With more than 50 hospital campuses, over 100,000 team members, and a mission rooted in whole-person care, AdventHealth is one of the largest nonprofit health systems in the U.S. But beyond clinical excellence, the organization is also advancing how its people learn, grow, and adapt in an industry undergoing rapid transformation.

In this candid and insightful conversation, Marquita Williams, Executive Director of Organizational Learning & Development at AdventHealth, speaks with Robert Daniel, Chief Revenue Officer at Data Society, about how her team is building a more personalized, inclusive, and future-ready learning culture across the organization.

From rolling out high-quality learning design standards and launching a “power skills” development initiative to preparing for a GenAI-enabled future, Williams highlights how learning is being reimagined as both a strategic differentiator and a deeply human experience. Whether it’s through content harmonization or designing engaging compliance training, her vision emphasizes equity, curiosity, and the synergy between people and technology.

The following Q&A explores the real work of culture-building in a complex healthcare environment, and how AdventHealth is preparing its workforce to thrive alongside intelligent technologies.

Edited Excerpts

Q: When you think about everything your team achieved in 2024, what moments stand out most?

Both the learning and development team as well as the learning technology and design team report to me, and I’m incredibly proud of the work they’re doing across the organization.

If I had to highlight a standout achievement from the technology and design team in 2024, it would be the development and implementation of learning standards to ensure that the content delivered to our team members via our LMS meets the highest quality benchmarks.

This initiative has advanced equitable learning across our organization. By adopting inclusive design principles and offering diverse learning resources, our team members are better supported in ways that meet their unique needs. The implementation of learning standards also sparked the creation of what my technology and design leader refers to as a “learning design and technology coalition.”

That coalition, primarily composed of instructional designers from across the organization, has grown into a vibrant learning community. It serves as a hub for knowledge sharing, exploration of emerging technologies, collaborative partnerships, and collective problem-solving. This has helped further cultivate a culture of continuous improvement and innovation in our technology and design space.

I also want to spotlight our learning and development team, who in 2024 successfully launched our organization’s first opt-in “power skills” learning experience. This initiative provides every team member with access to a wide range of resources, including books, podcasts, expert interviews, microlearning modules, and short videos. We began with key power skills such as communication, collaboration, and emotional intelligence.

To kick off the campaign, we created a commercial that helped debunk common misconceptions that hold people back from learning like age, lack of time, or prior education. Our message was clear: learning is lifelong. The campaign energized our teams and underscored our goal of being a preeminent learning organization. It reinforced that everyone has the opportunity to grow and develop, especially with the World Economic Forum stating that skills have an average shelf life of just five years. The result is a more knowledgeable, capable workforce that’s ready for the future.

Q: Looking ahead, how do you think GenAI will influence learning and development at your company?

We’re a healthcare organization, and GenAI is going to take compliance training and optional learning to a whole new level. I imagine a future without those nod-off training sessions where you’re sitting in a classroom feeling like you’re watching paint dry. Instead, GenAI will personalize content based on your specific role and level of expertise. Plus, with GenAI’s real-time feedback and simulations, practicing compliance requirements could actually become engaging and maybe even fun for our team members.

We now have all five generations in our workforce, and this will be a huge benefit for our learners.

On the optional learning side, GenAI can become a personal tour guide, curating the perfect playlist of educational content. It could draw on interests, goals, prior knowledge, and even feedback from recent development conversations with leaders.

This kind of technology can help create a more seamless and motivating learning experience. As we grow, we want content that evolves with us, and GenAI will help make that possible. For example, it could help connect learners with others, especially if they lack resources to build a coalition, bringing together individuals who share interests or have complementary skills, and turning learning into a community experience. It’s going to make compliance training and optional learning more personalized, interactive, and fun.

Q: If you could wave a magic wand and create any AI-powered learning tool, what would it be and what problem would it solve?

We’re currently deep into a content harmonization project as we transition from one LMS to another. That process involves consolidating, optimizing, and migrating our content.

When I think about a magic wand, I imagine an AI-driven content repository we could build tomorrow. How wonderful would it be to easily find, access, review, and manage all of our web-based training courses?

Right now, our content is scattered—across laptops, shared drives, OneDrives, and different team folders. Instructional designers and teams store materials in various places, making it hard to even know what exists. But imagine if that AI tool could automatically discover content, tag and categorize it, and make it searchable. That would empower our instructional designers, educators, and subject matter experts to simply describe what they need and the system would surface the right courses.

It could also flag duplicate content, identify outdated material, and even point out gaps based on trends or external research it pulls from technology wave streams. That enhancement would be fantastic as there are only so many hands that we have to help us constantly consolidate content.

Q: There’s a lot of concern about AI taking over human jobs, especially in fields like healthcare. How do you see AI and people working together when it comes to the future of learning?

The worry about the advent of AI, is warranted, because there is a potential to replace jobs across various sectors. We often hear that “AI won’t replace your job, but it will replace you if you’re not using AI as a collaborator.” But what if there’s a case where it actually might, maybe in the future?

In the healthcare industry, in particular, we see significant advancements as opposed to job replacement. We’re seeing AI technologies perform tasks ranging from diagnosing diseases to managing patient records. While these developments raise concerns about job replacement, they also present an incredible opportunity for collaboration between humans and technology.

I envision a future where AI and humans work hand-in-hand. Many share that future with me, especially in the realm of learning and healthcare. AI can process a significant amount of data, provide insights that would take humans much longer to uncover and help enhance both decision-making and patient care.

However, human intuition, empathy, and some of those more ethical considerations are irreplaceable and crucial in the healthcare industry. So by leveraging AI’s capabilities to complement that human connection and human expertise, we can create a more efficient, effective, and compassionate healthcare system — one where both the team member and AI thrive together.

CDO Magazine appreciates Marquita Williams for sharing her insights with our global community.