LAS is an award-winning provider of elearning consultancy, design, development and training services in the UK and internationally.
Established in 2005 as LearningAge Solutions, we work with some of the best known organisations in the world to boost their performance through the innovative use of learning technologies. Working in partnership with our customers, we draw on proven principles from human behaviour, how people learn and how the brain works to create impactful digital learning solutions with real return on investment.
Tess is a director of LAS. She has worked in a learning environment for over twenty years. First, as a senior manager in universities, moving into digital learning ten years ago.
By Tess Robinson
Posted 6 November 2025
Twenty years ago our digital lives were very different to what they are today. In 2005 Google’s search engine had only been live for a year, the very first video was published to YouTube and Facebook only had 1 million users. The office was also a very different place. Desktops reigned supreme, mobile phones only made calls and texts and working remotely was considered fairly impossible. As Rob and I sat in our kitchen two decades ago, thinking up names for his new digital learning business, we could sense that the world was changing. Technology was starting to open up new possibilities and connections and that potential was really exciting.
Fast forward to today, and we now operate in a hyper-connected, collaborative digital environment with powerful personal computers in our pockets! How we work, learn and live has been fundamentally altered by technology. It’s been a wild ride to be in a technology-facing business over this period, but the pace and relentlessness of change is what makes it a fascinating area to work in.
The dawn of digital dominance
Gone are the days of presenteeism, the belief that to be productive, you had to be seen at your desk, often late into the evening. Tools like Teams and Slack have made a physical presence less necessary. Cloud computing has also meant that you aren’t tethered to a building to access your files, but can access them from anywhere. We’re not quite at the ‘everyone working from the beach’ stage, but it’s now more possible than ever.
Alongside this, increased automation has freed us up from some of the more repetitive work tasks allowing us more space for problem solving, creativity and strategic thinking. Technology is now fully embedded in our everyday and we’d all be lost without it.
The learning revolution
One of the most profound impacts of technological progress has been on how we learn. The traditional model of a one-off face-to-face corporate training day has been largely superseded by a culture of continuous, on-demand, self-directed and blended learning. Digital is now an integral and important part of almost all learning interventions.
In the past, elearning content had a truly terrible reputation. If you asked almost anyone, they would groan at the very thought of online learning and more often than not, describe it as BORING (in capitals), patronising, irrelevant.
The digital learning industry has come a long way since then. We’ve been pioneering human-centred learning throughout our 20 years and this approach has now become mainstream. Thank goodness BORING elearning is now, more or less, a thing of the past. Additionally, as an industry, we’ve developed the functionality to allow us to personalise learning better, thus avoiding the sheep-dip approach that so many learners hate.
More recently, the integration of digital tools into our daily workflows has created the opportunity for a learning-by-doing environment. We learn a new analytics tool or CRM system by diving in, using online tutorials and collaborating with colleagues on Teams or Slack in real time. This just-in-time learning allows for greater agility and less time off the job.
An agentic AI world
As we look forward to the next 20 years, the pace of change is going up to warp speed. The last couple of years, with the democratisation of AI, have been an absolute whirlwind. Just as in 2005, it was hard to imagine what the world of work in 2025 would look like, it’s even harder to imagine 2045 today, because technology is advancing so rapidly.
Certainly in the next couple of years, agentic AI will be the driver of transformation. AI is rapidly becoming more than just a tool to perform a task set by a human. Agentic AI can understand a goal and then autonomously plan and execute the steps needed to achieve it. Put together with other agentic AIs in a team, they can check and augment each other’s work and solve complex problems at a speed way beyond anything a human could achieve.
At LAS, we are beginning to design and build agent teams to undertake complex tasks, based on our proven methodologies and models, overseen and enhanced by experts. What’s possible is already amazing and it’s only going to get better. The possibilities that we saw in 2005 for using technology to enhance learning have been multiplied a million-fold.
In a country like the UK, agentic AI could be a real game changer, both for helping get to grips with long-term national productivity issues and for upskilling. Imagine a group of AI agents that can identify skills gaps from your data, curate a bespoke learning pathway from multiple sources and simulate real world scenarios for people to practice in, all in minutes.
This next phase isn't just about automation to replace humans, but augmentation. Knowing how to ask agents the right questions, critically evaluating their output and managing them effectively will be key. Ultimately though, the most valuable skills will be the ones that the AI doesn’t possess, the ones that are uniquely human: original creativity, emotional intelligence, empathy, intent and ethical judgment.
The next 20 years
These are exciting times. The future is going to be very different. That kitchen conversation 20 years ago was about the potential of technology to change how we work and learn. Today, our conversations are more about our partnership with it.
The last two decades have taught us that technology moves at lightning speed, but human needs - for connection, for purpose and for meaningful growth - remain constant. We’ve finally moved past BORING eLearning, not just because the tech got better, but because we collectively realised that learning must be human-centred to be effective.
As agentic AI joins the team, this principle becomes paramount. The technology will be dazzling, the productivity gains immense, but the real winners will be those who cultivate the irreplaceable human skills on top. The future of work isn’t just digital; it’s a digitally-enabled, human-centred one.
