Is instructional design becoming less about course production?

I don’t think instructional design is disappearing. But I do think the version of instructional design many people built careers around is changing very quickly. For years, being a strong ID often meant being strong at production. If you could build polished modules, create interactions, clean up SME content, and ship courses efficiently, you were valuable. That was the role.

But AI is rapidly lowering the barrier to producing learning content. It can already help generate objectives, quizzes, scripts, voiceovers, lesson structures, summaries, and even full draft learning flows in minutes. The ability to simply produce a course is becoming less rare and less valuable on its own. At the same time, organizations are becoming more focused on business outcomes rather than learning outputs. Most leaders do not actually care whether a course exists. They care whether onboarding becomes faster, mistakes decrease, adoption improves, teams ramp quicker, managers perform better, or employees change behavior in measurable ways.

I think the IDs who will continue growing are the ones who can connect learning to performance, diagnose operational problems, influence stakeholders, simplify workflows, and identify when training is not actually the right solution. The work starts looking less like course production and more like performance consulting. Tool skills still matter. Knowing how to build effective learning experiences still matters. But production alone no longer feels like enough to differentiate someone in the field. And honestly, I think that may be healthy for L&D long term.

Curious how other people in L&D are feeling about this shift. What do you think will matter more for IDs over the next few years: production skills or performance/business thinking?