A post crossed my feed a few weeks ago calling AI enablement a fad. Thousands of reactions. Half agreeing, half furious.
They weren’t wrong to feel it coming. Training budgets built around a hot phrase have a short shelf life – everyone in L&D has buried at least one buzzword-shaped initiative. But they were arguing about the wrong thing entirely.
The buzzword is going to die. The thing it names isn’t. That distinction is the whole ballgame, and almost nobody is making it.
Fad vs. Label Decay: The Distinction Everyone Is Missing
A fad fades because interest runs out. The excitement was never attached to anything real, so when the novelty wears off, nothing is left standing.
Label decay is the opposite failure mode – except it isn’t a failure at all. A label fades because the thing it names wins. It gets so embedded in how people work that it stops needing a name, a budget line, or its own conference track.
The skill doesn’t vanish. It disappears into the background. That’s not death. That’s the finish line.
AI enablement isn’t heading for the fad graveyard. It’s heading for label decay. Those are opposite outcomes wearing the same headline.
The “Digital Skills” Precedent Nobody’s Citing
We’ve seen this movie before, beat for beat.
When PCs and Microsoft Office landed in the workplace, “digital skills” became its own category almost overnight – own budget, own consultants, own conference track. Then, with zero fanfare, it stopped being a conversation at all.
It became “how people work.” Nobody is running a digital skills enablement workshop in 2026. The phrase won itself out of existence.
That’s not a cautionary tale about hype cycles. That’s what success looks like for a workplace skill category.
Mapping the Pattern Onto AI Enablement
Run the same logic forward and the trajectory isn’t hard to read.
AI Champion roles. Dedicated enablement budgets. Program titles with their own slide template. These are this decade’s version of the digital skills office – and they’re going to fade, on schedule, right on time.
The capability underneath them won’t.
Which means the leaders currently fighting to protect the label – defending the program name, the title, the line item – are solving a problem that was never the real one. The label was scaffolding for a transition. Scaffolding is supposed to come down.
The One Honest Caveat
None of this is automatic, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
There’s a real risk worth naming, even though it’s more field observation than hard data: new hires who lean on AI for every first draft may never build the underlying judgment that draft was supposed to develop in the first place. Take the scaffolding down before the skill underneath is solid, and you don’t get label decay – you get a gap nobody notices until it’s expensive.
What Leaders Should Actually Do About It
Three shifts, in order of how often they get skipped:
- Measure baseline literacy, not program attendance. Workshop headcount tells you who showed up. It tells you nothing about whether people reach for AI appropriately when nobody’s watching.
- Watch for the real tell. It isn’t rising enthusiasm. It’s the moment people stop asking “should we use AI for this” and just do it – the way nobody asks permission to open a spreadsheet.
- Plan the off-ramp now, not later. Decide today what happens to the skill-building work once the program label retires, so the capability survives the label instead of getting buried with it.
The Bottom Line
The buzzword was always going to die. That part was never in question.
The only question that matters: were you building something durable underneath it, or just defending the name?
If you’re rethinking what AI enablement should look like inside your organization, that’s exactly the question we dig into on The Learning Buzz – [register for the next episode here].
Building the capability that outlasts the label is the harder, more durable work – and it’s the work Apposite does. If you’re ready to move past the workshop headcount and build AI fluency that sticks, talk to Apposite about designing your enablement strategy.