On Wednesday 22 July 2026, Busuu hosted a live webinar, From learning to performance: Is your team ready for the AI age of work?, with Jennie Drimmer (VP, Busuu for Business), Gino Micacchi (VP, GTM Strategy and Growth) and Sophie Huet (Director of Learning Design and Content Operations).
It addressed a very real problem in the L&D space right now. When employees can finish a course but still struggle to perform when it matters, that impacts your business. If you missed it, or would like to read a refresher, here's the recap.
Employees know the content, but that's not the same as performing it
We’re living in a revolution. Knowledge is available to everyone. Anyone can ask an AI tool a question and get an answer in seconds. What is scarce is the ability to use that knowledge under pressure, in a second language, when a client moves the meeting forward without warning.
How high are the stakes? "The organisations that win won't be the ones with the most AI. They'll be the ones with the most capable people.", Gino shared to kick off the discussion.
Busuu's own research backs this up. According to the Language Anxiety at Work Survey (Busuu, 2026, n=1,019 active B2B learners):
- 55% of employees simplify their message when speaking under pressure.
- 49% feel the most pressure in unplanned conversations, not the ones they had time to prepare for.
- A quarter go silent altogether, or let a colleague speak for them.
Picture the scene. A senior technical consultant, fluent and confident in her own language, has a client who moves a meeting forward with very little notice. The call happens in her second language. Instead of freezing, she simplifies, giving a safe, generic version of an explanation that would have won the room in her first language.
Her expertise remains hidden, and the deal doesn't close. Nobody involved lacked the knowledge. What was missing was the ability to turn it into performance at the exact moment of impact.
Completion rates were never the right metric
Then there’s a tension most L&D leaders will recognise. Completions are easy to measure, and capability isn't, so many organisations have defaulted to tracking the wrong thing.
In L&D circles right now, AI is a hot topic, and scaling AI and calling it ‘personalised’ doesn’t actually meet a learner’s specific goal. "We hear a lot about personalisation with AI, but it's become a buzzword sometimes without really any depth," said Sophie.
That distinction, she argued, is the foundation everything else depends on. You need to know what you're trying to measure before you can measure it well.
This isn't a new problem, and the demand for better measurement predates generative AI by years. What's changed is that the tools now exist to track real progress against a goal, rather than just activity.
AI can scale personalisation, but it can’t replace the human moment
Personalised coaching used to depend entirely on a human teacher who got to know a learner's specific gaps and built a path around them. That level of attention rarely reached beyond a handful of senior executives. AI now makes tailored practice available to every employee, not just a select few.
But the panel was direct about where AI's usefulness ends, with Sophie confirming, "Your brain knows the difference. It's just science.”.
Even a well-built simulation can't fully replace a real conversation with real stakes. "You're creating a second identity, you're creating a skill within a skill." is how Sophie linked this back to the way language learning works more broadly.
Knowing the grammar isn't the same as having the confidence to pick up the phone and use it. AI builds the rehearsal. A real conversation, with a teacher or a peer, is what turns that rehearsal into confidence that holds up under pressure.
Linking L&D metrics to what the business actually cares about
"We need L&D and business to share the same performance metrics, and I haven't candidly seen that happen quite enough." This is the change Jennie wants to see in how L&D is set up. Instead of identifying a tool or a feature, she pointed to internal alignment.
Every CEO's priorities come down to some mix of managing risk, driving growth and controlling cost. L&D's job is to show how learning connects to those three things, rather than reporting a completion rate that doesn't speak the same language as the boardroom.
In practice, that means starting with a specific business goal, such as a sales team's pitch performance in a second language, and tracking progress against it over time. It's a harder story to tell than a completion rate. It's also the one that protects budget and gets the green light to roll out programmes.
It's worth being honest about what this shift takes. Moving from completion tracking to capability evidence isn't a quick software swap. L&D needs to redefine what progress means internally, and to bring business stakeholders along with that change. Organisations that treat it as a checkbox exercise won't see the same results as those that commit to the harder work of defining what successfully using a skill actually looks like in practice.
Avoiding the illusion of competence
One of the sharpest questions from attendees asked how L&D can stop instant AI access being mistaken for real capability. Sophie's answer was that performance depends heavily on context. Someone might handle one type of conversation well and still freeze in another.
"Practice with different types of situations, with different contexts, understanding where your pain points are, that's how basically we make sure it's not just an illusion of competence.", she said.
The safeguard is practising across genuinely varied, realistic situations and tracking progress against a clear goal, rather than assuming one good moment means the skill is mastered everywhere.
Language performance under pressure isn't solved by more content or a bigger course catalogue. It's solved by connecting learning to the real, high-stakes moments your teams face at work. Watch the full webinar recording, get in touch with Busuu for Business to learn more about our AI-powered, human-backed approach, or book a demo to see it in action. Explore Busuu Business
Missed the live session? Watch the full recording here.