Most learning and development (L&D) professionals know this feeling: The answer to your problem is out there somewhere — buried in a mix of Google results, research reports and LinkedIn posts. The challenge is finding the right insight exactly when you need it.
As Training Industry approached its 20-year milestone, CEO Ken Taylor realized his organization faced the same challenge. Over the past two decades, Training Industry has published more than 10,000 articles, research reports, podcasts, courses, webinar archives and career guides — content that reaches more than 250,000 L&D professionals worldwide.
“We had so much content that it was almost unruly for a visitor to find what they needed,” said Taylor. “If you are an L&D professional curious about workforce development, it would take you weeks to consume all the content we have on this topic.”
Most of us don’t have this kind of time. L&D professionals want quick answers that they can trust and immediately apply.
“I get a lot of calls from people just asking, ‘What’s going on?’” said Taylor. “Because Training Industry has been immersed in this field for 20 years now, I typically have those top-of-mind insights and research into what’s going on with learning tech or business alignment, or whatever the question may be.”
Taylor began to wonder: What if the experience of those one-on-one conversations could scale?
“As I started to see demonstrations of artificial intelligence (AI) agents in the early days, I started to get excited about the possibility of an agent that could answer a question like only Training Industry could,” said Taylor.
That curiosity set the stage for a four-month journey to build Tia, an AI agent designed specifically for learning leaders — a tool that could make insights instantly accessible for visitors while also helping employees navigate the organization’s own wealth of knowledge.
Building Tia: From Vision to Reality
Tia officially launched in June 2024 alongside Training Industry’s membership program, giving members access to both the AI agent and a private community for L&D professionals. Built in collaboration with Mindset AI, Tia was designed to help users find and apply Training Industry’s knowledge more efficiently — sourcing only from vetted, curated knowledge banks, not the open internet.
“We didn’t want the AI to pull in articles on training from an Olympic coach,” said Amanda Longo, creative director at Training Industry.
Mindset AI offered this capability, along with features that made Tia especially useful for time-strapped L&D professionals, who are often dealing with a lot of complexity in their roles.
“Open-source AI tools are really good at giving definitive — but often wrong — answers,” said Taylor. “We wanted Tia to guide users through how to think about L&D challenges and offer resources for informed decisions.”
Creating an AI agent trained on 20 years of proprietary content wasn’t simple. Training Industry and Mindset AI worked together to develop processes for ingesting thousands of articles, podcasts, webinars and research reports into more than a dozen knowledge banks.
“One of the most difficult aspects was bringing in our catalog of data reports,” said Taylor. “Charts and visuals were tough for the AI to interpret. It took several review cycles to get it right.”
A major advantage of the partnership was Mindset AI’s ability to embed rich media directly into Tia’s interface.
“If Tia gives you an answer that’s sourced from a webinar, you can access that webinar without leaving Tia,” said Longo. “And when you click the link, it’ll take you to the exact moment in the video being referenced.”
As the team refined Tia’s capabilities, one priority became clear: users need to trust every response. An AI agent is only valuable if the insights it provides are reliable and actionable.
Tia has also proven beneficial internally. Training Industry employees use the agent to quickly locate insights from decades of research, speeding workflows and reducing time spent searching for content. In this way, Tia serves both visitors and employees, making knowledge easier to access and apply across the organization.
Built for Trust: Guardrails, Transparency and Community
What makes Tia special isn’t just what the agent can do, it’s what it won’t do.
“We were able to configure guardrails within Tia to ensure that if it doesn’t have an answer in the knowledge banks, Tia would have to say it doesn’t know,” said Longo.
That simple design choice builds trust. When Tia admits it doesn’t know something, users can rely on the accuracy of what it does share. Each “I don’t know” response is also reviewed by the Training Industry team to identify content gaps or technical issues, helping Tia grow smarter over time.
Transparency was another essential element of the design.
“When you ask Tia a question, it will provide an answer and a complete list of where that information is being pulled from,” said Taylor. “For our authors, that means Tia extends the reach of their articles. For users, it means answers they can trust.”
That approach reflects Training Industry’s long-standing commitment to community and shared expertise. When you browse articles on our website, you are reading advice, lessons learned and best practices from L&D practitioners who have been exactly where you are. Tia was trained on thousands of those stories, but they remain your stories. Tia gives credit where credit is due.
“I think there’s a real fear right now around AI’s lack of humanity, but we can’t forget that AI is informed by our human work,” said Longo. “AI has never been out in the field or dealt with difficult stakeholders. If we were going to build an AI agent, it had to be backed up by a community of L&D practitioners.”
Impact: How L&D Pros are Using Tia
Since its launch, more than 250 Training Industry members have turned to Tia to tackle everyday challenges — from post-training reinforcement and onboarding to building competency models and measurement strategies.
But don’t expect Tia to draft a complete training course. As Taylor explains, Tia was built to advise, not create.
“In the early days, we’d observe testers asking for very specific course builds,” said Taylor. “Unless we have a detailed course-building guide for the exact audience you’re targeting in our knowledge bank, you won’t get a great answer from Tia. But if you ask how to approach building a course, you’ll get a much better answer.”
By offering practical guidance grounded in trusted expertise, Tia helps learning leaders think through challenges and make informed decisions without starting from scratch.
Looking Ahead: The Future of AI in L&D
Taylor believes tools like Tia are only the beginning.
“I think the days of traditional courses are slowly but surely going to wind down,” said Taylor. “There’s so much content readily available. You no longer need to collect it and package it up into a static format. If you think more broadly about the learning experience, it could be an aggregation of interactions a learner has with an agent that knows everything there is to know about the subject.”
While that future is still taking shape, many organizations are already experimenting with AI. Training Industry research shows that high-performing companies are beginning to integrate AI into both their workflows and training programs.
“When agents start interacting with other agents, that’ll be interesting to watch,” said Taylor. “But for now, AI is just a tool — just like Excel. If you know how to use it, it can make things easier or faster. You’re still the expert, and the tool just makes you better or more efficient at your job.”
What’s Next for Tia
While the heavy lift of building Tia is complete, the work continues behind the scenes. Training Industry’s Tia administrators regularly ensure new content is auto-ingested and properly sourced, so users always have access to the most timely and relevant insights.
Next on the roadmap: voice-to-text capabilities, workflow integrations, corporate memberships and more. But even as Tia evolves, the goal remains the same: to empower, not replace, human expertise.
“Tia’s going to give you a really great answer, but it’s still only mediocre on its own,” said Longo. “You are in control of making Tia’s output the right answer for your organization. Without you, Tia can’t solve your organization’s problem. Recognize that you are as powerful as the AI, and use Tia as your assistant, not your replacement.”
