307: How Sysco Is Using AI and Skills Data to Ensure L&D's Business Impact

Every L&D leader asks themselves the same question: how does learning demonstrate its ability to improve the business metrics that matter most? Sysco, one of the world's largest food-service distributors, is answering that question by rethinking how training drives improved performance across a massive, regionally diverse sales organization.

In this session, Myka Bingham, who leads this work within Sysco's Learning & Development team, walks through the next evolution in Sysco's L&D journey: using AI-driven skills mapping to correlate specific learning activity with real business drivers like sales readiness and new-hire performance, rather than relying on completion rates and other proxy metrics.

Myka will share how this approach is being applied within Sysco's North American sales organization and mapped directly into existing onboarding programs, and how AI made a skills-based approach possible in a way it hadn't been before. She'll share the internal work behind that shift: how the business case was built and socialized across senior stakeholders in sales, strategy, and enablement, and the practical lessons learned along the way, including why data quality and organizational patience mattered as much as the technology itself.

Attendees will leave with a practical yet strategic view of what it actually takes to shift an L&D function from delivering training to proving its value to the business.

During this session, you will learn: 

• How to reframe L&D's value proposition by correlating specific skills to measurable business drivers, rather than defaulting to completion rates and other activity-based proxy metrics.
• A real-world look at what the next evolution of an L&D function can look like as it moves from delivering training to directly supporting business performance.
• What it takes to build and socialize an internal business case for a new learning technology, including how to translate technical capabilities into language that sales, strategy, and finance stakeholders will trust.
• Why input data quality (not just the technology itself) determines whether an AI-driven skills initiative succeeds, and how to audit and prepare your own data before you start.