Onboarding a new cohort of employees used to demand a huge investment: continual coaching, real-time feedback, and constant managerial oversight. When it worked, it drained leaders’ time. When it didn’t, the costs were even higher—unprepared employees and high turnover. Today’s entrepreneurs have another option: AI agents.
Staying competitive now depends on fast, effective training and upskilling—not just for business owners themselves, but for their teams, new and existing employees alike. AI agents are poised to change the corporate training landscape, helping businesses close skills gaps created by rapid technological change.
Maybe you’re skeptical of AI agents. Your fears aren’t entirely misplaced. A recent Carnegie Mellon experiment attempted to run an entire company, TheAgentCompany, with AI agents. The results were far from reassuring—even the best-performing agent struggled to complete a quarter of its assigned tasks. It’s safe to say that agents aren’t ready to autonomously lead businesses. But when used thoughtfully, they can be powerful tools for a range of functions, including skill-building and personalized learning.
At my company, Jotform, we’ve seen firsthand how AI agents can help scale learning, democratize opportunities, and future-proof companies in fast-changing economies. Here’s a closer look at how.
What Are AI Agents—And What Can They Do For Training
AI agents are systems designed to simulate human reasoning: they execute tasks, make decisions, and adapt—often without needing direct human intervention.
There are various categories of AI agents, like voice agents, knowledge-based agents, and autonomous agents. Learning and training agents are a type of specialized autonomous agent designed for knowledge acquisition and skill-building. They’re not fully autonomous educators, designing course curricula and activities out of thin air. (We saw the pitfalls of that approach with TheAgentCompany story.) But they’re more autonomous than your traditional corporate learning modules, where everyone receives the same passive videos and quizzes. These have their own downfalls as well, like low completion rates (by some estimates, 3-6 percent) and, quite frankly, they’re boring.
Traditional corporate training programs, which lean on passive content, often fall short of their goals. Companies like Uplimit are rolling out educational AI agents that promise significantly higher completion rates (upwards of 90 percent) and better results. It boils down to engagement—the active learning, with role playing and personalized feedback, is more stimulating than merely watching a video and completing a quiz. Agents can provide 24/7 assistance, responding to questions as soon as they pop up. What’s more, education and training with agents can be highly personalized. As Bill Gates noted:
“If a tutoring agent knows that a kid likes Minecraft and Taylor Swift, it will use Minecraft to teach them about calculating the volume and area of shapes, and Taylor’s lyrics to teach them about storytelling and rhyme schemes. The experience will be far richer—with graphics and sound, for example—and more personalized than today’s text-based tutors.”
This example focuses on childhood education, but the takeaway holds: AI agents have the potential to tailor lessons using the most effective pedagogy. They won’t replace teachers, but they can act as highly efficient teaching assistants—and they can also replace outdated virtual training sessions that fail to engage learners.
Business Benefits
The clearest advantage of using AI agents for training is faster, more effective learning. Agents can train a higher volume of employees in the same amount of time. Employees will gain skills more efficiently, giving them more time to apply what they’ve learned—and likely boosting engagement in the process. They’ll be better prepared to stay competitive. Those wary of AI’s impact on jobs may feel more confident, both in using new technologies and in their footing within the organization.
For managers, AI agents mean less time spent overseeing basic training and more time to focus on higher-value tasks. Engagement can rise across the board.
Of course, humans must still lead. As TheAgentCompany experiment showed, AI workforces can’t run themselves. The key is smart delegation: entrepreneurs and managers should use AI agents to handle designated training tasks, while maintaining strategic direction.
Businesses that move quickly to integrate AI-driven learning will reap a major competitive advantage. AI agents won’t replace the human side of education, but they can massively enhance it, making corporate training faster, more personalized, and more engaging.
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