Neon Elephant Award 2025
21 December 2025
Neon Elephant Award Announcement
Dr. Will Thalheimer, Consultant, Researcher, Speaker at Work-Learning Research, announces the winner of the 2025 Neon Elephant Award, given this year to Matt Beane for his book, The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in the Age of Intelligent Machines—and for his many years researching how humans do work interacting with machines and the people with whom they work.
Click here to learn more about the Neon Elephant Award…
2025 Award Winner – Matt Beane
Matt Beane is a researcher and entrepreneur working at the intersection of human performance and intelligent machines, including AI. He is an assistant professor in UC Santa Barbara’s Technology Management Program and has conducted extensive research on how people build skill in work shaped by AI, robotics, and simulation.
In The Skill Code, Beane warns that “intelligent” tools can quietly weaken the expert–novice relationships—apprenticeship dynamics—that grow capability. This is especially relevant to those of us in Learning and Development as we rush to help our organizations adopt AI. Beane shows how we can redesign work so technology strengthens (rather than erodes) skill development.
For L&D professionals, his work translates directly into practical design principles for building expertise at scale: protecting learning-by-doing, preserving coaching access, and ensuring technology adoption doesn’t accidentally starve the future talent pipeline.
Matt is also a co-founder of SkillBench (Tacitly’s SkillBench platform), which focuses on helping organizations understand and manage how new technologies affect skill and performance.
Notable contributions from Matt Beane:
- Book: The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in the Age of Intelligent Machines
- TED Talk: “How Do We Learn to Work with Intelligent Machines?”
- SkillBench: A platform enabling research-aligned data-based insights for responsible AI implementation.
- Podcast: (Humans + AI) The 3 Cs of skill development, AI augmentation design templates, inverted apprenticeships, and AI for skill enhancement.
- Matt Beane’s Website: https://www.mattbeane.com/.
We in Learning and Development have talked for years about workflow learning, informal learning, and on-the-job learning. Too often, however, we’ve underemphasized the role of apprenticeship—learning that is powered by access to experts, coached practice, and the gradual assumption of real responsibility.
Beane reminds us that when complex work loses healthy expert–novice connections, novices don’t just learn more slowly—they can end up much less capable than they should be. And in the AI revolution now underway, that risk may grow, not shrink, unless we deliberately design work to protect how skill is built. With his research and practical guidance, Matt Beane shines a bright, much-needed light on our work—and on the future of human development.
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