Instructional Design in the Age of AI

“Imagine an L&D team in the near future, where instructional designers each have their own artificial-intelligence assistant. The assistants handle routine tasks, analyze learner data, and serve as brainstorming partners for content design.” That’s the future Michelle Lentz paints in her TD at Work guide, “Partner With AI for Instructional Design.”

To investigate the use of AI in instructional design, ATD Research published AI in Instructional Design: Transforming Workflows and Content Creation in July 2025. In this study, 232 instructional designers answered questions about how they use AI tools for day-to-day tasks, content creation, and the development of multimedia assets. The study also explores the types of AI tools they use and how those tools affect course quality and the time it takes to create them.

ATD Research found that 80 percent of instructional designers surveyed currently use AI tools while designing courses. Almost all of them use generative AI as opposed to traditional AI. Generative AI can generate content such as text, images, videos, or audio based on user prompts.

Instructional designers are responsible for many different tasks while designing courses, and depending on the purpose, they use AI tools with varying frequency.

Day-to-Day Tasks

This study first investigated how often instructional designers use AI tools to augment day-to-day tasks. Instructional designers commonly cited outlining and summarizing, writing, and brainstorming with the help of AI tools. Most find AI tools to be somewhat or very effective for performing those tasks.

Specific Work Tasks

When it comes to specific work tasks that instructional designers are responsible for, ATD Research found that they use AI tools more often for outlining courses or storyboarding and writing learning objectives. They use these AI tools less for developing learner personas and analyzing learner data. Only 21 percent of respondents always or often use AI to develop learner personas, and only 19 percent do so to analyze learner data.

In her TD at Work guide, Lentz explains how instructional designers can use AI to develop learner personas. They can prompt an AI tool to generate personas using learner information such as age, job role, education level, and other characteristics. Instructional designers can then use those personas to gain insights about the needs and preferences of different types of learners.

Multimedia Assets

Lastly, instructional designers may be responsible for developing multimedia assets, so ATD Research wanted to investigate how frequently they use AI tools to do so. The only multimedia asset that instructional designers commonly use AI tools to develop is narration. Fifty-four percent reported often or always doing so. Smaller percentages of instructional designers use AI to create assets such as videos, avatars, and simulations. Less than a fifth reported often or always using AI for these.

To learn more about how instructional designers use AI tools and what benefits they’ve experienced, download the full research report, sponsored by Clarity Consultants, for free here.