AI in Learning and Development

Why Designers Still Matter: 60-second animated explainer video

AI can build any course you ask for in seconds. But what if a course isn't what learners need? This short video below follows one training request from "we need a course" to the real problem behind it, and shows the part of learning design that still takes a human: asking why.

I don't think AI will replace instructional designers or good learning design practices. I think it will replace the blank page.

AI is remarkably good at producing drafts: outlines, scripts, storyboards, images (some better than others...) personas and even finished animation. What it can't do is ask whether the thing it was asked to build is the right thing. Most training requests arrive as solutions ("we need a course"), and the real work is finding the human problem behind them. That takes curiosity, empathy and judgment, and that part of the job belongs to designers.

So I use AI to move faster on production and put the time I save into diagnosis, review and the decisions that make learning effective.

The video above is an example of that philosophy in practice. I built it with AI as a production partner in about two hours, against an estimated 25–35 working without AI. Claude Design generated concept options and the animation. I used Vyond's text-to-speech tool for the voiceover. I owned the message, the audience and every edit. I rejected the first two drafts because they told the wrong story, reframed the piece around root-cause diagnosis, and cut anything that wasn't clear.

In the interest of transparency, I am including a design brief below that documents the full process: who did what, where AI helped, where it fell short, and how I kept the judgment calls human.

Read the full design brief (PDF):