5 Priorities for Education-Led Growth Success

EDITOR’S NOTE: Because enterprise learning involves multiple disciplines and perspectives, we regularly invite experts from other organizations to share insights. Today, Intellum Director of Customer and Partner Enablement, Dr. Anderson Campbell, shares new research about the state of education-led growth and its implications for the road ahead.

Education-Led Growth Success is Becoming a Reality

In recent years, the conversation around extended enterprise learning has shifted. Not long ago, organizations were asking, “Does education drive business outcomes?” Now, they’re proving how it does.

In 2024, Forrester benchmark data showed clear links between customer education and product adoption, retention, and performance. But new survey results reveal a more nuanced relationship.

Findings from our 2026 Education-Led Growth Report suggest that the challenge is not just about demonstrating added value. It’s about building systems and strategies that sustain value across the business.

What does this mean for future-minded learning leaders? To answer that question, let’s take a fresh look at key issues and opportunities…

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5 Critical Factors for Education-Led Growth Success

1. AI Scales Output, But Not Strategy (Yet)

In 2024, 99% of survey respondents expected to be using AI by now, and the latest data confirms the accuracy of that prediction. This year, more than 90% of education teams are taking advantage of AI.

However, the way organizations are applying AI tells an important underlying story. Most are focusing on:

• Content creation (69.9%)
• Learner support, including automation and chatbots (65.3%)
• Planning assistance (65.3%)

These AI use cases are excellent. Education teams are creating content faster and responding to learners more efficiently.

However, AI is not yet fundamentally changing the way most programs are designed or measured. Incremental improvements are beneficial, but transformative efforts lead to stronger, more lasting business impact.

This raises a related concern: If your strategy is fragmented or unclear, AI will scale that, as well. For years, organizations at the forefront of customer and channel education have stressed the importance of putting strategy before design, development, and delivery. The rise of AI further reinforces this need.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER:

• Are you using AI to rethink the way you deliver learning, or only as a tool to produce more output?
• Where could AI help personalize or adapt learning experiences, rather than just automate them?
• How can you fit AI-generated content into your broader content strategy?

For in-depth guidance to prepare your learning content, programs, and teams for an AI-first future, check out this free AI Readiness Playbook for L&D.

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2. Measurement is Improving, But Integration Still Lags

This year’s data includes good news: More teams are measuring impact (95%), while only 5% still don’t measure at all. Also, more organizations are evaluating results earlier. Specifically, 76% say they now begin evaluating results within the first three months of a program launch.

However, measurement maturity isn’t just about timing. It’s also about what you’re able to measure.

Activity and completion data has always been the easiest to access. Still, the toughest measurement challenge has been — and continues to be — integration between systems. That’s because learning data typically resides in one place, while business outcome data (like revenue, retention, product usage) lives elsewhere.

Unless these systems are connected, moving beyond surface-level metrics is difficult. Yet, this is the most critical factor in proving how well your program works. And connecting various sources of relevant data remains a massive challenge for organizations pursuing education-led growth.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER:

• Do you know where your “source of truth” for impact data actually lives?
• Can you connect learning activity to customer, partner or employee outcomes? Where are the bottlenecks?
• Are you designing programs with measurement in mind from the start?

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3. More Marketing Doesn’t Guarantee External Engagement

External education programs typically have access to more marketing resources. This year, 72% told us they rely on some form of marketing support, while 40% of internal programs have no marketing support at all. Yet, despite this advantage, external audience engagement still lags significantly behind internal programs.

On the surface, this finding isn’t surprising. After all, employees are usually required to complete training, while external audiences are free to choose whether they want to participate. This means external-facing programs must invest more heavily in marketing to attract people and involve them in learning. Yet, even with stronger investment in outreach and promotion, the gap persists.

What does this tell us? It suggests the issue is more than reach. It’s also relevance. External audiences don’t engage with education just because it exists or it is promoted well. They engage when they believe it will help them do something that matters to them. They respond to perceived value.

No one wakes up thinking, “I want to go to a product academy today.” People wake up thinking about their job. They care about the problems they need to solve, what they need to accomplish, and how to move beyond what’s keeping them from achieving those objectives. Customer and partner education works best when it fits into this context.

Too often, external education is built as a structured, linear experience. This means long courses, rigid prerequisites, and formal pathways that assume people have the time and motivation to work through them.

However, most learners desire something much simpler. They want to know the fastest way to get unstuck, adopt a feature, or do their job better. When that doesn’t happen, engagement drops, no matter how strong the marketing is.

So, the core challenge typically isn’t distribution. What matters most is alignment with real, specific audience needs.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER:

• Do you tie education to specific moments in the customer lifecycle or offer a generic, standalone program?
• Are you optimizing for enrollment or actual behavior change?
• Where are learners dropping off? What does that say about perceived value?

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4. Video and Formal Learning Dominate Content Formats

Training videos remain the most widely used content type (68.4%), followed by virtual and in-person classroom learning. Knowledge base content and certification programs are also widely used, confirming the continued importance of structured, instructor-led experiences.

This supports what we’ve believed for years: Formal learning plays a critical role in onboarding, certification, and building foundational knowledge at scale. But what do in-app guidance and embedded learning contribute? They trail significantly behind more structured approaches.

Interestingly, in-app guidance previously ranked among the top formats, but new data indicates a shift back toward more formal, program-based learning. What’s causing this? Several factors could be involved:

• Formal programs are better suited for deeper learning, adoption, and advocacy. This makes sense for complex products. So, the uptick may mean more companies with sophisticated offerings responded to the most recent survey.

• It may also indicate a gap that different content could fill. As we’ve noted, learners don’t show up simply because content exists. They engage when it helps them solve a problem in real time. This is often easy to address with something other than a course — a short video, a quick answer, or guidance embedded directly in an individual’s workflow.

The takeaway isn’t to replace structured learning. Defined learning paths and certification programs clearly play a useful role in education-led growth. However, as leaders, we need to recognize that just-in-time solutions serve a different purpose than formal learning — and most programs are still based on a structured approach.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER:

• Where do you rely on full courses when a shorter, more targeted format would be more effective?
• Do learners have access to quick, in-the-moment support, or only structured programs?
• How are you balancing foundational learning with just-in-time enablement?

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5. Content Demand Is Outpacing Most Teams’ Capacity

If there is one constant across all education programs, it is that content plays a central role. In other words, “Content is king.”

But content must also scale with demand when organizations need to support more audiences, deliver more personalized experiences, and cover more use cases.

Even teams that use AI can’t keep up with demand on their own. As a result, we’re seeing much heavier reliance on external partners for content development, instructional design, and platform support.

Going forward, a key aspect of content strategy won’t only be what you create or which format you choose, but how efficiently and effectively you use AI to scale content development. Leading-edge organizations are already making this a priority.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER:

• Which content should you create internally vs. externally?
• Where can templates, modular design, or content reuse improve efficiency?
• How will you maintain quality as production volume increases?

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Next Steps: Where to Focus for Education-Led Growth Success

The latest research findings are clear. Education-led growth is no longer a question of whether this strategy works. It’s a question of how well organizations execute it.

This year’s responses show significant progress: Widespread AI adoption, earlier measurement, and expanded reach across audiences. But the data also pinpoints areas where programs continue to fall short: Over-reliance on structured content, gaps in external engagement, and systems that aren’t fully connected.

The next-stage opportunity is not about doing more. It’s about designing programs that are more relevant, more measurable, and easier to deliver at scale.

If you want to prepare your organization for education-led growth success, you’ll find more insights and actionable ideas in the full survey analysis. DOWNLOAD THE 2026 REPORT FROM INTELLUM →

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