As artificial intelligence changes the way people work, one of the most important questions facing learning and development leaders may have surprisingly little to do with technology. If knowledge becomes easier to access and routine work becomes easier to automate, what capabilities will help people continue to perform when their jobs, tools, and expectations keep changing?
For Brian Davidson, founder and president of MindVue, the answer includes resilience, grit, motivation, growth mindset, adaptability, purpose, and other qualities that have traditionally been grouped under the broad category of soft skills. Davidson sees them differently. These are performance skills, and they influence whether people can apply what they know, persevere through difficulty, respond constructively to change, and continue developing when familiar ways of working no longer apply.
That perspective drives a fascinating conversation on the Training Impact Podcast about the psychology of performance, the limitations of traditional training, and the potential for artificial intelligence to make highly personalized development available at a scale that previously would have been difficult to imagine.
Davidson’s path to MindVue began with curiosity rather than a predetermined business plan. After earning an undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Iowa, he added secondary education and began teaching at Minnetonka High School in Minnesota. Working directly with students prompted him to look more closely at what separated consistently successful students from their peers.
Two qualities repeatedly stood out: self-motivation and self-discipline.
The observation eventually led Davidson to graduate work at the University of Kansas, where his interests expanded through counseling psychology, positive psychology, and leadership development. He began studying resilience, grit, growth mindset, self-efficacy, and other psychological factors while asking a practical question that would eventually shape MindVue: Can these capabilities actually be developed?
That question led to the creation and validation of an assessment combining multiple mindset factors into a more comprehensive model. Early work showed a relationship with academic performance, while curriculum development explored how those factors could be strengthened rather than simply measured.
An invitation to train leadership, faculty, and staff in New Delhi, India, eventually expanded the ambition behind the work. Seeing the sheer number of people who could benefit from stronger motivation, perseverance, and resilience shifted the challenge from development alone to development at scale. How could capabilities traditionally supported through coaching, education, and personal interaction reach millions of people?
That question remains central to MindVue today.
One of the most useful insights Davidson shares is that qualities such as resilience and grit are not as fixed as they were once assumed to be. Although genetics and personality can influence them, individual levels can rise or fall as circumstances change.
MindVue discovered the importance of that distinction while assessing people who appeared, from the outside, to represent extraordinary levels of achievement. Professional athletes, military leaders, and senior executives sometimes produced unexpectedly low scores on factors that seemed inconsistent with their accomplishments.
The explanation emerged by looking beyond the score.
Some were burned out. Others had lost their sense of purpose or passion. Major relationship changes, health concerns, and other life events were affecting people who continued to appear highly successful professionally. Their achievements had not disappeared, but something important beneath the performance had changed.
For training leaders, the implication is significant. An assessment should not necessarily be treated as a permanent label describing what someone is capable of becoming. It can instead provide a snapshot of where that person is today and a starting point for development.
Davidson also cautions against the idea that organizations can simply push grit or resilience onto people. Grit has to be pulled from within by connecting perseverance with goals that genuinely matter to the individual. Values become part of that foundation because they help people establish meaningful goals, maintain integrity through challenges, and find reasons to continue when progress becomes difficult.
This distinction also helps explain why developing performance skills is different from simply acquiring knowledge. A person can understand the definition of resilience without becoming more resilient. Knowing what grit means does not automatically create perseverance.
Davidson compares these capabilities to mental muscles. Just as physical fitness requires repeated exercise, mindset skills have to be practiced, maintained, and strengthened over time.
Resilience provides a practical example. Davidson emphasizes that resilience rarely develops in isolation because relationships can provide support when people encounter difficult circumstances. He also describes a process called adaptive forecasting, in which people scan their environment for potential changes and consciously consider how those changes are interpreted.
Someone who immediately frames change as a threat or obstacle is more likely to resist it. Someone capable of identifying opportunity within the same change may be more willing to adapt. The external event may be identical, but the interpretation influences the response.
For organizations navigating AI adoption, restructuring, new technology, or rapidly evolving roles, that makes resilience a practical business capability rather than an abstract psychological concept. Training cannot eliminate uncertainty, but it can help people become better prepared to respond to it.
That is where the MindVue story begins moving into particularly interesting territory. Coaching and training have already provided ways to develop these capabilities, but they can be difficult to personalize across large populations. MindVue is now exploring whether artificial intelligence can preserve the individual relevance of coaching while making that development dramatically more scalable.
The challenge for MindVue is one familiar to many learning organizations. Coaching can be highly effective because a coach learns about the individual, understands personal goals and challenges, asks questions, and adjusts the development experience accordingly. But the more individualized the experience becomes, the more difficult and expensive it can be to deliver at scale.
Artificial intelligence creates another possibility.
MindVue has developed an AI platform that begins with a conversational intake designed to understand the learner’s goals, challenges, hobbies, and interests. The individual also completes MindVue’s psychometric assessment, creating a snapshot of mindset factors at that point in time.
The platform uses that information to create a personalized podcast approximately 10 to 15 minutes long. Rather than delivering the same lesson to everyone, the podcast is built around the individual, incorporating personal goals, challenges, and interests into the learning experience.
After listening, the learner engages with an AI coach to reflect on what was covered and consider how it applies to work or life. Those conversations become part of an expanding learner history that can influence future podcasts and coaching interactions.
It creates a continuous learning cycle in which the system learns more about the individual as the individual learns.
For L&D leaders, the interesting idea is not simply the use of AI to generate content. It is the possibility of using AI to create learning that becomes progressively more relevant to the individual. Narrative provides context, coaching encourages reflection, and the learner’s responses provide additional information that can shape what comes next.
Over time, reassessment could add another important dimension. MindVue could potentially compare changes in resilience, grit, motivation, and other factors with the developmental experiences occurring between assessments. That creates the possibility of learning not only whether someone participated, but which approaches appear to produce meaningful development for different people.
This emphasis on measurement is particularly relevant for organizations trying to connect learning with performance.
MindVue has reported improvements of approximately 40 to 50 percent in some mindset factors through previous human-led coaching and training programs typically conducted over about six months. Davidson has also seen improvement through shorter interventions, including curriculum delivered over approximately 10 weeks.
The newer AI approach is still being evaluated, but the larger philosophy remains consistent: measure where people begin, provide development, and determine whether the capability itself changes.
That is a very different standard from course completion.
For organizations responsible for employee development as well as extended enterprise training, the distinction matters. A completed course tells you that someone participated. It does not necessarily tell you whether a dealer became more adaptable, a franchise manager became more resilient, or a customer became more capable of applying what was taught.
MindVue’s approach points toward a model in which training success is connected more closely to capability development.
For readers interested in the training architecture behind that model, the companion case study, MindVue: Building the Human Performance Skills People Need to Thrive Through Change, takes the discussion further. It examines MindVue’s training structure, learner populations, operational challenges, and best practices through the lens of the LatitudeLearning Training Program Roadmap, including the relationship between identifying performance needs, acquiring knowledge, practicing skills, and measuring development.
The larger theme of Davidson’s conversation is ultimately not AI. It is how people will respond to the changes AI creates.
Davidson describes MindVue’s mission in this environment as building human readiness. If technology continues accelerating change, organizations will need people capable of learning, adapting, recovering from disruption, and finding purpose even when familiar roles and processes are changing around them.
That makes resilience, grit, motivation, and adaptability increasingly relevant to organizational performance.
Davidson also expects an interesting counterbalance as AI becomes more embedded in everyday work. Technology may make personalized learning dramatically more scalable, but human interaction could become even more valuable. People will still want relationships, conversations, shared experiences, community, and opportunities to learn with other people.
For L&D leaders, the future may therefore require a thoughtful combination of both. AI can help personalize learning, provide scalable coaching, and make knowledge more accessible. Human interaction can provide context, relationships, culture, empathy, and experiences that technology cannot simply replace.
The opportunity is not to automate every learning experience. It is to use technology where it improves development while preserving the human elements that help people grow.
Perhaps the most important idea emerging from the conversation with Davidson is that the future of learning cannot be focused exclusively on helping people know more. As knowledge becomes increasingly accessible, organizations will also need to help people become better at navigating what they do not yet know.
That requires resilience when circumstances change, grit when progress becomes difficult, adaptability when established approaches stop working, and purpose that gives people a reason to continue developing.
MindVue is bringing assessment, coaching, training, and emerging AI capabilities together around that challenge. The technology is important, but the objective is distinctly human: helping people develop the performance skills they need to navigate change and continue moving forward.
For training leaders facing their own period of rapid transformation, that may be one of the most important capabilities they can help their organizations build.
Want to go deeper?
🎧 To explore the full conversation, listen to the Training Impact Podcast episode featuring Brian Davidson of MindVue.
📄 Download the companion case study: MindVue: Building the Human Performance Skills People Need to Thrive Through Change
🌐 Learn more about MindVue on their website: https://mindvue.com/
