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Wanna know what Cornerstone OnDemand is up to? Last week, I had the opportunity to be in New York City at the Cornerstones Connect Conference and asked a whole bunch of questions . As we do, I've written up a road report outlining the announcement and my thoughts. I've included the TL;DR below. You can link to the full article for free without signing in (the link is in the first comment). Thanks to Cornerstone Leadership for being such excellent hosts! TL;DR: ▶️ Cornerstone is repositioning as a workforce intelligence company, built on four pillars. Cornerstone's new thesis is that AI frees up human capacity rather than replacing it, and they want to be the platform that helps organizations deploy that capacity more effectively. ▶️ The primary buyer is shifting from the CLO to the CIO and CHRO, both of whom have larger budgets and greater influence to fully leverage Cornerstone's capabilities. The challenge for Cornerstone will be balancing the needs of its existing buyers with those of new buyers. ▶️ People Graph and Skills Architect sit at the center of everything Cornerstone is building. People Graph represents every employee as a node fed by labor-market data, work-tech signals, and employee-provided data, while Skills Architect derives skills from tasks rather than roles, sidestepping the top-down taxonomy problem that most skills vendors haven't solved. ▶️ Cornerstone's headless MCP makes the UI less important than it used to be, redefining where the value (and the user experience) lies. The headless MCP enables integration with Teams, Slack, or the LLM of choice. The agent layer bundles agents around specific business outcomes, and as organizations add more agent packs, they build on each other and become more powerful. ▶️ Cornerstone is moving from selling technology to co-building solutions with customers, using a forward-deployed engineer model to embed technical specialists directly with clients. The Cisco example shows what's possible, but it also shows how much organizational sophistication, technical investment, and close partnership are required to get there. ▶️ Cornerstone is PE-owned and likely overdue for an exit, and it's hard not to notice that the partners they're investing in most heavily, including Salesforce, Deloitte, and the hyperscalers, would all make excellent buyers from their point of view.

🎙️ New Workplace Stories episode: Heather Stefanski, Chief Learning and Development Officer at McKinsey & Company Most L&D functions are racing to teach AI fluency. McKinsey & Company is doing something different — and it might be the more important bet. In this episode, Heather joins Stacia Garr and Dani Johnson to discuss what it actually means to rewire L&D for the AI age, starting with a distinction most organizations are missing. AI productivity and AI for new business opportunities are getting all the attention. The third leg of the stool, using AI to accelerate development itself, is still largely untapped. Her argument is that if you get this right, "work is learning and learning is work, and there's just no more trade off." What that actually looks like at McKinsey is worth understanding. Learning designers are now embedded in workflow teams, co-building agentic tools that prompt, coach, and give real-time feedback as people work. McKinsey's new problem-solving tool, Inception, doesn't just support the work — it monitors how people build issue trees and triggers developmental nudges when patterns go sideways. And partners are creating digital twins of themselves so early-tenure colleagues get first-round document feedback before it ever reaches a human reviewer. 🎧 Episode highlights: • Why Heather thinks the CLO role needs to evolve toward something closer to a chief work officer, and what that means in practice • How McKinsey quantified the impact of great teachers: employees with them are 2.5x more likely to advance • The case for "purposeful abandonment" — which skills McKinsey is actively deciding to stop teaching because AI can handle them • How McKinsey's AI evaluation tool flags bias in real time during performance reviews, replacing after-the-fact training that evaluators may not remember Listen now wherever you get your podcasts: https://lnkd.in/dvd3r5Rc

Here's what we've found about these conversations: the questions that tend to go deepest aren't the polished ones. They're the "is it just us, or..." ones. The ones where you're not sure if you're behind the curve or if the curve is actually further out than everyone's pretending. That's what RedThread Unplugged is built around. We're not here with finished answers — we're here with what we're seeing in the research, what's still unresolved, and genuine curiosity about what you're navigating. Your questions don't just get answered. They shape what we actually talk about. Join us June 11 for an informal hour with Stacia Garr and Dani Johnson. What's on your mind right now? 👉 Register and share your question: https://hubs.ly/Q04hk3fn0 📅 June 11 | 1 PM ET / 10 AM PT

Join us for one of my favorite things we do: Our quarterly AMA Live! This session, which is made possible by our RedThread Research Tech Consortium members, is fully formed by you all -- what you most want to talk about, the questions you can't get answered anywhere else, and the perspectives you want feedback on. Here's how it works: --You submit your ideas, and as we start to get energy around them, we will put them into groups and share the loose agenda. --When we kick off the AMA, we will begin with the pre-submitted questions. --We will also encourage an active chat on related (or sometimes not related!) questions, as we know we can't cover everything in the "air time" and we have some seriously amazing community members who have heaps of knowledge to share. --We will also take live questions as they come in. Sound like chaos? It might be, just a bit. AND THAT'S WHY WE LOVE IT. It is alive, fun, surprising, insightful, and very, very human. So come join us for an hour. We will all leave smarter. Sign-up here: https://hubs.ly/Q04hk3fy0

Thank you HRBench for sponsoring RedThread Summit 2026! Events like this only happen because of partners who believe in bringing senior HR leaders together to do real work. We're grateful to have you with us in June.

We ran our first RedThread Unplugged session in March and left with more questions than we started with. It's what happens when you actually dig into something real. A few threads we're still working through: 1️⃣ The gap between distributing AI tools and actually redesigning how work gets done 2️⃣ What it looks like when L&D shows up where the business needs it, not just where it's comfortable 3️⃣ The unglamorous infrastructure work — data, governance, process — that determines whether any of this pays off We're bringing the conversation back on June 11. Same format: informal, unscripted, no slides. Stacia Garr and Dani Johnson will share what we're seeing in the research, including what's still genuinely unclear to us. What you're navigating on the ground shapes where we go. If March left you with follow-up questions, or something new has come up since then, this is the place to bring it. 🎙️ RedThread Unplugged 📅 June 11 | 1 PM ET / 10 AM PT 👉 Register and tell us what's on your mind: https://hubs.ly/Q04hk3fn0

Tekstac is now officially a member of the RedThread Research Tech Consortium. This is more than a partnership announcement. It’s a strategic step in our commitment to helping enterprises build future-ready capability, not just deliver learning. Founded by industry leaders Stacia Garr and Dani Johnson, RedThread Research has built a reputation for independent, rigorous research at the intersection of skills, learning, talent intelligence, and workforce transformation. For #Tekstac, this membership matters because our customers are navigating one of the most important shifts in enterprise talent strategy: The conversation is moving from training delivery → measurable capability building. From course completions → workforce readiness. From learning activity → business outcomes. Being part of the RedThread Tech Consortium gives us the opportunity to stay closer to emerging market signals, enterprise priorities, and evolving best practices shaping the future of work. For our customers, that means sharper perspective, stronger benchmarks, and product innovation informed not just by technology possibilities—but by what enterprise L&D and talent leaders actually need. For the broader ecosystem, we’re excited to contribute our experience from solving real-world capability-building challenges in technical talent transformation—through hands-on learning, AI-powered assessments, skills intelligence, and measurable workforce readiness. And for Tekstac, this is also an opportunity to learn alongside some of the most thoughtful innovators in the HR and learning technology landscape. The future of skilling won’t be built by isolated platforms. It will be built by ecosystems where research, technology, and enterprise realities come together. Excited for what comes next. Hui Lin Tan | Priyanka Mehrotra | Chief Etheridge | Vengatesh CR. | Vanitha Raghavan | Muthuselvan Ayyasamy | Krishnan Unni | Krishna Kumar N | Abin Abraham | Girish Badrinarayanan | Abhijith Chandraprabhu | Dani Johnson #FutureOfWork #SkillsIntelligence #WorkforceTransformation #EnterpriseLearning #TalentDevelopment

🚨 New Research: Learning Technology Market Report 2026 We just published our fourth iteration of the Learning Technology Market Report, and the market looks broader, bolder, and blurrier than it was in 2023. Our database now covers 461 vendors (up from 426), and the market continues to evolve and reorganize. Here are some of the key takeaways we observed while doing this market research: 1⃣ The market has moved away from content creation and delivery as its center of gravity. Analytics & Measurement is the top functionality offering, with 83% of vendors indicating it's a primary focus of their solution, up from just 33% in 2023. Content Creation dropped from first to fifth. The market is reorganizing around translating learning's impact on work. 2⃣ AI adoption is, unsurprisingly, rising. Just 2% of vendors report no AI usage, down from 24% in 2023. Conversational AI, a functionality category we didn't include in our research three years ago, is already a primary focus for 42% of vendors. And 95% of vendors describe their AI as either "production ready" or "core to platform." Whether the confidence matches the depth is a question buyers should be asking. 3⃣ Meanwhile, the single-purpose provider is fading. Vendors offering 1–5 functionalities went from 52% of the market in 2021 to just 1% in 2026. AI has lowered the cost of building, and the market is leaning into functionality breadth. But breadth on a feature list and depth in execution are two different things. 4⃣ One thing that didn't change too much: messaging still sounds largely the same. Our natural language processing analysis across 5 messaging dimensions found that 69% of vendors cluster into one archetype: multi-purpose L&D platforms. The remaining third splits across more distinct categories like "Skills Intelligence" and "Coaching at Scale", but the pools are much smaller. If you're a buyer trying to navigate this market, a vendor trying to stand out, or an L&D leader trying to understand where this is all headed, this report gives you some data to work with. 📖 This report (and our full research library) is available to RedThread Research Professional members, learn more about joining here → https://lnkd.in/ejEF5-gy