By now the team was prompting confidently — so the question shifted from "how do I use AI?" to "which AI, and how do we keep up?" This was our most discussion-heavy session: a frank, whole-team conversation about the landscape of tools, what's actually useful in L&D, and how we stay on top of a space that changes every week.
What we covered
- The current landscape — the AI tools out there, what they're for, and how they map to real L&D work.
- Effectiveness, honestly — not just what each tool claims, but how well it actually performs for our needs.
- In-house tools — demos of AIESA and MyAI, tools Lenovo itself was building, so the team could see what was coming from inside the company.
- Staying current — the bigger challenge: a system for keeping pace as new tools appear.
The tool-tracking database
The centerpiece was something I built to solve the "how do we keep up?" problem — a living SharePoint database that tracks every AI tool we evaluate.
What the database tracks
- The tool and what it does
- Cost and purpose
- Pros and cons from real use
- Status against our AI whitelist — is it approved?
- The verdict — do we invest in it or not?
Crucially, it's not mine alone. I invited the whole team to access and update it as they discover new tools — so evaluating the landscape becomes a shared, ongoing effort instead of a one-person bottleneck.
The real conversation
What made this session matter wasn't the tour of tools — it was the team grappling together with a genuinely hard question: how do we stay on top of a field moving this fast, without chasing every shiny new thing? The database is our answer: a structured, collective way to test, compare and decide, so we invest our attention where it pays off.
Key takeaways
- Knowing the landscape matters as much as knowing any single tool.
- A shared, living tracker turns "keeping up" from a scramble into a system.
- Evaluate against cost, purpose, governance and real effectiveness — not hype.
- Staying current is a team sport; everyone contributes what they find.
Delivered live to my team and recorded internally for anyone who missed it.