Ask anyone who has sat through a mandatory corporate training and the reaction is usually the same — a small grimace, maybe a laugh. The modules get opened, the slides get clicked through, the completion box gets ticked. People do it because they have to, not because they expect to walk away knowing something useful. For years, this was simply accepted as one of the minor indignities of working life.
Then AI arrived, and the conversation changed. Suddenly, the reskilling problem — the growing anxiety about whether workforces could keep pace with a world changing faster than training programmes could track — seemed like it might have a solution. Pour in enough technology, the thinking went, and the problem would sort itself out.
It has not. The completion rates are up. The platforms are shinier. The concern about upskilling and reskilling is, if anything, louder than before. When employees are asked whether training has actually made them better at their jobs, the answer is, at best, lukewarm.
Yuvraj Singh thinks he knows why. And more importantly, he thinks he knows what needs to be built instead.
A Career Built on Getting Close to the Problem
Singh's conviction about learning did not come from a research paper. It came from watching it matter — genuinely, consequentially — in ways that most people building edtech products never get to see.
He started his first education company at seventeen, drawn early to a belief that access to the right knowledge, delivered in the right way, could change the direction of a person's life. That belief has never left him. What changed over time was his understanding of how hard it is to actually deliver on it at scale — and how thoroughly most organisations fail to.
He went on to build two million-dollar companies without raising outside capital, studied at top universities in the United States, and joined McKinsey as an Engagement Manager, where his work took him inside large organisations navigating complex transformations. He saw how training decisions got made, who made them, and what happened to carefully designed programmes once they encountered actual employees with actual jobs to do.
The work that sharpened his thinking most was the years he spent in the UAE, advising senior government leadership on education reform and national workforce strategy. The scale was significant — digital academies deployed across more than eighteen government bodies, sovereign wealth funds, and hundreds of companies across Saudi Arabia, India, and the UAE, reaching tens of thousands of employees and hundreds of public service professionals. When you are building capability programmes at that level, the consequences of getting it wrong are not abstract. They show up in a workforce that has been trained but not equipped.
It is an unusual combination of vantage points — founder, McKinsey, government advisor — and it has produced an unusually clear-eyed view of where the system fails.
What He Found — And Why It Matters
"The shelf-life of content has collapsed," Singh says. "The nature of work is changing faster than any content team can keep pace with. You commission a course, build it, approve it, produce it, deploy it. By the time employees actually sit through it, a meaningful part of it is already outdated. That is not an execution problem. That is a structural one."
The structure he is pointing at is the centralised content model: a team of learning designers and subject matter experts produces training material, which gets packaged into a library and pushed out to employees. It made sense when skills were stable and information moved slowly. It does not make sense now.
There is a second problem underneath the first. As people have grown accustomed to short-form video and on-demand content in their personal lives, enterprise learning has responded by trying to make training more entertaining — snappier, more visual, more like the content people choose to watch. Singh thinks this has been a mistake.
"Learning is not entertainment," he says. "It is the acquisition of structured, accurate information in a format matched to what that person actually needs to do their job. When you optimise for engagement instead, you end up with something people enjoy watching and then forget. That is not capability. That is content consumption."
Building What Comes Next
Arusto, the company Singh founded after years of sitting with these problems, is built on a simple premise: that the speed at which organisations need to create, update, and distribute knowledge content has outrun what traditional workflows can deliver.
The platform takes raw inputs — documents, slide decks, internal recordings, subject matter expert interviews — and converts them into structured training materials, video content, and modular knowledge assets. What previously required a chain of specialists working across weeks or months can now be done in days.
But the more important shift is not about speed alone. It is about who gets to create. Singh's view is that the centralised content model is not just slow — it is the wrong architecture for a world where every business unit and every team is sitting on knowledge that their colleagues urgently need. Arusto is designed to let organisations distribute content creation without losing control over accuracy, structure, or quality.
"The central L&D function is not going away," he says. "But its job changes. Instead of producing everything, it governs everything — sets the standards, ensures the quality, decides what is accessible. The actual creation moves closer to where the knowledge lives."
His Vision for the Next Generation of Learning
The future Singh is working toward is one where the lag between something changing in an organisation — a new regulation, a product update, a shift in how work gets done — and employees actually knowing about it shrinks from months to hours. Where content is not a catalogue to be browsed but a living resource that reflects the organisation as it actually is, right now.
For L&D leaders, he sees a profession in the middle of a significant identity shift: from content producers to knowledge architects — people who design the infrastructure through which information flows, rather than manufacturing every asset themselves.
For employees, the change is more fundamental still. The training module, assigned quarterly and completed on a deadline, gives way to something more like a knowledgeable colleague — one that knows your role, your organisation, and the specific challenge sitting in front of you today.
Singh has been thinking about this problem since he was a teenager. The scale of what he is building has grown considerably since then. The conviction underneath it — that the way people learn at work is badly designed, and that fixing it is worth a career — has not changed at all.
