A year into building the Learning & Development Board, one thing is clear: there is no playbook for L&D right now. 

Not for proving the impact of learning initiatives. Not for building leaders who can perform in constant change. Not for how to use — and scale — AI. And yet, L&D leaders are expected to have answers. 

That’s the challenge our members have faced: high expectations, low clarity. 

What we’ve seen over the past year is that the most valuable conversations aren’t about best practices. They’re about what’s working, what isn’t, and what people are trying next — because in this environment, no one has it fully figured out. 

A Year of Building, in Numbers 

The L&D Board started with a simple idea: if you bring together the people doing this work — at the scale and seniority of real enterprise L&D — the conversations would be different. 

A year in, the community has grown to nearly 175 L&D leaders across 58 companies, including AbbVie, Allstate, Dell Technologies, Fidelity Investments, Medtronic, Southwest Airlines, T-Mobile, Target, Prudential Financial, Boston Scientific, and Liberty Mutual. 

These are heads of L&D, leadership development, sales training, and talent enablement — running real programs, against real budgets, inside the world’s largest organizations. 

“The Learning & Development Board provides an invaluable forum for senior learning leaders to address the most pressing challenges in our field. By fostering a trusted, peer-driven environment, the Board enables members to exchange best practices, explore innovative approaches, and collaboratively shape future strategies.” — Kim Troxell, Head of US Commercial Learning & Development, AbbVie 

The 5 Questions L&D Leaders are Being Held Accountable For 

Across hundreds of conversations, the same five questions keep surfacing as career-defining pressure points: 

1. Can you prove L&D is driving measurable business outcomes? “We have data, but it’s not telling a clear story.” 
2. Are your leaders able to perform in today’s environment? “We’re investing in leadership, but not seeing behavior change.” 
3. Can L&D operate at the speed and scale the business requires? “We can’t keep up with demand.” 
4. Is L&D focused on the right priorities? “We’re not in the right conversations.” 
5. What is L&D’s role in AI? “We’re experimenting, but don’t have a clear direction.” 

These are showing up in budget reviews, leadership conversations, and day-to-day decisions. 

The Learning & Development Board provides an invaluable forum for senior learning leaders to address the most pressing challenges in our field. By fostering a trusted, peer-driven environment, the Board enables members to exchange best practices, explore innovative approaches, and collaboratively shape future strategies.

Kim Troxell, Head of US Commercial Learning & Development, AbbVie

What’s Actually Emerging 

A few patterns we’ve seen across industries: 

• L&D is becoming a decision function, not just a delivery function. The hardest part isn’t building content. It’s knowing what to do, when, and why. 
• Speed is becoming the competitive advantage. As one member put it: “It’s like having experts on speed dial.” 
• Peer insights are replacing static best practices. Static frameworks aren’t holding up against the pace of change. 
• AI is creating urgency, but not clarity. Everyone is experimenting. Very few have a clear operating model. 
• Leadership development is under pressure to prove itself. Not participation. Performance. 

How Members are Helping Each Other 

Not polished case studies — real moments where decisions were shaped. 

Pressure-testing an AI strategy. A member who recently moved from a long-standing HR role into Talent Management used our North American Learning Executive Summit to shape her organization’s AI approach. “The sessions and conversations played a pivotal role in shaping our AI strategy and approach for Global Operations. Hearing from peers and experts about the practical challenges and innovative solutions around AI helped me pressure-test decisions and avoid potential missteps as our team moved forward.” 

Validating how to measure training impact. Another member used the community as a brainstorming partner while exploring personalized, predictive learning journeys. “It has served as an effective forum to test whether an initiative we’re exploring is working, how to identify potential pitfalls, and how to surface the right partners to engage along the way.” 

Course-correcting in real time. As David Curtis, Sr. Manager of Leadership and Employee Development at Pacific Gas & Electric Company, described it: “These insights have prompted me to reassess some of my approaches and course-correct where necessary, leading to more effective outcomes.” 

Finding validation — not just answers. As Nicole Krause, Director, Headquarters Learning and Development at Target, put it: “I really appreciate hearing from other companies that are experiencing similar challenges. It has served as inspiration and validation that we are not alone in the problems we face.” 

What came up repeatedly wasn’t just what was discussed — but how we’re creating solutions for L&D leaders. 

“A truly open, non-competitive environment where knowledge is freely shared and real challenges are tackled through thoughtful peer-to-peer conversations — without the noise of vendor selling.”

I really appreciate hearing from other companies that are experiencing similar challenges. It has served as inspiration and validation that we are not alone in the problems we face.

Nicole Krause, Director, Headquarters Learning and Development at Target

What’s Changing in Year Two 

Year one was about understanding the problem. Year two is about going deeper on solving it. 

• More working sessions, less broad discussions. Smaller groups, real challenges, live problem-solving. 
• Sharper focus on the 5 questions L&D leaders are being held accountable for. 
• Increased focus on AI — practically, not theoretically. Not “what is AI?” but: What are you actually using? What’s working? What’s scalable? 
• Leadership grounded in real experience, with top L&D leaders shaping the agenda. 
• Structured around in-progress decisions, not abstract trends. 

Join the Learning & Development Board for More Insights 

L&D leaders are operating in a function that’s being redefined in real time. The question isn’t whether you have all the answers — it’s whether you have the right people to think them through with. 

What we’ve seen over the past year is simple: the leaders who move fastest aren’t the ones with the best frameworks. They’re the ones with access to real insights at the moment they need it. 

“The Learning & Development Board has been an exceptional space to connect with peers across a wide range of companies and industries. I’m grateful for the openness of this community — its willingness to share, support, and help one another grow.” — Kendra Smith, Head of Talent & Learning at LyondellBasell 

Learn more and join your peers leading L&D at the world’s largest companies to get the full story of what actually works (and what doesn’t) that you won’t hear from other sources. 

Senior AEO, SEO, and brand visibility leaders from the world’s largest enterprises gathered in Chicago for the AEO Board Founders Summit.

Practitioners representing 35 companies — including Zebra Technologies, Salesforce, Securian Financial, Northwestern Mutual, Astellas Pharma, and more — spent a full day in confidential peer discussions, hands-on vendor clinics, and a private Founders dinner.

No sponsors on stage. No vendor pitches. No polished case studies from three years ago.

Just real conversations, and there was a lot to talk about. Here’s what we uncovered for the future of AEO.

AEO Leaders Aren’t Debating the “Why” Anymore

The biggest signal from the day: this group wasn’t debating whether AI search matters. That question is settled. What they came to work through was harder — how do you actually make progress when the playbook doesn’t exist yet? 

Who needs to own this? What do you fix first? What can you measure responsibly — and what are you overselling to leadership when you report it? How do you build alignment across teams that weren’t designed to work together on this? 

Those are the questions that filled the room. And the fact that senior leaders are all wrestling with the same ones — right now, in real time — is exactly the kind of intelligence that doesn’t show up in agency reports or conference keynotes. 

Nobody Has Figured Out Where AEO Lives Yet

The first discussion of the day surfaced something most AEO leaders already know but rarely say out loud: the function doesn’t have a natural home. 

Across the room, our members described AEO sitting in SEO, digital marketing, search, corporate communications, customer engagement, web operations, and — in more than a few cases — nowhere formally at all.  

One member’s organization had no AEO function to speak of. Another described colleagues throwing content into ChatGPT and calling it AEO-ready. 

What members agreed on: where AEO lands often depends on what problem you’re trying to solve. Brand visibility requires different ownership than product discoverability. And wherever it sits, the work immediately touches teams that weren’t expecting to be part of it — Content, PR, IT, Legal, Paid, Affiliate, and Sales Enablement. 

The organizations making the most progress are the ones that built working relationships across silos — through AI task forces, weekly cross-team standups, “lunch and learn” programs, and shared AI value statements that give everyone something to align to.

Showing the Gaps Across the Business Help Improve the Case for AEO Investment

Getting leadership to fund AEO work is a shared pain point. The consensus from members who had cracked it: stop asking for budget based on potential and start showing them what’s broken. 

Members described auditing what’s surfacing in LLMs for their brand, and what isn’t. One member found that only 3% of the content pulling into AI responses was created by their team. That one number changed the conversation with leadership immediately. 

Another ran a benchmarking analysis across ten major brands, showing exactly where they led, where they trailed, and where they were invisible. Corporate Communications, Search, Web, and R&D all ended up at the table as a result. 

Other framing that moved leadership: 

• Tying declining organic traffic to measurable revenue impact 
• Surfacing compliance and accuracy risk — wrong brand information in AI responses is a regulatory issue, not just a marketing one 
• Positioning AI search as a future paid channel: if you can’t earn organic presence now, you’ll be buying it when the ads arrive (and one member noted OpenAI’s early ad pilot generated $100M in its first six weeks)

The urgency isn’t hard to establish. As one member put it: “Execs are being told ‘AI or you’re going to die.'” The challenge is making the ask specific, the gap visible, and the win credible. 

AEO Governance: Don’t Build the Rules Before You Run the Experiments 

Members shared different approaches to AEO governance, with one consistent theme: the most functional programs are integrating AI accountability into what already exists. 

One member described building a “Responsible AI Working Group” that addresses when AI tools can and can’t be used, baked into existing operational controls. Another brought their AI task force directly into existing data governance and ethics structures. 

One of our members shared they’re developing a full Center of Excellence — a technical roadmap, a prompt library, and a structured model that distinguishes the teams creating content from the teams distributing it. 

One sharp piece of advice from one of our members, who tried and disbanded COEs too early: don’t build the governance infrastructure before you know what you need. Run projects first. Let the framework emerge from what you learn in practice. 

AEO Measurement Is Useful And It Needs a Lot of Context 

The afternoon opened with one of the most honest conversations of the day: nobody fully trusts their AEO metrics yet. 

Prompt volume is opaque. Citation data is inconsistent across platforms. Different tools produce wildly different visibility scores for the same brand on the same query. 

One member built an executive report based on a platform that ranked their brand #1 — then ran the same query through a second vendor and landed near the bottom. Members said they are measuring directionally, not definitively, and getting ahead of leadership before the KPI conversation happens. 

Several members have stopped reporting organic clicks entirely. What replaced it is a harder, more honest set of questions — whether the right audiences are finding the right content, whether they’re doing something when they get there, and whether any of it is moving the business. 

One member shared that since implementing a jobs-to-be-done content program, their monthly search impressions grew from roughly 7–10 million to over 80 million. One company in the room lost 42% of organic traffic, and reported zero change in conversion rate. 

What’s Actually Working in AEO Content and Tech 

Members got specific about what’s moving the needle and what they’ve left behind. 

Content approaches that are producing results: 

• Lead H1 headings with action verbs: Users prompt with what they’re trying to do, and LLMs follow that intent 
• Put the answer at the top of the page: LLMs stop crawling if you don’t lead with relevance 
• Build in FAQs, Q&A structures, comparison tables, and anchor-linked tables of contents 
• Add published and last-reviewed dates: Recency signals matter 
• Credit authors with relevant credentials: LLMs weight MDs, PhDs, and domain experts higher 
• Structure YouTube chapters around questions, not topics 
• Invest in infographics and video: Both are increasingly pulled into AI responses as citations 

What they’re moving away from: 

• Massive “ultimate guide” content built for old SEO logic 
• Marketing language that adds noise without signal 
• PDFs buried in the site 
• Videos without voiceover

The build-versus-buy debate wasn’t really a debate. Buy. The landscape is moving too fast to build competitively, and the members who tried mostly learned that the hard way. 

What the room spent more time on was interoperability — how to connect what you’re buying, so the insights don’t live in silos across three different dashboards. 

This Is Why the AEO Board Exists 

The Founders Summit wasn’t just a good day of conversation. It was proof that this community fills a real gap. 

AEO leaders are operating in a space where the playbooks are still being written, the vendor claims are still being tested, and the internal alignment work is still being done. The practitioners doing this work at large enterprises are navigating ambiguity, and most of them are doing it without many peers who understand the actual constraints. 

The AEO Board is a confidential, vendor-free peer community for exactly those leaders: senior brand visibility practitioners at large enterprises who need more than conference keynotes and agency reports. Year-round access to the intelligence, relationships, and honest conversations that help you make better decisions in real time. 

If you weren’t in the room in Chicago, the community is open. Join your peers today to get ahead of the future of AEO.

What’s Expanding

The updated name also signals a broader evolution in our community’s focus. 

AI will now be a central theme across the agenda, including topics such as AI governance, lifecycle management, operating models, and value realization.  

In addition, our members will see expanded opportunities for deeper engagement, including: 

• New AI-focused working groups and leadership cohorts
• More targeted working sessions on tools, platforms, and use cases
• A growing library of peer-driven insights, toolkits, and benchmarking data

These enhancements are designed to help leaders move beyond strategy and into execution. 

A Clearer Signal to the Current Landscape 

Ultimately, the shift to the Data & AI Strategy Board is about alignment. 

Alignment with how the role of data leaders is evolving.
Alignment with the conversations already happening inside the community.
And alignment with the urgency organizations are facing as they operationalize AI. 

For our current members, it reinforces the value they’re already receiving. For future members, it signals a community built for the full scope of modern data and AI leadership. 

Join the Community

As the pace of AI adoption accelerates, the need for trusted, peer insights has never been greater. 

The Data & AI Strategy Board brings together senior leaders navigating these challenges in real time, offering a space to share candid perspectives, learn from your peers, and move faster with greater confidence. 

If you’re leading data and AI strategy today, this community is built for the work in front of you.