Brent Colescott has spent more than two decades inside the learning and HR technology industry, asking the same inconvenient question from both sides of the table: why do organizations spend so much on developing people and get so little back for it?
He’s run that function from the inside as a learning and development executive, and studied it from the outside as a consultant to Fortune 500 companies for nearly a decade. That dual view shapes his read on AI now. Not what the vendor decks promise, but what actually happens to judgment and skill when a workforce stops practicing them.
That question is the subject of his first book, Enabling Critical Thinking. The argument: organizations said they wanted critical thinkers, then quietly stopped building them, and AI is making that shortfall impossible to ignore.
He writes Wednesday Words, a blog now in its seventh year, and has been published in Chief Learning Officer Magazine, Training Industry, and HRCI. He’s spoken at ATD International, the CLO Symposium, Tech HR India, and the Beyond HR Forum.
He lives in the Houston area, is a devoted, if occasionally long-suffering, Astros fan, and believes the most quietly endangered skill in the modern workforce is the ability to think for yourself.