AI Investment is primarily focused on content

Published in August 2025, Fosway Group’s AI Market Assessment for Digital Learning paper delivers a clear, data-led view of the state of AI in the Digital Learning vendor market today. What features or capabilities are genuinely live? What is still on the roadmap? Here we provide a snapshot of another of Fosway’s pioneering research papers, focusing on AI content investment.

The digital learning industry is and has been a content market for many years. AI investment and adoption, perhaps unsurprisingly, is concentrated on lower risk and higher frequency use cases, where automation benefits are clear and dangers are lower impact or easier to manage. Solving known and common customer problems for which the technology is well suited is an obvious roadmap principle. In digital learning, content is at the heart of the vast majority of solutions. Consequently, the industry focuses on innovation which solves the problems of learning content design, production and distribution. It is also an arena highly suited to GenAI automation.

As a result, there is a focus on sustaining innovation as opposed to fresh or disruptive value. Customers, in general, are readier to buy and apply content related capability. It fits with existing solutions offered, the workflows to manage them and the technology ecosystems that house them. Transcription, translation and synthetic media creation are frequently AI capabilities that are live for many vendors. For off the shelf (OtS) services, automation benefits enable speed to market, lower development costs and ease of updating of existing libraries and services. Speed of content editing, once live, is proving to be a significant efficiency benefit across the industry.

In addition to content production, automation of design tasks is starting to shape how learning design studios operate and the quality of their output at scale. Learning design assistants, authoring features such as script generation and source content research and analysis are emerging as reliable tools to increase the speed of design phases of products. Whilst human scrutiny is embedded in workflows, few vendors complain of low-quality outputs and are confident of further efficiencies to come. What it takes to compete in producing at speed and sufficient volume is changing rapidly.

Platform capabilities follow the content pattern

Our functional model covers a wide range of digital learning platform capabilities from content authoring tools, through content portals to specialist programme solutions such as adaptive and simulation-based learning solutions. The overall pattern of live features and committed roadmap activity is similar in this market segment, although at 7%, a smaller fraction is adopted live by customers. The lions share is towards authoring and content management tools. These include summarisation of Subject-matter expert (SME) resources and the use of AI design assistant or Copilots as part of a broader trend to simplify content authoring steps and empower SMEs to do more directly for themselves. Specialist instructional design skills might though be more valued in the future in editorial judgement and quality assurance, rather than just directly in production. Add this to the growing use of synthetic media in solution design and significant change to the ID role is clear to see.

This is an excerpt from the AI Market Assessment for Digital Learning paper. Get the full insight and discover all the latest market and solution trends by reading the whole report here.

What should you do next?

• There’s still time to be involved in Phase Two – plus, alongside Fosway’s publicly available suite of AI research papers come a range of private assets for this AI project’s participants, with a level of detailed analysis and insight you will not find anywhere else. Contact us for more, join Fosway’s strategic AI project for 2025: ‘AI in Learning’.

Other recommended reading

• Build your AI strategy with evidence, not guesswork. Get an overview of the research programme here: Fosway AI Strategic Research Programme
• The 2025 Fosway 9-Grid^TM for Digital Learning – full report. Released earlier this year. The latest look at the market and solution trends in digital learning – get the full analysis today.

For corporates looking for deeper insight on this and other similar topics, please consider joining our Fosway research network to get access to corporate roundtables, private 1-1 analyst time, benchmark reports and other analyst services or project support. Click here to find out more.

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