Most AI features are vendor promises, not live reality

Published in August 2025, Fosway Group’s AI Market Assessment for Learning Systems paper delivers a clear, data-led view of the state of AI in the Learning Systems vendor market today. What is real, what is live with customers and where is AI headed next? Here we provide an excerpt of this new, groundbreaking paper.

Despite extensive vendor marketing around AI in learning systems, the narrative is advancing much faster than real-world delivery. Whilst nearly every learning systems vendor claims AI-enhanced functionality, only 10% of mapped AI features have been delivered and are live with customers so far.

Overall,

• 59% of LS AI roadmaps are focused on either Learning Experience or Learning Management
• 15% is on People Development, 14% on People, Systems& Architecture and 12% on Workplace Learning
• Only 10% of mapped AI features have been delivered and are live with customers, with another 3% in beta/piloting and another 5% in short-term development (H1 2025)
• 13% of AI capabilities are on H2 2025 or on longer term roadmap (2026+)
• 69% of all AI vendor capabilities are not yet within roadmap plans

Although only one in ten AI features is considered by vendors to be already live, that may mean they are only activated in the live instance, not necessarily that they are fully rolled out across customers. This gap between marketing promise and market reality has two implications:

• Corporates cannot rely on roadmap claims: Unless a capability is already live or in active piloting, it should not influence immediate platform decisions.
• Buyers must prioritise visibility and evidence: Ask for demos, reference clients, and rollout timelines anchored in real deployments, not vague intent.

AI may be the future, but most of it still lives in the future, too. Customers should ground decisions in what vendors can deliver today, not what they hope to develop tomorrow.

AI adoption is focused on two hot zones

AI roadmap investment is far from uniform across the Learning System feature categories. Fosway’s Roadmap Flow Maps expose a clear heat map: currently vendor innovation is highly concentrated in two categories, whilst large parts of the functional model remain relatively untouched.

As highlighted already, the Hot Zones are in the Learning Experience and Learning Management categories, where in particular, vendors are deploying AI to enhance search, personalisation, and learning content, provide generative AI authoring tools to create both content and assessments, and introducing assistants tailored to a variety of user personas. These features are widely planned, with many already live, and with strong consensus across the vendors. If you’re looking for immediate impact from AI, start here.

The AI functional breakdown for Learning Experience looks as follows. Overall, this shows the heavy concentration of AI features in Personalisation (34%) and Search (27%). It also shows the highest ratio of features live with customers at 15%, with another 10% in pilot or first half 2025 development timescales.

This is an excerpt from the AI Market Assessment for Learning Systems paper. Get the full insight and discover AI’s market reality by reading the whole paper here.

What should you do next?

• There’s still time to be involved in Phase Two – 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’.
• Not long left to be part of Digital Learning Realities 2025 – have your say before the survey closes. Share your experiences in this year’s research cycle and get first look at the results.

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 Learning Systems – full report. Released earlier this year. The latest look at the market and solution trends in learning platforms – 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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