How to Create a Course with AI: A Guide for L&D Professionals

According to a McKinsey survey⁽¹⁾, only 11% of business leaders believe their leadership development initiatives yield meaningful results. Yet, they allocate large budgets to L&D initiatives. This gap isn’t just about content quality- it’s about scale, personalization, and delivery.

As an L&D leader, you face constant pressure to produce more high-quality leadership content with fewer resources. A typical leadership course requires 130-150 hours to develop—that’s nearly a month of full-time work for a single program. Meanwhile, there’s a demand from learners and managers for customized content for different leadership levels, business units, and also to address emerging challenges.

Well, now you can do it all with the form of AI-powered content creation, that is make a course with AI. Early adopters report cutting course development time by 40-60%⁽²⁾ while actually increasing content personalization and relevance. This isn’t about replacing instructional designers, it’s about amplifying their capabilities and focusing their expertise where it matters most.

In this guide, we’ll walk through exactly how forward-thinking L&D departments are leveraging AI to transform their leadership to create course content with AI. You’ll discover practical frameworks for planning, researching, developing, and refining leadership courses with AI assistance. We’ll explore specific tools that solve real L&D challenges, and address the concerns about maintaining authenticity and organizational voice.

Here’s the guide for how to create a course with AI

How to Create a Course With AI : A Step by Step Guide

What if you could design, research, and build leadership courses in half the time while improving quality? With AI, this isn’t just possible, it’s becoming standard practice for forward-thinking L&D teams.

Word of Caution: L&D course creation is a very human task. AI will serve as your co-pilot, but it’s important to remember that you should never hand over the reins entirely. The human element is essential, especially in cases like leadership training, where emotional intelligence, nuanced communication, and organizational culture play a crucial role.

Step 1: Planning Your Learning and Development Course Structure

Before diving into AI tools for creating courses, take the time to lay a strong foundation for your learning material and course by focusing on a few key areas:

• Define Clear Learning Objectives
  The first step is to set clear, measurable learning objectives that align with your organization’s leadership competencies. These SMART goals should tailored to the needs of both your learners and the company. With AI, you can refine these objectives further, but you need to ensure that they stay aligned with your strategic goals.
  
• Create a Content Outline
  Once you have your direction, build a content outline that AI has the ability to expand upon. You’ll use AI to generate relevant examples, case studies, and scenarios, but the overall structure of the course should reflect your vision and expertise. Think of AI as a tool to fill in the gaps, not to replace your strategy.
  
• Determine Metrics for Success
  How will you measure success? Whether it’s engagement rates, learner performance, or feedback, your metrics should align with your learning objectives. While AI would help you automate the collection and analysis of these metrics, it’s still up to you to interpret the data and adjust course content as needed.
  
• AI as a Strategic Tool, Not a Replacement
  AI is great at analyzing successful L&D programs and identifying patterns, but it can’t define your strategic direction. Use AI as a support tool, but trust your human expertise to guide the overall course structure. For example, AI tools will help you brainstorm ideas, but the learning goals you’ve set will shape the final content.

Quick Tip: When setting your learning objectives, break them down into smaller, achievable milestones. AI tools help track progress and help adjust the course content if learners are struggling to meet those milestones. Dowload Risely’s Free SMART Goal Template to get started.

Step 2: Content Research and Organization with AI

After setting your course structure, it’s time to get into content research. 

But one major issue is time constraints. As an L&D professional with limited resources, research, trend analysis, and content creation takes up valuable time. AI helps speed up this process, but it can’t replace the need for human oversight. You’ll still need to curate and filter the information to ensure it aligns with your goals.

Another problem is keeping content current. L&D trends evolve constantly, and staying updated is tough. AI tools will do research for you but you still need to interpret and decide what to include.

Here’s where AI really helps: it accelerates research and provides relevant insights, but it can’t do the entire job. Use it to gather data, generate examples, and automate analysis. But remember, you’re still the one who refines and curates the content.

• Use AI for Research: Tools like Claude or ChatGPT help you gather the latest L&D research and trends. For example, you can ask ChatGPT to generate specific scenarios for your course, such as “Create three examples of difficult feedback conversations in healthcare.” These tools will save you time and help you gather fresh ideas.
  
• Organize Findings Using AI-Powered Tools: Once you have your research, tools like Miro’s AI features helps you organize everything into logical modules. This makes it easier to visualize connections between concepts, case studies, and learning objectives, and will give your course structure more clarity.
  
• Incorporate Structured Surveys for Learner Feedback: Tools like Elicit allow you to create and analyze structured surveys to understand what your learners really need. AI will help you synthesize this feedback and tailor the course to better address their challenges, ensuring your content is relevant and impactful.
  
• Explore Complex Research Efficiently: Sometimes research can be dense and time-consuming. AI tools like Perplexity summarize complex academic papers in real time, saving you time and helping you integrate the latest leadership theories into your course.
  
• Leverage Academic Research for Evidence-Based Learning: Platforms like SciSpace let you access and collaborate on academic research papers. You can use these resources to build credible, evidence-based content that supports your leadership competencies, ensuring your course is grounded in the latest academic insights.
  
• Continuous Improvement and Data-Driven Iteration: AI assists with continuous course improvement. By tracking learner performance and engagement, AI also highlights areas where learners are struggling and suggest ways to update the content in real time. Tools like Risely, an AI-powered leadership development coach, can provide personalized insights to help managers, leaders for continuous improvement and bridge skill gaps effectively. Post-course feedback analysis, powered by AI, can also help refine the course for the next round, ensuring continuous improvement and relevance.

Quick Tip: It’s helpful to use AI tools as your research assistants. When creating leadership courses, you can input prompts like “What are the top leadership challenges for 2025?” and let the AI bring in real-time data. It’s an easy way to start gathering relevant information quickly.

Step 3: How to Create Course Content with AI Effectively?

AI makes personalizing training for different types of learners seamless. 

For example, suppose you are running a leadership development platform: Marketing managers deal with brand messaging, customer insights, and cross-functional collaboration. AI generates case studies around leading creative teams, handling conflicts between sales and marketing, or adapting to shifting consumer trends.

For tech managers, the focus shifts to agile leadership, innovation, and managing engineering teams. AI will help curate content around leading remote development teams, balancing speed with quality in product releases, or handling stakeholder expectations in tech-driven projects.

Meanwhile, operations managers might need content on process optimization, supply chain leadership, and crisis management. AI will help you generate leadership scenarios that reflect logistical challenges, cost-cutting strategies, or efficiency improvements, making learning more practical and industry-specific.

Instead of a one-size-fits-all generic leadership program, AI allows you to customize learning paths, examples, and challenges to fit each managerial role. With the right input, AI adapts tone, complexity, and real-world context, ensuring every learner gets a relevant and engaging experience.

While AI is a powerful ally, it’s important for you to understand how to integrate these best ai content creation tools effectively into your course creation process.

ChatGPT (OpenAI)

• Excels at: Generating diverse leadership scenarios, creating discussion questions, and developing case studies
• Best for: Quick content ideation and addressing “what if” leadership scenarios

Claude (Anthropic)

• Excels at: Longer, nuanced content with stronger reasoning and fewer hallucinations
• Best for: Evidence-based leadership content requiring balanced perspectives

How to get better leadership content from AI writers?

• Use role-based prompting: “Act as an executive coach explaining how to deliver difficult feedback” yields better results than generic requests
• Provide context about your audience: “Create content for new engineering managers transitioning from technical roles to leadership”
• Request specific formats: “Generate a 10-minute interactive exercise on delegation skills with clear facilitator instructions”

The quality of your AI outputs depends entirely on your prompting skills. If your prompt simply says,“Write about leadership” you are not going to get much out of it, because:

• Lacks clarity on tone, length, audience, and specific focus.
• Too broad, making it difficult to know what type of content is expected.

What should you write instead?

• “Act as a leadership coach. Create a 400-word article for senior executives about how to inspire innovation while maintaining a strong ethical framework. The tone should be authoritative yet approachable, and the format should include real-world examples of successful leadership.”

Why does it work?

• Clear instructions on tone, length, audience, and content type.
• Specific in terms of desired outcome and structure.

AI Pitfalls to Watch Out For

AI is a great assistant, but it’s not flawless. There are a few red flags in AI content that you should look out for while creating an L&D course with AI:

• Factual Accuracy: AI  sometimes generate incorrect information. Always verify the data and insights before using them in your course.
• Biases in Content: AI models can inherit biases from the data they’ve been trained on. Review the content for any unintended bias that could affect the credibility or inclusiveness of your course.
• Engagement and Interaction: AI will generate text quickly, but it might not always produce highly engaging content. Make sure your course includes interactive elements, such as quizzes, exercises, and discussions, to keep learners engaged.

Step 4: Enhancing Engagement and Visual Elements

By now, you’ve built a solid course structure and refined your content with AI, but how do you make it engaging and memorable? AI-powered visuals, branching scenarios, and interactive elements will help you transform passive learning into an immersive experience. However, the challenge is knowing when and how to use them effectively.

Let’s be real, dumping AI-generated infographics or videos into your course won’t automatically make it engaging. The key is using the right medium for the right learning moment while ensuring content remains inclusive, relevant, and accessible.

Bringing Concepts to Life with AI Tools with these Best AI content creation tools

Here’s how you can use AI to enhance engagement to create course content while keeping learner experience at the core:

Make complex ideas interactive with infographics: Instead of lengthy text, tools like Canva’s Magic Design will instantly turn key leadership principles into easy-to-understand visuals. A great use case? Visualizing decision-making frameworks like the Situational Leadership Model.

Tell compelling leadership stories with custom illustrations: Want to depict diverse leadership scenarios? AI tools like DALL·E or Midjourney can generate tailored images, but here’s the catch, AI has a bias problem. Always review generated visuals to ensure they reflect inclusive and diverse leadership representations.

Simulate real-world decision-making with branching scenarios: Leadership isn’t theoretical, it’s about making tough calls. Use ChatGPT to create interactive, choose-your-own-adventure-style leadership scenarios where learners navigate challenges like handling a team conflict or giving difficult feedback.

Polish your presentations effortlessly: Static slides don’t cut it anymore. Tools like Beautiful.ai transform text-heavy slides into sleek, engaging presentations in minutes, ensuring leadership concepts don’t just inform but inspire.

Quick Tip: Don’t just use AI-generated content as-is. Instead, personalize it, adjust case studies, tweak wording, and add real-world context. AI is an assistant, not a substitute for thoughtful instructional design.

Step 5: Review, Refinement and Quality Assurance

AI will generate leadership content fast, but will it ensure accuracy, relevance, and inclusivity? Not quite. That’s why this final step is all about refining, reviewing, and quality-checking what AI produces before delivering it to learners.

Think of AI as your co-pilot, it’s great to create an online course with ai, but you’re still in the captain’s seat. Here’s how to keep your course high-quality and bias-free:

Quality-Check Your AI-Generated Content

• Develop a Leadership Content Checklist: AI sometimes hallucinates (yes, really). Before rolling out your course, check that AI-generated insights align with current leadership best practices, not outdated models.
• Watch out for hidden biases: AI often mirrors historical biases—for example, depicting only men in leadership roles or defaulting to Western corporate settings. Be intentional about diversifying scenarios and ensuring inclusive language.
• Test for engagement & relevance: What sounds good in theory may not resonate in practice. Gather pilot group feedback and refine AI prompts accordingly. Ask: “Does this leadership scenario feel realistic?” and Would this example make sense for our industry?”

Step 6: Assembling Your AI-Powered Course

You’ve structured your course, refined the content, and added engaging visuals—now it’s time to bring everything together into a seamless, accessible learning experience. But here’s the challenge: compiling, organizing, and delivering content effectively without losing personalization or engagement.

Luckily, AI-powered course assembly tools will help streamline the process while ensuring learners get a structured, interactive, and tailored leadership development journey. Here’s a couple that you might want to check out:

Articulate 360 with AI

• Key feature: AI Content Generator creates interactive leadership courses from simple prompts
• Analytics strength: Tracks completion and decision paths to identify leadership tendencies

Docebo Learning Suite

• Key feature: AI-driven content recommendations and learning path creation
• Personalization capability: Creates individualized development plans aligned with leadership competency frameworks

By following these steps, you are well equipped with how to create a course with AI with the strategic insight that only human L&D professionals are able to provide.

Enhancing Leadership Development with AI Coaching

Traditional leadership courses face a fundamental challenge: they are designed to teach skills that can only be mastered through practice and personalized feedback. While structured courses provide essential foundational knowledge, they often fall short in supporting leaders during critical moments when that knowledge must be applied in complex situations.

The Gap Between Knowledge and Application

Leadership development strategy isn’t just about knowing, it’s about doing. Research shows that without immediate application and reinforcement, 90% of content is forgotten within a week. This “forgetting curve” is particularly problematic for soft skills development, which requires consistent practice and contextual learning.

How AI Coaching Bridges the Gap?

AI-powered coaching creates a continuous learning experience that complements traditional leadership courses in several powerful ways:

Just-in-Time Support

Unlike scheduled training, AI coaches are available precisely when leaders need guidance. The AI Coach helps you to structure conversation, anticipate reactions, and practice responses. No static course could provide this support at that moment.

Personalized Guidance for Specific Challenges

AI coaching adapts to each leader’s unique context and challenges. It analyzes individual communication patterns and suggests improvements, recommends approaches based on team dynamics and organizational culture.

Safe Environment for Practice

You can rehearse difficult scenarios without real-world consequences. Even simulate tough conversations with virtual team members, test different approaches to complex leadership situations and receive immediate feedback on communication effectiveness

Consistent Reinforcement

Behavioral change requires repetition and ongoing feedback. Micro-learning nudges that reinforce key leadership concepts. Pattern recognition that identifies improvement areas over time. Progress tracking that celebrates development milestones

Try Merlin – AI coach at Risely for a hyper-personalized learning to build people leadership skills all your managers need.

Common Challenges and How to Overcome Them

As AI reshapes leadership development, three critical challenges threaten to undermine even the most optimised content strategies. 

Challenge of Maintaining Authenticity

Authentic leadership content reflects lived experiences and organizational wisdom that AI alone cannot replicate.

What you should do instead:

• Implement an AI-human collaboration workflow where AI generates initial drafts that experienced leaders then enhance with personal anecdotes and insights.
• Use “voice calibration prompts” that incorporate your organization’s values: “Generate content that reflects our collaborative leadership approach characterized by transparency and psychological safety”.
• Create a library of organization-specific examples and stories that would be referenced in AI prompts.

Cultural Sensitivity and Inclusivity Hurdles

Effective feedback differs significantly across cultures, presenting a challenge for multinational organizations implementing AI-driven leadership development. Many AI tools, initially trained on Western-centric data, may fail to resonate with diverse global teams.

Try to focus on –

• Develop regionally-specific content parameters and review guidelines.
• Use diversity prompting, for example “Create leadership scenarios that reflect diverse cultural approaches to conflict resolution across Asian, European, and Latin American contexts”.
• Establish a diverse review panel representing different regions, backgrounds, and leadership styles.

Leadership Is Not Ready to Commit to an AI Solution

When leadership is unsure or resistant to adopting AI, it can stall organizational progress and innovation.

Keep these best practices in mind:

• Present data-driven case studies to leadership, demonstrating how AI has successfully enhanced similar organizations’ operations and bottom lines. 
• Engage leadership with pilot AI projects that allow them to see firsthand the potential benefits of AI tools before making a full commitment. 
• Create a roadmap for AI adoption that outlines the clear benefits, timelines, and required resources, showing leadership how AI aligns with long-term organizational goals.

Lack of AI or Digital Literacy Hindering Adoption

AI literacy is crucial for employees and leaders to fully embrace AI tools, but a lack of digital literacy can create roadblocks to adoption. But you can cover this gap:

• Offer foundational AI training programs to employees at all levels, focusing on practical applications and understanding AI’s role in their work. 
• Provide hands-on workshops where employees will interact with AI tools in real-world scenarios, allowing them to develop confidence in using AI systems. 
• Use peer champions within the organization who are digitally savvy to mentor and guide others, helping to bridge the literacy gap

Difficulties with Integration

AI-generated materials often clash with existing content in tone, terminology, and pedagogical approach.

• Create an integration framework that maps which content elements should be AI-generated versus human-crafted
• Use the “extension technique”: “Using our existing leadership competency framework as a foundation, extend the ‘influential communication’ module with practical exercises that maintain our established approach”

The most successful organizations view AI not as a replacement but as an amplifier of human expertise.

By addressing these challenges, L&D leaders can maximize AI’s efficiency while preserving the authentic human elements that make leadership development truly worth it.

Key Takeaways

• AI transforms leadership development by enabling faster content creation, personalization at scale, and better consistency, while complementing (not replacing) human expertise in areas like authenticity and cultural sensitivity.
• Structure your AI-assisted course creation process with clear steps: define learning objectives, research with AI tools, generate diverse content types with well-crafted prompts, enhance with visuals, and maintain quality through careful review to create course content that is well optimized.
• Beyond static courses, AI coaching provides you with just-in-time leadership development with personalized guidance, simulated role-plays, and consistent feedback that reinforces learning and addresses practical challenges.
• You should start with specific AI tools for different content needs: writing assistants for course materials, multimedia generators for engagement, and course assembly platforms with analytics to measure leadership development progress to create online course with AI.
• Implementation works best when integrated gradually, maintaining your organization’s voice and values, and establishing a quality review process to ensure content aligns with your leadership philosophy.

References

1. McKinsey’s Leading Off Survey, 2022
2. Achieving e-Learning Success Through the Use of AI in e-Learning Blog Post