it when it lives everywhere?
The answer is everyone, but through a teeny tiny bit of governance. The more distributed and intelligent the education layer becomes, the more it needs centralized standards, quality controls, and cross-functional decision rights. In practice, this doesn't mean bureaucracy. It means a cross-functional charter that aligns education goals with company goals like reducing churn by 5%, not training 500 users. It means a council that includes Product, CS, and Sales, ensuring educational content moves in step with the product roadmap. It means integrated data architecture where learning events and product telemetry live in the same stream, so you can finally prove impact without cohort gymnastics. And it means deciding—explicitly, early, and with executive sponsorship—that the academy is not a support function. It's an activation function. One that accelerates the path from contract signed to customer successful, and from customer successful to customer expanded.
The new job description
The SCORM, the LMS, whatever four-corner digital place for learning you're used to building and inviting your customer into, it isn't dying. It's simply being demoted, from primary experience layer to backend service. The concept of a customer academy isn't disappearing, nor are the e-learning modalities we're all too familiar with. And the education team isn't becoming obsolete. It's being elevated from course producer to systems architect and governance owner.
The practitioners who'll thrive in the next two years won't be the ones with the best course catalog. They'll be the ones who can govern a distributed, AI-powered education ecosystem that spans the entire customer journey, and prove its impact in the language of net revenue retention, time-to-value, and expansion revenue.
If that sounds like a bigger job than building courses. It is. And that's exactly the point. The academy isn't shrinking; its walls are. The question is whether your team is ready to operate without them.