In this Brandon Hall Group™ Excellence at Work Podcast, Michael Rochelle, Chief Strategy Officer at Brandon Hall Group™, and Soma Bhaduri, Senior Vice President and Business Head at Liberate, explore how the L&D function is being fundamentally rewired and why managed learning services may be the most strategic move available to learning leaders navigating today’s pace of change.
To read the Executive Interview with Soma Bhaduri, click here.
Key Discussion Points:
- In-House L&D Isn’t Shrinking — It’s Moving Up the Value Chain: Traditional L&D teams were largely built to create content, manage programs, and coordinate execution. That model worked when learning demand was predictable. Today, organizations face continuous reskilling, rapidly evolving roles, and shifting business priorities. Internal teams are increasingly becoming orchestrators and capability architects, setting direction, defining standards, and ensuring governance, rather than handling all execution themselves.
- Four Forces Driving the Rise of Managed Learning Services: Soma identifies speed, capability, operational complexity, and cost efficiency as the converging forces making managed learning services (MLS) more relevant than ever. Organizations need to reskill at a pace and scale never seen before, often across global audiences, while managing advanced learning technologies, localization needs, and always-on operations that lean internal teams simply cannot sustain alone.
- The Control Tower Model: The most effective future-state L&D function is a lean internal team paired with a managed learning partner. Internal teams act as the control tower, defining skills strategy, aligning learning to business outcomes, and maintaining strong governance. The MLS partner handles execution at scale: content ecosystems, platform management, global rollouts, analytics, and continuous optimization.
- Where Organizations Get It Wrong: The biggest misstep is outsourcing strategy along with execution. When organizations hand over direction-setting and decision-making to an external partner, the model breaks down. The most successful engagements keep skills strategy and business alignment in-house while leveraging partners for operational delivery and innovation. As Soma put it, this isn’t outsourcing learning. It’s building a true partnership model.
- AI Is a Major Accelerant, But Only with the Right Foundation: AI is enabling hyper-personalized learning journeys, faster content development, adaptive skill pathways, and intelligent analytics. However, operationalizing AI at scale requires governance, integrated platforms, and continuous optimization that most internal teams cannot manage alone. Managed learning services bring technology, design, analytics, and operations into a single ecosystem, making AI not just a capability but a sustainable one. Brandon Hall Group research reinforces the urgency: 46% of organizations surveyed are still at the lower end of AI readiness.
- The Expertise Advantage: Beyond operational capacity, MLS partners offer something internal teams structurally cannot, which is compounding expertise across dozens of organizations. L&D functions are often so consumed with day-to-day execution that upskilling the team itself becomes a challenge. A strong managed learning partner stays on the leading edge so internal teams don’t have to.
- One Plus One Equals Three: When the strategic strengths of an internal L&D team are combined with the execution capabilities of the right managed learning partner, the result is an always-on, data-driven, scalable learning function that neither could build alone. The goal isn’t to make internal teams feel replaced. It’s to amplify what they’re already good at and extend their reach.
The conversation makes clear that the future of L&D is not a story of decline. It’s a story of elevation. The most effective learning organizations will be those that embrace a partnership model, keep strategy close, and leverage managed services to deliver the execution, innovation, and scale that today’s business environment demands.
