Dr. Allen Partridge · Adobe · Eugene, Oregon
Writing on AI, Learning & Workforce Transformation
Director of Digital Learning Product Evangelism at Adobe. Researcher, builder, and occasional provocateur on the question of what humans actually do when AI can do everything faster. Also building poqpoq, where you're the spark the world was waiting for.
Off the Map: A Five-Minute Rehearsal in Judgment
Five customers. One very confident map. A five-minute interactive rehearsal in judgment: make the call and say why before you see what happened.
Read the essay →Play
Interactive companions
Small things you can try, not just read. Most of them go with an essay.
Off the Map
Five customers, one very confident map. Make the call and say why before you see what happened, then compare your route with every other driver's.
Play ↗
The Campaign You Never Ran
An interactive companion to the article. Open the drawer of unrun L&D campaigns. Watch what happens when the math changes.
Play ↗Mind Forge: AI Math Curriculum
A civilization-scale math curriculum where every concept unlocks a new capability in the AI minds you're building. Free for teachers and learners.
Open ↗The Perturbation Calibrator
Interactive diagnostic for locating the generative window in learning design — the zone where productive perturbation drives construction rather than shutdown.
Open ↗AI Role Evolution
Interactive exploration of how AI is restructuring roles across the enterprise. Where does human judgment remain irreplaceable, and where is AI taking over execution?
Open ↗ALM Solutions Map
Interactive flowchart for Adobe Learning Manager — maps problems to solutions across use cases. A navigational tool for L&D teams making platform decisions.
Open ↗Search Depth Comparison
Interactive comparison of traditional keyword search vs. deep semantic search in learning platforms — why LXPs need retrieval architectures closer to Netflix than to Google.
Open ↗Multipart Mind: An IFS Lens on AI Architecture
Interactive exploration of Internal Family Systems therapy as a model for multi-agent AI. Why the wounded parts — exiles — might be exactly what current AI systems are missing.
Open ↗PATHFINDER: First Contact Protocol
Browser-based cognitive flexibility training game designed for AI-era workforce readiness. Tests and builds the rapid context-switching and ambiguity tolerance that AI-augmented work demands.
Open ↗Corporate Learning Landscape 2026
Strategic market analysis of the $66B corporate learning landscape, focused on the Internal vs. Extended Enterprise opportunity split and where AI is reshaping both.
Open ↗CONDUCTOR: The Collaboration Gradient
Interactive self-assessment for locating where you and your team sit on the human-AI collaboration gradient. For L&D professionals, developers, and leaders.
Open ↗Writing
Articles & essays 48
The Map Is Free Now
For twenty years, partner education taught people to read the map. The map is perfect now. What's left to teach is knowing when the terrain disagrees.
The Campaign You Never Ran
On unbuilt academies, the prep tax, and what becomes possible when the build cost of external learning experiences drops to nearly free.
Dark Code: An Organizational Problem, Not an Engineering One
Dark code — software nobody understands — isn't a tooling failure. It's an organizational capability problem. Here's what the fix looks like.
You're Not Optimizing for Search Anymore
SEO assumed humans were searching. AI retrieval systems don't rank pages — they build representations of who you are. Here's what that means.
We Train Behavior. We Ignore Psychology. And Then We Wonder Why Nothing Changes.
Behavior is not a cognitive output — it's the expression of a belief system in context. You cannot train behavior by filling the cognitive domain alone.
NemoClaw, OpenClaw, and the $1B Question: Whose AI Bill Is It Anyway?
Jensen Huang walked onto the GTC stage yesterday and said something that should stop every product leader, every platform architect, and every indie…
The Map Was Always There. You Just Didn't Know It Applied to You.
A few weeks ago I was talking to an office manager who had spent fifteen years keeping a mid-sized company running. Scheduling, vendor relationships,…
The Shift Nobody's Teaching: From Doing With AI to Thinking With AI
The skills depreciating fastest are closest to implementation. The ones appreciating fastest are clarity of intent — and the ability to specify it.
Imagine This: "The Boss Called. You Have Hours, Not Weeks."
Deploying Targeted Urgent Training to 3 Groups in an Afternoon — Using ALM's JavaScript Injection
Input. Input. Input.
Dr. Allen Partridge | Director, Digital Learning Product Evangelism, Adobe
Why Scenario-Based Training Works (And Why Most of It Doesn't Go Far Enough)
The learning science behind branching decisions, resource pressure, and the courage to let learners fail
Your Brain Has a Fight-or-Flight Response for Ideas. Here's How to Train It.
A misquoted futurist, a cognitive linguist, and an alien planet walk into a bar…
Why I Keep Three Writing Tools Open (And You Probably Should Too)
I have a confession that might lose me some credibility with the developer crowd: I still use Microsoft Word. Regularly. On purpose.
Experience Builder Has a Hidden Superpower
I've been doing this for a long time. Decades in learning tech. And every once in a while, something comes along that makes me stop and say "wait... they…
The Boomerang Effect: What Happens When Leaders Mistake Acceleration for Replacement
Why the organizations cutting people are losing to the organizations growing them
The Parable of the Schoolhouse and the Talking Lantern
A Postmodern Fable for 2026
What I Learned Building Memory for AI (And What It Taught Me About Us)
This is the fifth article in a series exploring where AI and learning intersect. The previous pieces covered scaling limits, emotional architecture,…
It's Me... I'm the Problem, It's Me
A confession about listening, failing, and the ongoing work of getting out of my own way
Why Your Learning Platform Shouldn't Just Work Like Netflix
You know that satisfying moment when you open Netflix and something perfect is already waiting? No scrolling through menus, no decision fatigue - just...…
From Memorization to Understanding: What AI Researchers Are Relearning from Kindergarten Teachers
The gap between today's AI and genuine reasoning might come down to something every good teacher already knows: you can't just tell someone something and…
What Therapy Can Teach Us About AI Architecture
Therapists have studied multi-part minds for decades. AI researchers are just starting. The accumulated wisdom may be highly relevant.
Why AI Can't Learn Like Your Best Employees (Yet)
A teenager masters driving in 10 hours. AI needs millions of examples. The difference isn't computing power—it's something every good trainer already…
The Age of Scaling is Over. What Comes Next Matters for L&D.
OpenAI's co-founder just said the strategy that built ChatGPT won't work anymore. The path forward looks surprisingly familiar to anyone in learning and…
AI Doesn't Hallucinate. You Do.
That sounds confrontational. Maybe even a little rude. But I mean it literally, and I think it matters.
Enterprise GPU Hibernation Strategy: A Leader's Guide to 30-60% Cost Reduction
How smart enterprises are transforming GPU cost management through strategic hibernation and workload optimization—because even bears know when to sleep
The Beautiful Mess: Why Real Learning Happens When Both You and AI Are Lost
I've been battling a Babylon.js camera control issue for days. Mouse events vanishing into abstraction layers. Documentation that assumes you already know…
The Tale of Two Bridge Guards
Once upon a time, in a prosperous kingdom divided by a great river, there stood a magnificent bridge connecting the bustling merchant quarter to the royal…
The Generational AI Myth: Why Your Most "Outdated" Workers Might Be Your Best AI Partners
The narrative: Gen Z gets AI, older workers don't. AI adoption declines with age - 34% for under 40, just 17% for 50+ (NBER).
The Innovation Paradox: Why AI Makes Human Creativity More Critical, Not Less
We're drowning in AI tools that promise to "unlock creativity" - from ChatGPT to Midjourney to Claude. But here's what I've observed after months of…
10 Critical Questions to Audit Your Organization's AI Readiness for 2026 (And How to Get There)
"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." – Alvin Toffler
The Human × AI Decision Framework: A Strategic Tool for Workforce Planning
"Should we automate this with AI, keep it human, or find a hybrid approach?"
Object Oriented Disorientation
Or: Who's On First Base Class?
The Serious Business of Being Ridiculous: Why Your Brain Craves Comedy in Crisis
I was doing fine in Spanish class—conjugating verbs, rolling my R's, feeling quietly confident about my grasp of masculine and feminine articles—when…
From "Don't Make Me Laugh" to "Netflix & Skill": How Comedy Ate Corporate Training (And Why Your Brain Thanked You)
Ten years ago, I wrote about humor in eLearning with all the confidence of someone tiptoeing through a minefield in clown shoes. "Conventional eLearning…
The Singularity Ate My Crystal Ball: A Learning Addict's Guide to Future-Proofing When Tomorrow Arrives Every Tuesday
Picture this: It's 1998, I'm wearing cowboy boots in a Texas Tech seminar room, arguing about whether Peirce's semiotics could explain why my dial-up…
When Five Friends Walk Into a Learning Management Bar: A Tale of Integration Choices
Heres your chance to finally understand when to use webhooks, APIs, connectors, and all those other integration buzzwords
The API Awakening: How We Built a Mind-Reading Quiz Machine in One Week
🏆 THE FINAL SCORE Time: 1 week (7 days of caffeinated determination.) Cost: $0 (just sweat equity and melting green tea.) Result: A fully automated,…
Meeting the Principal: Your First Real Adobe Learning Manager API Adventure
In 30 minutes, you'll know how to:
How Your Favorite Pizza App is Secretly Teaching You Everything About APIs
Remember when you were five and someone tried to explain how the TV remote worked? They probably said something about "infrared signals" and…
Why This Old Dog is Learning New API Tricks (And Teaching Them Like You're Five)
Look, I'll be straight with you. I've been staring at Adobe Learning Manager's API documentation for what feels like three lifetimes, and my brain keeps…
The Morning I Learned to Dance with a Robot
Picture this: It's 6 AM, and I'm staring at a blank screen, trying to write about quantum computing for a colleague. My chai’s gone cold, my brain feels…
Learn Faster, Stress Less: Amplify Your Tolerance for Ambiguity with a Little Help from AI
I still vividly remember staring blankly at my screen, feeling my heart rate spike as a subtle panic set in. The more I tried to grasp the new framework…
Sweet Little Lies: The Curious Case of AI's Sycophantic Drift
The Rise of the Overly Agreeable AI
AI Success: A Strategic Guide to Upskilling Your Organization
Spring is here, and it often inspires thoughts of new beginnings. As the season changes, I find myself reflecting on how many organizations struggle to…
An AI Bridge from Ambiguity to Enlightenment; exploring Socratic dialog with AI for learning
There's this moment—right between knowing something and realizing you don’t quite know enough—that feels like standing at the edge of a creek, ready to…
From Kindergarten Bruises to Cultural Battles: Why Emotional Openness Is a Revolution
I remember the exact moment I first realized what it felt like to suppress my own emotions. I was five years old, still in kindergarten, navigating what…
Surviving the Singularity: Reflections on Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt in Media
If you've ever found yourself scrolling endlessly, absorbing news and updates without quite knowing what to do with it all, you're not alone. The modern…